Beethoven

Anne Pimlott Baker

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780750994811
• eBook ISBN: 9780752475264
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Considered by many the world's greatest composer, Ludwig van Beethoven achieved his ambitions against the difficulties of a bullying and drunken father, growing deafness and mounting ill-health.

Here, Anne Pimlott Baker tells the story of the German composer's life and work, from his birth in Bonn in 1770 and his early employment as a court musician, to his death in Vienna in 1827. She describes his studies with Haydn in Vienna and his work during the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. His most financially successful period followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815, despite several unhappy love affairs and continuous worry over his nephew, Karl.

Beethoven is a concise, illuminating biography of a true virtuoso.

ONE

A SERVANT OF
THE COURT

Ludwig van Beethoven was born on 15 or 16 December 1770 in lodgings at 515 Bonngasse in Bonn, chosen as the residence of the Elector of Cologne in 1257. The Catholic Electorate of Cologne was part of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled from Vienna by the Hapsburg monarchy, and the Elector was both archbishop and secular ruler. Bonn had no industry or commerce, and existed solely as the seat of the court – it was said that ‘all Bonn was fed from the Elector’s kitchen’ – with a population of about 9,500 in 1770. Beethoven’s grandfather, Ludwig van Beethoven, came from Malines, near Antwerp, in the Austrian Netherlands; son of a master baker, he was a bass singer in the electoral chapel at Bonn from 1733 until his appointment as Kapellmeister to the Elector in 1761. As Kapellmeister he was in charge not only of the chapel choir and the music for the services, but was also responsible for the court ballroom, concert hall and theatre. He managed to find time to run a successful wine business on the side, but his wife was removed to a nunnery because of drunkenness. Beethoven idolized his grandfather, although he had died in 1773 when Beethoven was only three, and always hoped to become a Kapellmeister himself, even going so far as to give himself the title ‘Royal Imperial Kapellmeister and Composer’ in 1818.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s only surviving child was Beethoven’s father, Johann van Beethoven, born in about 1740, also a court musician in Bonn, a tenor singer and music teacher. In 1767, against his father’s wishes, he married Maria Magdalena, daughter of Heinrich Keverich, overseer of the kitchen at the palace of the Elector of Trier. His father alleged that she had been a chambermaid, but there is no evidence that this was so. She was a young widow, previously married to the valet of the Elector of Trier. Beethoven was their second child: their first child, Ludwig Maria, baptised on 2 April 1769, lived for only six days. They went on to have five more children after Beethoven, but only two, Caspar Anton Carl, born in 1774, and Nikolaus Johann, born in 1776, survived infancy. The last, Maria Margaretha, died aged one, in 1787, four months after the death of her mother.

Beethoven seems to have been confused for most of his life about the year of his birth, maintaining that he was born in 1771, not 1770; after he moved to Vienna he regularly deducted two years, or sometimes more, from his age, insisting that the baptismal certificate from 17 December 1770 was that of his elder brother Ludwig Maria and that his own had either disappeared or had never existed. It has sometimes been said that Beethoven’s father was responsible for falsifying his son’s age in order to promote him as a child prodigy like Mozart, but it seems that Johann van Beethoven was not to blame for this, and that Beethoven himself believed his birthdate to be wrong. This is connected to another of Beethoven’s fantasies, that he was of noble birth, and that his true ancestry had been concealed by Johann and Maria, who were not his real parents at all. From 1810 the rumour circulated that Beethoven was the illegitimate son of a king of Prussia (either Friedrich Wilhelm II or Frederick the Great), and this was perpetuated in music encyclopedias for the rest of his life. He never denied it. He passed as a member of the nobility in Vienna, where it was assumed, wrongly, that ‘van’ was the equivalent of the German ‘von’.

