Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, it was plain to see that the artists
felt themselves in the presence of a very mixed task; but it was not
so clear where the incongruity lay. They stood under the influence of
the popular opinion, which binds these three heroes under a single
yoke, and they were the victims of this influence. Nations have an
instinct of symmetry in the classification of their great men. The
ancients had their seven sages; to-day we are content with two or
three; but even so the combinations are none the less strained. The
false ideas due to the pairing of Bach and Handel, or of Goethe and
Schiller, are hardly to be numbered. The triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven, is the very acme of perversity. Haydn and Mozart,
though two fundamentally different natures, have yet in common the
similar features of the age. But Beethoven is as little like them as
Goethe is like Racine. We have only to glance round a salon in the
Vienna of the last century. The old Haydn and the old Salieri sit
smiling and friendly on a sofa; they move in the stilted fashion of
the eighteenth century; they retain in their carriage all the features
of the “Zopf und Schopf”[110] period; and in every judgment, in every
gesture, they show their antagonism to unrestrained emotion. Over
against them a young man is leaning on the piano. His demeanour is
modish though untidy, and smacks of the Rhine; his movements natural
but wooden; his hair is loose and disordered; his compliments are few;
he accepts strangers only on compulsion; his playing is perhaps too
vigorous, too full of feeling; and the ideas which he incorporates in
his works are in their originality half revolutionary, half romantic.
This new-comer is Beethoven, a man so different from the settled type,
from the old “composers of the Empire,” as he himself calls them, that
it is easy to anticipate the future which he himself is conjuring up.
He is the first of the Titans, the first of the great fragmentary
natures, the first tone-artist who breaks the forms of music to
pieces on the iron of his emotions. A strange Providence closes his
outward ears, and thus gaining a clearer vision, he receives from
Nature herself unheard-of inspirations. How this strange new man, this
romantic raver, could be coupled with Haydn and Mozart is a wonder;
but popular opinion accounts for it. Beethoven came to Vienna just as
Mozart began to be missed. The world gave him the honour of attaching
him to the classic school. But it is a mere blunder to treat him as
the end of an epoch--he is the beginning of a new one.
It must be observed at this point that the world had meanwhile become
really musical--or perhaps less truly musical than music-loving. Nay,
more; political events, as formerly church ceremonies, could now be
celebrated in music. The famous concerto which Beethoven gave in
honour of the Vienna Congress was perhaps the first great occasion on
which music lent itself in festal manner to the adornment of public
events. It was now no longer a mere incident in a commemorative
display, but to a great extent pure music; and the rapid and vigorous
education of men to instrumental music by the classical masters
was the necessary precedent condition of the attainment of this
point. In these matters the clavier played its important part as an
intermediary and a teacher; it made the innovations into current coin,
scattered them among people in their homes, and accustomed their ears
to understand better and better the absolute language of music, as
it dealt in wider and wider abstractions. The publishers were more
active, the issues more frequent, the popular settings more numerous
and artistic. Even the great men themselves take a share in the work.
A frequent phenomenon in the music-trade is that composers like
Clementi, Dussek, and Pleyel, themselves open publishing houses--and
secure the advertisement of their wares, oftener perhaps than was
really necessary.
International exchange became more active year by year. If we look
to London, we see Johann Christian Bach at work, helping to give
form to the Sonata; we observe Haydn and Pleyel in vigorous rivalry
for the favour of the public; we see the virtuoso Clementi from
Italy setting up a clavier-school. In Petersburg meanwhile lives the
Englishman, Field, one of the chief nocturne-romancists, and Klengel
and Berger, the Germans, all three brought out by Clementi. Next we
see there also J. W. Hässler, the ex-hatter, who has left behind such
agreeable works that Bülow regarded him as a good intermediary between
Mozart and Beethoven. In Paris the opera is the favourite agent of
musical pleasure. With Gluck the old quarrel between the Italian
and the northern manner is renewed. Chamber-music retreats into the
back-ground. Schobert and Eckard, decorative musicians, are hardly
known beyond the border; and Adam and Kalkbrenner, who restore the
fame of French clavier-technique, leave productive art on one side.
