The story sounds likely enough since there are plenty of well-attested accounts from only very little later of Beethoven’s prodigious skill as an improviser, especially when challenged to work from a mere handful of notes. It also contains a plausible germ of the arrogance that was to remain a characteristic of most of the subsequent musical challenges he accepted, especially later in Vienna where competitions between keyboard players were keenly fought.
At the age of fourteen Beethoven published the first compositions to have his precocious personal stamp: the three Piano Quartets WoO 36 (a great many of his early and uncollected works were marked thus as works without an opus number). The music inevitably shows the influence of Mozart, partly because he was the composer who most inspired the young Beethoven but also because each quartet was modelled on one of Mozart’s violin sonatas. Despite that, these compositions betray surprising individuality and a depth of controlled feeling quite unexpected in anyone so young. Beethoven obviously wrote these quartets with himself as pianist in mind, and as such they are a testimonial to the keyboard technique he had acquired, since they are much more demanding for the pianist than Mozart’s violin sonatas. The second movement of the E flat major Quartet (WoO 36 No. 1) is not only in the stormy, passionate mode that later became one of his trademarks when he set up in Vienna; it is in the tonic minor—the rare key of E flat minor, the six flats presenting difficulties to all the players: to the strings in terms of intonation and to the pianist because having to deal with so many black keys was seldom encountered outside Bach’s ‘48’ (a difficulty related to that of tuning keyboard instruments in the remoter keys). Beethoven’s familiarity with Bach’s work surely facilitated this logical but unusual choice.
All three of these piano quartets show clear pointers towards later works. In particular he was to adapt the slow movement of No. 3 in C major ten years later as the Adagio of the first of his thirty-two piano sonatas, the F minor, Op. 2 No. 1; while a G minor passage in the quartet’s first movement was to re-appear in the Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 2 No. 3. More importantly in the present context, though, in two of these quartets there are remarkable suggestions in embryonic form of the ‘Prometheus’ theme that in fifteen and more years’ time Beethoven was to use in four separate works, culminating with the last movement of the ‘Eroica’.*
Were these prophetic hints, not yet fully realized, of a tune that was to become famous in twenty years’ time or were they just a musical commonplace, more fragments of a tune than a tune itself? Musicologists have also pointed to two of Muzio Clementi’s piano sonatas as possible influences for this theme, especially his F minor Sonata, Op. 13 No. 6, dating from 1784.4 Its last movement begins with the first few notes of the ‘Prometheus’ theme, albeit in a minor key, but later in the movement it appears in the major and does sound convincingly similar. Clementi was perhaps the first virtuoso of the early piano, and later on his numerous sonatas undoubtedly had some influence on Beethoven, who certainly had copies in his library as an adult and also had business relations with the Italian. That Beethoven could have seen a sonata written only the year before his own piano quartets seems doubtful, and in any case too much can be made of these apparent musical cross-references and presagings.
A handful of notes that might have foreshadowed an entire later tune seem of little significance, particularly as Beethoven never felt himself remotely challenged by Clementi either as a performer or as a composer. Unknown to his fourteen-year-old self in 1785, of course, it was precisely the use and expansion of such motivic fragments that was to become the trademark of his maturity. At the time, composers such as Mozart and Haydn tended to favour self-contained tunes they would develop in ways that usually left them still identifiable. Beethoven was to invent a method of either starting with bald rhythmic motifs (like the opening of the Fifth Symphony) that could be expanded into tunes, or else doing the opposite: starting with a tune and reducing it to its component parts (as in the last movement of the Eighth). These techniques became a salient feature of his mature compositions and not least of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Whatever its origins, this particular germ of the later ‘Prometheus’ tune clearly had a long genesis.
Hearing these early quartets, no musician in the new Elector’s court in Bonn could have been in any further doubt about young Beethoven’s great gifts and promise. Archduke Maximilian took particular notice of him, not merely as an ornament to his court but as a potential inheritor of Mozart’s laurels. This interest in his promising organist’s future was all of a piece with his plan to convert Bonn from an ecclesiastical Rhenish backwater into a seat of the arts and learning. He was very much a man of the Enlightenment, encouraging science and laying out botanical gardens, opening a public reading room in the library of his palace and inaugurating the new university his predecessor had planned. Ignorant of the awful changes that lay in wait for Bonn at the hands of Napoleon following the French Revolution of 1789, for a few brief but exciting years the city basked in a springlike regeneration that attracted artists and intellectuals. It was this period and this progressive atmosphere that Beethoven was to retain for the rest of his life as an image of civilized orderliness that epitomized his birthplace, his locus of homesickness.