Beethoven had a lonely and unhappy childhood. He was shy and withdrawn, with few friends, and made little progress at school, and he felt neglected and unloved. His father treated him severely, and after he began to teach him music at the age of four or five he used to force him to practise for hours. Visitors remembered the child standing in front of the piano, crying, and when his father’s drinking companion, Tobias Pfeiffer, was staying in the house and giving him lessons, the young Beethoven was sometimes woken late at night for a lesson, and kept up all night at the piano. His mother does not seem to have intervened in all this. Beethoven first performed in public at a concert in Cologne in 1778, but any creativity was stifled by his father, who would not let him improvise, and he left the cathedral school at the age of ten, ready to start work as a court musician.

Beethoven had various teachers apart from his father, including the court organist, Gilles vanden Eeden, but the most important influence was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who began to teach him composition in about 1780, and later piano and figured bass. Neefe, a Protestant from Chemnitz in Saxony, and a protégé of Johann Hiller, Bach’s successor as cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, came to Bonn in 1779 to join the Grossman and Helmuth theatre company, and was appointed to succeed van den Eeden as court organist in 1781. Neefe admired Bach, and used his Well Tempered Clavier as a basis for Beethoven’s instruction. He trained Beethoven as assistant court organist, and left his twelve-year-old pupil in charge when he went away in June 1782. In 1783 Neefe used him as the harpsichordist in the court opera orchestra, conducting the orchestra from the keyboard. At the same time Beethoven was beginning to compose, and Neefe arranged for the publication of nine variations for the piano on a march by Dressler, and three piano sonatas dedicated to the Elector Maximilian Friedrich, in 1783. In his dedicatory letter for these sonatas, Beethoven wrote: ‘my Muse in hours of sacred inspiration has often whispered to me – “make the attempt, just put down on paper the harmonies of your soul” . . . My Muse insisted – I obeyed and I composed.’ In 1783 Neefe predicted, in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, that Beethoven would become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he continued as he had begun, and after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna he wrote to Neefe thanking him for all his help: ‘Should I ever become a great man, you too will have to share in my success.’¹ Ten compositions survive from the period 1782–5.

Until now Beethoven had been unpaid, but in 1784 he successfully petitioned the new Elector for an official appointment as assistant court organist, as his father, who had become a heavy drinker, was no longer able to support his family, and Beethoven’s salary was fixed at 150 florins a year. An official report on the musical establishment of the court at Bonn, prepared for the new Elector, had already noted that Johann van Beethoven had a ‘very stale voice’ and that his son was playing the organ but received no salary. Johann had hoped to succeed his father as Kapellmeister in 1773, and survived for the next ten years thanks to the protection of Count Kaspar von Belderbusch, a friend of his father’s. But von Belderbusch died in 1784, and although Johann remained on the electoral payroll, he was becoming increasingly ineffectual. His wife ran the household, frequently complaining about her drunken husband.

Between 1785 and 1789 Beethoven seems to have stopped composing, as he became more and more burdened with the financial responsibility for his family, and with coping with his alcoholic father. On one occasion he had to intercede with the police after his father was arrested for drunkenness. In 1787 the Elector sent him to Vienna, probably in order to have lessons from Mozart, but although he did play to Mozart and impressed him with his improvisation, after only two weeks he was forced to rush back to Bonn because his mother, who was suffering from tuberculosis, had taken a turn for the worse. She died in July 1787, soon after his return, and in 1789 Beethoven petitioned the Elector for half his father’s salary, in addition to his own salary, so that he could support his two brothers. Although this was granted, and it was arranged that Johann van Beethoven would be retired on half pay, Beethoven never made the necessary arrangements with the Exchequer, because his father begged him not to, dreading the humiliation. Instead, his father paid him the 100 florins a year himself.

