2
THE BOY FROM BONN
It used to be customary to present Beethoven’s family background and boyhood almost as a contrast to Mozart’s, as though to show how a heroic genius could dispense with the advantages of being a child prodigy painstakingly groomed by a father who was both an accomplished professional musician and extremely ambitious for his son. In fact Beethoven’s father, Johann, was also a professional musician (although much less accomplished than Leopold Mozart) and ambitious enough for his son occasionally to shave a year or two off the boy’s age just as Leopold did with Wolfgang. The market for child musical celebs was very lively in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Young Beethoven was certainly not a child prodigy to the same degree as Mozart or Mendelssohn, but it was obvious early on that he had quite exceptional musical talent. Music did after all run in the family. His grandfather Ludwig (1712–1773), who died when Beethoven was not quite three, came from what today is Belgium and was a trained singer who accepted a post in the Elector of Cologne’s chapel at his court in Bonn. That he must also have been a thorough musician as well as having a notable voice is proved by his subsequent appointment there as Kapellmeister in 1761 with responsibility to supervise all the court’s music. Such a post normally went to a composer, which the elder Ludwig never was.
Ludwig’s son Johann (1740–1792) also joined the Elector’s chapel as a singer, first as a boy and then staying on as a tenor. Johann had enough ability on both the violin and the harpsichord to give basic lessons to eke out his stipend but his musical talents were much more modest than his father’s. He married in 1767, and his second surviving son, Ludwig, was born in December 1770. Two younger brothers also survived, Carl and Johann, both of whom were to figure prominently in Beethoven’s later life.
Having spotted Ludwig’s early talent Beethoven’s father did his best to foster it by giving him basic keyboard and violin lessons. The boy was then sent to various teachers in Bonn and gave his first concert when he was seven, playing ‘various concertos and trios’, which surely argues rapid progress. But under his father’s bullying the boy Beethoven was soon as overworked as the boy Mozart had been some fifteen years earlier, but with none of that little showman’s satin suits, miniature court dress and periwigs. On the contrary, as a child of what the current British euphemism would call a ‘troubled family’ young Ludwig bore clear signs of neglect, undernourishment and, on occasion, welts and bruises from his father’s beatings. His younger brothers, showing no signs of musical precocity, probably escaped the worst consequences of their father’s ambitiousness. Outside the house Johann was convivial and not unpopular but occasionally showed the effects of heavy drinking, his voice and court attendance already beginning to suffer.
Maria, the boys’ mother, was a kindly soul, although she could flare up suddenly with formidable outbursts of temper, as could all the Beethovens. Somehow she dealt with her difficult husband, but trying to hold the family together was taxing and at school her children were noted for being generally unkempt and grubby. Ludwig’s formal education never progressed even as far as Gymnasium level (secondary school, in British terms) but stopped at Bonn’s Tirocinium, or primary school, from which he was removed in 1781 in order to concentrate on music. He was not quite eleven. Years later one of his fellow pupils at the Tirocinium remembered the boy they called either ‘Luis’ or ‘der Spagnol’, the Spaniard, because of his dark complexion and haughtiness:
Apparently his mother was already dead at the time, for Luis v. B. was distinguished by uncleanliness, negligence, etc. Not a sign was to be discovered of that spark of genius which glowed so brilliantly in him afterwards.1
In fact poor Maria was not dead, merely ill with the early stages of tuberculosis and ever more exhausted with maintaining the household and keeping her three children fed and presentable.
In leaving school so young Ludwig was not exceptional for the times. Eleven was considered an appropriate age for a boy in a needy family to get out into the world and become apprenticed to a worthwhile trade, earning being much preferred to learning. Ludwig self-selected for the trade of music: he was as brilliant at that as he was backward in such basic skills as even the most elementary mathematics. In the vast archive of manuscripts, notes, diaries, conversation books and scribbles he was to leave behind are various touching efforts at accountancy that betray this lack. He never learned how to multiply, for example. If he needed to multiply a sum of money by forty he wrote it out forty times and added the column up, not always reaching the same total twice running.