In Vienna there is a swarm of prominent figures. Gradually the city
is preparing itself for the state of things which in 1820 W. C.
Müller thus describes in one of his “Letters to German Friends”: “It
is incredible how far the enthusiasm for music, and especially for
skill on the piano, is now being carried. Every house has a good
instrument. The banker Gaymüller has five by different makers; and the
girls especially play a great deal.” Indeed, a glance at the society
of Vienna at that time shows us innumerable ladies, ranging from the
merest amateurs to the maturest artistic performers, thronging round
the great and the mediocre alike. Even Beethoven, the misanthrope,
sees himself surrounded by them; he cannot keep from them, nay,
he often does not choose to do so. The Baroness Ertmann, Julia
Guicciardi, Nanette Streicher, are some of the actual persons of the
fair sex, who, amid innumerable legendary beings, hovered about the
Master. As usual where social life forms the basis of culture, the
ladies come to the front. Invitations fly in bewildering profusion;
the great houses exchange their guests; new compositions are made
known in the salons before they find a publisher; and when they
are published, old acquaintances become subscribers. This narrow
circle gives a great opportunity for the advance of chamber-music.
An accurate observer will notice how the modern international
musical public slowly develops itself from this old-fashioned, close
corporation.
The names of the best teachers are in every mouth. Czerny, who was
destined to raise Vienna technique to its height, and to become the
teacher of a Liszt, tells us in his Memoirs who were known as the
best teachers in Vienna at the commencement of the century: “Wölffl,
distinguished by his bravura-playing; Gelinek, universally popular for
his brilliant and elegant execution; Lipawsky, a great sight-player,
renowned for his performance of Bach’s fugues. I still remember how
Gelinek once told my father that he was invited out for an evening to
break a lance with a foreign player. ‘We mean to hew him in pieces,’
said Gelinek. Next day my father asked Gelinek how the fight of
yesterday had gone. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘I shall remember yesterday’s
fight. The young man has a devil. I never heard such playing. He
improvised fantasias on an air I gave him, as I never heard even
Mozart improvise. Then he played compositions of his own, which are
in the highest degree wonderful and grand, and he brings out of the
piano effects the like of which we never heard of!’ ‘Ah,’ said my
father, astonished, ‘what is this man called?’ ‘He is,’ said Gelinek,
‘a little, gloomy, dark, and stubborn-looking young fellow, and he is
called Beethoven.’”
Beethoven was discontented. He knew what lay within him, and yet
could not help seeing how the crowd preferred to shout itself hoarse
over the brilliant exponents of technique, then beginning to swarm
over Vienna. He was brought into a contest not only with Gelinek,
but with Wölffl, who was renowned for his abnormally long fingers.
Such contests are a mark of the times. As yet the division of labour
between composers and interpreters had not been introduced. Playing
and invention had a more intimate association. The following is
the programme of the “Academy,” which Mozart performed in 1770 at
Mantua: “First, a symphony of his own composition; secondly, a
pianoforte concerto, which he will play at sight; thirdly, a sonata
just placed before him, which he will provide with variations and
afterwards repeat in another key. Then he will compose an aria
to words given to him, sing it himself, and accompany it on the
clavier. Next, a sonata for the cembalo on a motive supplied him by
the first violin[111]; a strict fugue on a theme to be selected,
which he will improvise on the piano; a trio, in which he will take
the violin part _all’improviso_; and, finally, the last symphony
of his own composition.” No sharper contrast can be conceived than
this performance offers to the modern concert. Almost all is here
arranged for sight-playing and improvisation, or for the instantaneous
exertion of inventive or executant skill. There is in this still a
good deal of the earlier notion of music, in which the conception and
visible development of a theme was preferred to the performance of a
completed work. Later, the demand for such instantaneous performances
gradually disappears. In Mozart the cadenza at the conclusion of the
concerto-movements remained as the last refuge of the improviser
in the written-out piece. Beethoven insisted that his E flat major
concerto should be performed without an improvised cadenza.