After his mother’s death, Beethoven was befriended by a widow, Frau von Breuning, who had four children, one of whom, Stephan, became one of Beethoven’s closest friends in Vienna. He spent a good deal of time with the von Breunings, and it was at their house that he became better acquainted with Count Ferdinand Waldstein, a close friend of the new Elector. Waldstein was his first important patron and in 1805 Beethoven dedicated his piano sonata op. 53 to him. The new Elector, Maximilian Franz, was the youngest son of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and brother of the Emperor Joseph II and Marie Antoinette, wife of the French king, Louis XVI. Under his rule Bonn became a centre of the Enlightenment. By an electoral decree of 1785 Bonn Academy became a university, and the Elector supported music, literature and the theatre, while attempting to follow his brother’s lead in easing political repression. Beethoven, whose education had been very rudimentary, read popularized versions of the works of the leading thinkers, including Kant, and even attended lectures at the university, and was later to identify with the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Although Beethoven himself was not a member, many of his friends and acquaintances, including Neefe, belonged to the Lese-Gesellschaft (Reading Society), founded in 1787 after the clandestine Order of Illuminati had been forced to close down; it was the Lese-Gesellschaft that commissioned him in 1790 to write the music for a Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II, an ‘enlightened’ ruler. The cantata, regarded by Brahms as Beethoven’s first masterpiece, was not published or performed in his lifetime. It is evidence, however, that Beethoven was concerned with political freedom from an early age, and the theme of the death of the hero was to reappear in works such as the Eroica symphony, Fidelio, and the Egmont overture. His Cantata on the Accession of the Emperor Leopold II, written later in 1790, was less successful.

From 1789 Beethoven played the viola in the court chapel and theatre orchestras, and also built up a reputation as a virtuoso piano player. He started to compose again, very much in the style of Mozart, whose music was very popular in Bonn in the 1780s. Much of Beethoven’s music of this period was written to entertain the court and included piano quartets, wind music, songs, and music for solo piano. He was not yet acclaimed as a composer and it is interesting that his name does not appear as a composer on a list of chapel and court musicians of the Elector of Cologne, drawn up in 1791, although by 1792 he had composed over fifty works. He was also in demand as a music teacher although he always disliked teaching. He was beginning to feel the restrictions of life in Bonn, where a musician was merely a servant of the court.

In 1790 Joseph Haydn spent a few days in Bonn on his way to London from Vienna, and again on his way back in 1792, when the court orchestra gave a concert in his honour. On one of these visits, probably the latter, Beethoven showed him some of his compositions, including the Joseph II cantata, and Haydn agreed to take him on as a pupil.

Thanks to Count Waldstein, the Elector agreed to pay for Beethoven to go to Vienna to study with Haydn. Fifteen of his friends wrote messages in an autograph album which they presented to him before his departure; Count Waldstein wrote: ‘You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. . . . You shall receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.’² Beethoven set off in November 1792, intending to return to Bonn, perhaps as Kapellmeister, but in 1794 the Electorate was dissolved when the French armies occupied the Rhineland, and Beethoven remained in Vienna for the rest of his life.

TWO

VIENNA

Beethoven arrived in Vienna on 10 November 1792, not yet twenty-two and eager to begin composition lessons with Haydn. He found himself an attic room but he had scarcely had time to settle in before he received the news that his father had died suddenly, in Bonn, on 18 December.¹ Interestingly, Beethoven did not mention his father’s death in his diary, but he wrote to the Elector pointing out that he still needed to support and educate his two young brothers, with the result that the Elector doubled his salary. These quarterly payments continued until March 1794, and his brothers were soon to follow him to Vienna, Carl² in 1794 and Johann³ at the end of 1795.

Beethoven soon attracted the attention of Prince Carl Lichnowsky, and moved into his apartments as a guest, remaining there for about two years. Lichnowsky became an important patron and Beethoven often played at his Friday morning chamber music concerts. Lichnowsky retained his own string quartet, led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who was still a teenager when Beethoven first moved there. Several of Beethoven’s compositions had their first performances there, and Beethoven later dedicated his piano sonata op. 13, the Pathétique, to Lichnowsky.

Beethoven began lessons with Haydn at once and these continued throughout 1793, but he seems to have found them disappointing. ‘Papa’ Haydn was enjoying enormous success at this time and evidently devoted very little attention to his pupil. He set Beethoven to work on counterpoint, using ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chronology
• 1. A servant of the court
• 2. Vienna
• 3. ‘I live entirely in my music’
• 4. ‘Immortal beloved’
• 5. Karl
• 6. The final years
• Notes and References
• Bibliography