The first music teacher to have a far-reaching influence on the young Beethoven was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who was appointed court organist in Bonn in 1781. It was Neefe who introduced the boy to J. S. Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues in all the keys at a time when the Baroque master’s music had fallen out of fashion. In the thirty-one years since Bach’s death, his legacy was kept alive by a comparative handful of enthusiasts. (It would be almost another half-century before Mendelssohn resurrected the St Matthew Passion from total obscurity to astonish audiences then firmly in music’s Romantic age and re-establish Bach in his rightful place.) Bach’s ‘48’ proved the perfect grounding for a more advanced piano technique, as it did for Beethoven’s own later and highly idiosyncratic brand of fugue. At eleven Ludwig was already accomplished enough to act as Neefe’s deputy as court organist, and Neefe himself admiringly described his prize pupil in a magazine article as being a skilled keyboard player and sight-reader, as well as having had a composition published. This was a set of nine piano variations on a march by the minor composer Ernst Christoph Dressler. (In the context of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, with its famous funeral march in C minor, it is a curious coincidence that the theme of Dressler’s that the boy Beethoven chose for his first published piece was also a funeral march in C minor). Neefe’s article ended: ‘This young genius deserves help to enable him to travel. He would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were to continue as he has begun.’2
Before he turned thirteen Beethoven had risen to be deputy continuo player in the Elector Maximilian Friedrich’s orchestra with three published sonatas judiciously dedicated to his employer. The continuo player’s chief task had long been that of accompanying from the keyboard the singers of recitatives in operas and cantatas. By this time the traditional harpsichord was slowly being replaced by the fortepiano, and in those pre-conductor days the continuo player also helped keep the orchestra together. The job was a considerable test of sight-reading from scores as well as time-keeping and would have been invaluable for familiarizing Beethoven with ensemble playing. The following year the Elector died and was succeeded by Archduke Maximilian Francis, Empress Maria Theresa’s youngest son. His title might have been Archbishop and Elector-Spiritual of Cologne, but his court was in Bonn, as it had been for all the Electors of Cologne for centuries. The new Elector was keen to make Bonn an artistic centre to rival Vienna, the city of his birth. Knowing his keen interest in music, Neefe put forward his prize pupil for the post of assistant court organist, to which the thirteen-year-old Beethoven was duly appointed at a salary of 150 gulden. The relief in the Beethoven household must have been immense. The boy was making good. It is hard to imagine that Johann went to bed sober that night. The Elector soon began to take a personal interest in his young organist, recognizing the ferocious nature of the boy’s talent.
From Beethoven’s point of view the next few years were perfect for his musical education in that his duties were not onerous and left him with plenty of time for perfecting his keyboard technique. Better still, he had the court orchestra from which to learn the range of each instrument, its uses, its tonal limitations and ability to blend in or stand out in an ensemble. From his father he had learned the basics of violin technique and turned himself into a viola player good enough to take his place in the opera orchestra, but he was never a natural string player. Such skills were merely what any practical musician picked up along the way. Haydn, for example, claimed to be able to play any instrument in the orchestra, none brilliantly but all of them quite well enough for him to be able to deputize at the desk of an absent player.
Two scholars who wrote outstanding Beethoven biographies in the early 1930s, Marion M. Scott (Beethoven) and Richard Specht (Bildnis Beethovens), referred to an incident from this period that later biographers have ignored, although this might be for lack of a reliable source. In Marion Scott’s version the story goes:
Beethoven, during the course of his duties… had to accompany on the piano those portions of the Lamentations of Jeremiah which are sung on a reciting note in Holy Week. In Holy Week, March 1785, the singer was Ferdinand Heller, an excellent musician who, when Beethoven asked leave to try to put him off his note, assented very readily. [The boy], while persistently striking the reciting note with one finger, improvised such daring harmonic excursions in the accompaniment that Heller became too bewildered to find the closing cadence… The musicians of the chapel were dumbfounded at Beethoven’s skill, Heller was furious to the extent of complaining to the Elector, and the triumphant youngster was ‘very graciously reprimanded’ by that exalted person.3