At a period in which instantaneous performances were so popular,
contests of the kind mentioned above were not misplaced. But Beethoven
had more to suffer in them than others, since his genius had already
outgrown them. He was a poet who loved to live apart and to offer
his gifts in a more intimate fashion. How wonderfully did that very
deafness, which turned his genius inward, preserve him in later
years from public playing and conducting! But, before, he had been
forced to enter the lists not only with Wölffl, with Gelinek, with
the renowned technist Hummel, but actually with so contemptible an
artist as Steibelt. This Steibelt was one of the disgraces of the age.
Bespattered with praise, he rushed through Europe with his trashy
compositions, his battles, thunder-storms, Bacchanals, which he played
_ad libitum_, while his wife struck the tambourine in concert with
him. The populace was enraptured, for Steibelt and Madame tickled
their nerves with sparkling shakes and tremolos. At the house of the
Count von Fries he fell in with Beethoven. A quintett of Steibelt’s
and the B flat major trio of Beethoven’s (Op. 11) were played. In
the latter occur the variations on a theme of Weigl, from the opera
L’Amor Marinaro. Beethoven was out of humour and would not play. A
week later the same company met again. On this occasion a quintett by
Steibelt is again played, and to it Steibelt adds a series of wild
clattering variations on the same theme of Weigl. Such “Leit-motive”
attacks are familiar in these contests. It is well known that
underlying Mozart’s Zauberflöte overture is a theme which Clementi
had already used in his B flat major Sonata. Clementi had played
it in a contest with Mozart, who did not care much for the Italian
“mechanical” artist. But Beethoven this time avenged himself bitterly
on Steibelt. After a long persuasion from his friends he stepped
negligently to the piano, struck with one finger a few notes from the
just-played quintett, and twisted it in and out until he had produced
a fantasia; but Steibelt, before the conclusion of the piece, left the
room and never came near him again.
Thus Beethoven lived in a world with which he had no sympathy. It is
true that there were some houses in which the higher class of music
was openly cultivated. Such a house was that of Van Swietens, where
Beethoven often played to a late hour from Bach’s Wohltemperiertes
Klavier. But the multitude, whose musical horizon was bounded by the
Italian opera, occupied itself with the glitter and splash of the
executants. In such a city old Diogenes might have sought long for a
man. A composer of the best class, Friedrich Wilhelm Rust, who in the
midst of his capriccios in the style of Philip Emanuel often showed
features reminding us of Beethoven, died at Dessau in 1796 alone and
inglorious. A Franz Schubert lived close by Beethoven, but no one knew
of his existence. Those who are heard of are virtuosos and writers for
the pianoforte. Dussek, however, is of importance not only from the
technical point of view, but from that of true _art_. He is noteworthy
also as the first musician to compose almost wholly for the piano,
with or without accompaniment. How distant are the times when we could
feel surprise when a piece appeared written for piano alone! And this
man, within the limits of his genius, made the poetry of the piano
into a life-work. It is as if for the first time an anticipation
of Chopin rose before us; but the likeness is after all only in
externals. Dussek is the bourgeois romancist, when he spends his whole
year in the country with his lady-love; but he is the true son of the
eighteenth century when he in turn attaches himself to successive
princely patrons. Especially devoted was he to the musical Prussian
Prince Louis Ferdinand, on whose death at Saalfeld he wrote a suitable
composition. His style would seem to have been noble and full, and his
pieces are more charming than was usual at the time. Unlike Hummel
he was very partial to the pedal; and it is in his pages, perhaps,
that we find it for the first time accurately employed. His works
themselves are of all kinds and degrees of merit. When, led by his
national temperament (he was a Czech), he gives full play to the dance
forms in the last movement, he strikes a fine and fresh note. He was
one of the first to use syncopations effectively. But he has also
written a final movement, that of the E flat major sonata in 6/8 time,
which has a true and solid worth over and above its dance-form. He is
less attentive to his first movements, and his most famous sonata,
that in A flat major, which he entitled “Retour à Paris,” disappoints
in this regard our expectations. In his second movements he is quicker
to light on tones which, by their tender character, linger in the
memory; as above all in the slow movement of the D major in 2/4 time.
After all, if Dussek does not stand among the immortals, he yet, in
intellect and power of invention, ranks among the lesser stars[112] to
whom we owe the full elaboration of the popular forms. His style is
soon grasped. We know one of his sonatas already as soon as we hear
the first bars. A broad first theme gives us a good tune; then it goes
smoothly flowing through grateful passages to the second theme in the
dominant or relative key. Other runs give the fingers some further
opportunity for bravura; perhaps a third scrap of melody peeps out,
and we are at the landmark of the first double bar. Next some suitable
free fantasia is arranged, which sounds more scholastic than it is; we
pass with it through a series of related keys--until a motive already
known, the first theme, brings us back again with a smooth glide to
the beginning, from which point the movement practically repeats
itself. In the following movements there is a longer melody adorned
with variations. In the third a seductively familiar theme tickles our
fancy, which at times spreads itself out in bravuras, or gives itself
effect in a very poor imitation of a fugue.
[Illustration: Dussek.]
In company such as this Beethoven stands absolutely alone. It is true
he has not yet wholly cast off the garment of his time. In many a
harmonic phrase, in many a formal turn, he is a child of the period;
above all in many a _naiveté_. And he not seldom exerts himself about
passages which are utterly unworthy of him. He, the composer of the
A major symphony, wrote at the same time the incredible “Battle of
Vittoria.” Conscious advance, such as Wagner set before himself, is
to him unknown; and we find among his later works various things that
remind us of an earlier period, as, for example, the wonderfully
Mozart-like C major Rondo for the pianoforte. But his _naiveté_ was
strangely warped; and thus arose noteworthy mixtures of style, such as
we so often observe in men who stand on the borders of two ages. His
character was the most complicated that ever musician had; and only
investigators who know not the demon of the great soul, can seriously
ascribe the paltry avarice of the master to humane goodwill for the
notorious nephew whom he supported. A soul like Beethoven’s is a
mystery into which we can only penetrate slowly and with difficulty;
and who knows--even if perhaps the deepest secrets of his “last style”
should become common and familiar, whether even then the last word
would have been said on this strangely complicated and distorted
character? But Beethoven composed from the soul outward. This was the
great novelty. And we must penetrate into his soul if we will rightly
apprehend him.
The enthusiastic compiler, Thayer, who died while writing
Beethoven’s biography--musical history has often been the death
of its authors!--remarks very excellently how differently from
others Beethoven already sketches out his work. The motives stand
there in hasty cursive--applications of motives--tone-ideas in
words--as a painter sketches or a poet notes down his observations
or inspirations. It bubbles up not like Bach’s steady stream of
self-restraint, but in a torrent of unmeasured passion, which regards
self-restraint as a weak concession and the correctness of the
“galants” as a lie. In this man music spoke in words, not in pictures.
He had the unparalleled boldness to tear out his secret feelings, all
bleeding as they were, and hold them up before his own gaze. It was
the boldness of a Zarathustra-nature. He belonged to those who worship
Bacchus, not to those who follow Buddha. In Thayer’s possession was
a note from Beethoven to his friend Zmeskall of Domanovecz. “For the
future I bid farewell to the cheerfulness which I sometimes enjoy;
for yesterday, through your Zmeskallic chatter, I became quite
gloomy. The devil take them--I don’t want to know anything of their
universal morality. Might is the morality of men who distinguish
themselves above others. It is my morality, anyhow. If you start on
me again, I shall pester you until you find everything I do noble and
praiseworthy.”
We shall then only understand Beethoven thoroughly when we leave form
on one side and take music as a speech. It is no feeble paradox to
say that the reason why Beethoven, in his operas and songs, paid so
little attention to the words, was because the music was to him words
enough. To this greatest of instrumental geniuses was revealed the
great secret of pure music, which, precisely because it has no speech
or language, speaks infinitely the more profoundly. Words obstruct it.
When Beethoven, at the end of the Ninth Symphony, has recourse to the
human voice, everyone feels that it was to him only the highest of
all instruments, with which he can do yet more than with trombone or
contrabass. It is the utmost triumph of the pure musician who can draw
even the voice under his sway.
[Illustration: Cast of Beethoven’s living face, 1812.]
Music is to him a speech, because it is full of associations of ideas,
which bring tones into relation with the outer world, and make them
reverberate with a thousand inner meanings. In his orchestra we hear
nature, as in his pianoforte we hear the orchestra. Not without
reason has Bülow, in his edition of Beethoven, in more than one place
translated the piano-piece for the reader into score, in order to
make its content clearer. These are things which did not exist in
Bach. The world of tone has sacrificed her great unity for the great
fragmentariness of unveiled speech, and a never dreamt-of height was
thus reached in that absolute tone speech, which formerly in Venice
and in England had taken the place of the mediæval vocal music.
What a Gabrieli, a Bull, a Bird, a Couperin, each in his own way,
had begun, was by Beethoven brought to full completion. Here was the
perfect opposition to the Middle Ages. Here was the Michael Angelo
who could stand alone against the ancients. The abstractions were
perfected, the relations more general, the language more intelligible.
If Beethoven began his first Symphony with a chord of the seventh,
it was possible to understand what he meant by it. To this man, who
completed one epoch in beginning another; to this symphonist and
chamber-musician, the clavier must become a daily necessity. His life
has been written in his works. Words, which could only fetter him, are
kept at a distance; the notes tell the story by themselves.
[Illustration: Lithograph by C. Fischer, after the original portrait
of 1817, by A. Kloeber (1793-1864).]
If we would understand Beethoven’s language we must study the
way in which he works out his motives. His peculiarities are the
peculiarities of the naturalistic school. The melody mounts or
falls as his emotion mounts or falls. He takes a motive and narrows
it until its parts curve upon each other, and then again makes it
greater and broader, until it lies open before us. This is a deep
and mysterious language, which deals with the tones as a word, an
expression; which looks on us, shall I say? like the eye of certain
animals--we understand them through and through, and yet their speech
is not ours. But the most powerful agent in stirring our emotion is
the rhythm, that soul of all expression. It is the absolute pulse of
things, which only the finer ears can hear in the outer world; it
lies here before us in its artistic purity. The pauses, the leaps,
the syncopations, the gigantic parallelisms of structure, the dynamic
surprises, leave but a thin wall of partition between the phenomenal
and the transcendental of music. There is no longer any reserve in
the language. There are some movements in which Beethoven’s music
stands at the very doors of verbal speech: such, for example, as the
allegretto in Op. 14, 1 and the first movement of Op. 90. The words
appear to tremble on the lips; but it would be the disappearance of
the apparition were we to utter them.
Over Beethoven’s realm broods a deep tragedy. A constraining
seriousness speaks to us--the dark abyss of passionate emotion: a
total pitilessness, a gloomy brooding, accents of misery, a unison of
terror. Beethoven began his piano publications with the three sonatas
(Op. 2.) dedicated to Haydn; works full of inexhaustible inspirations,
of the ravishing freshness of youth. The second is introduced by sharp
accents and those broad extensions of chords by means of octaves,
which remained to the end characteristic of the author. Another
man would have begun the piece _after_ this tragic cry, with the
contrapuntally-rocking motive. But the first of his greater tragic
outbreaks was the mighty Sonata in C minor, the so-called Pathétique,
which he dedicated to his patron Lichnowsky. Upon the heavy, slow
introductory passage follows the stormy First Movement, whose themes
are, first, a tempest of rage, secondly, an utter despair; and the
Grave intrudes its monitory remembrances in the midst. Unity of
colouring is preserved. Over the second singing movement, and the
third with its rondo-like passages, lies the same sombre tone; and the
conclusion is sharply cut short.
Beethoven revels in the gloomy. He buries himself in deep tones,
as in the Andante of the Pathétique or in Op. 22, its cheerfulness
notwithstanding. Later, on the magnificent Broadwood, which he
received from England as a present, he goes with delight into the
regions of the deep. A mystic tremolo attracts him; and the “trios” of
his scherzi are full of the sonorous murmuring of billowy chords.[113]