Beethoven the teenager might have been ill educated in a formal sense and often socially uncouth, but in other respects he was the beneficiary of a good deal of extra-musical intellectual stimulus. His teacher and mentor, Christian Neefe, was a creature of the Enlightenment with pronounced egalitarian views that verged on the mystical. He was a Freemason as well as a member of the more secretive and politically radical Bavarian Order of Illuminati. Such interests were very much in the spirit of the times. Many of the leading artists and intellectuals of the day were Masons, from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington in America to Goethe and Frederick the Great, not to mention Gluck, Mozart and Haydn closer to home. The playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, author of Nathan the Wise (1779), was also a Mason. Nathan made a powerful plea for the peaceful co-existence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and this parable of the brotherhood of man was already famous throughout Europe. He described the central belief of Freemasonry thus:
By the exercise of Brotherly Love we are taught to regard the whole human species as one family, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, created by one Almighty Being and sent into the world for the aid, support and protection of each other. On these principles Masonry unites men of every country, sect and opinion, and by its dictates conciliates true friendship among those who might otherwise have remained at a distance.5
From Neefe and others of his circle Beethoven would have heard such ideas and no doubt internalized them as a vindication of his own humble origins, together with the implied reassurance that lowly birth was no bar to future greatness. From its first publication and wide circulation in 1786, Schiller’s poem ‘Ode to Joy’ must also have deeply impressed the teenager. Although Schiller was not himself a Freemason, many of the poem’s sentiments (Alle Menschen werden Brüder: ‘All men shall be brothers’) perfectly echoed the Masonic ideals. Indeed, once Beethoven had finally settled in Vienna in the next decade he decided he would set the poem to music, although it was thirty years before he got around to it for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. It might seem surprising that Beethoven never became a Freemason himself: he was to have many friends in Vienna who were, several of them aristocrats. But he was never a joiner. Constitutionally unclubbable as Beethoven was, it is impossible to visualize him as a member of any organization. Any oaths and rules in his life were exclusively his own. Despite all his invocations of the brotherhood of man, he powerfully felt himself a loner, often belligerently so.
Meanwhile he concentrated on honing his piano technique and was giving lessons to various aristocratic children in Bonn until, in the late spring of 1787, Archduke Maximilian sent for him and announced he was sending him to Vienna, all expenses paid. The sixteen-year-old travelled alone and it is not known exactly what the purpose of the trip was. Since the Archduke was himself a keen amateur musician and his brother Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, there was no one in that city to whom Beethoven might not have been given an introduction, and doubtless he left home with a sheaf of appropriate letters with impressive wax seals. Certainly he longed to meet Mozart and Haydn, although at that time Haydn was an almost permanent fixture at Eszterháza Palace, about fifty miles southeast of Vienna just over today’s Hungarian border, where he was Kapellmeister, seldom coming to Vienna except for short visits at Christmas.
In the event Beethoven did meet the rushed and preoccupied Mozart and played for him—or so goes the legend, since there is no reliable record of this visit. Tradition also has Mozart turning to some others as Beethoven was playing to say, ‘Keep your eyes on that boy—some day he’ll give the world something to talk about’, in the approved way by which legendary figures endorse their worthy successors, just as Haydn had the young Mozart. It makes a story. But nothing else is known about this visit, which was anyway cut short after less than a fortnight when news reached Beethoven that his mother, Maria, was now mortally ill. He returned post-haste to Bonn, arriving somewhat ill himself after the days of travel in lurching coaches over appalling roads. He nursed her until she died barely two weeks later, aged forty. Deeply attached to her as he was, Beethoven was bereft, saying he had lost his best friend. (Her gravestone is marked by her famous son’s words: Sie war mir eine so gute liebenswürdige Mutter, meine beste Freundin). He was old enough to recognize the struggle she had had to make a home for him, his two brothers and an afterthought—a one-year-old baby sister—in a household in which Johann had lately been a barely effectual husband.
In this way at the age of sixteen Ludwig became the family’s main breadwinner, Johann having already begun his decline into alcoholism, eventually losing his employment at court because his singing voice had deteriorated so badly. Many of the family’s possessions were pawned. The baby girl died in November. Two years later Johann was sacked, and Ludwig petitioned to be recognized as the de facto head of the Beethoven family. This was granted, so the eldest son’s moral duty became also a legal one. His father had become an embarrassment, and Beethoven’s closest friend Stephan von Breuning later remembered an occasion when Ludwig had furiously intervened to prevent his incapably drunk father from being arrested in the street.
There is no doubt that at dark periods at this stage of his life Beethoven relied heavily on his friendships to save him from utter despondency. He had long given piano lessons to the slightly younger children of the large and well-to-do von Breuning family, and the widowed Frau von Breuning, a most intelligent lady who recognized young Ludwig’s exceptional talent and understood his black moods, was motherly and infallibly kind. Another lifetime friend of Ludwig from this period was Franz Wegeler, a young doctor who would marry one of the von Breuning girls and eventually write a biography of Beethoven. The young musician might have been a loner, not to say impossibly difficult on occasion, but it is clear he must have had something lovable about him that was capable of being coaxed into lasting friendships. It is anyone’s guess whether Beethoven would have survived this grim period in his life without his supportive friends.
Another of his long-term friendships from this period was with Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, some eight years older than Beethoven and a keen amateur musician as well as a close friend of the Elector. Waldstein gave Beethoven a piano, and in due time Beethoven dedicated his Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 53, to him, the work every pianist knows as the ‘Waldstein’. As the 1780s ended Beethoven was busy refining his piano technique, acquiring a working knowledge of the orchestra and composing numerous works varied enough to show his competence in different forms. Then suddenly, in February 1790, the news came that Joseph II, the Elector’s older brother, had died in Vienna.
Joseph II, like his Prussian contemporary Frederick the Great, had been an admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau and the Enlightenment generally. Despite commanding the Holy Roman Empire he had privately hankered after such things as a secular state and the abolition of serfdom. His mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had summarily banned the Jesuits from the Empire in 1773, causing uproar in the Vatican. While he himself remained a Catholic, Joseph went on to grant religious autonomy to Protestants and Jews. Although never joining a lodge, he was also amiably inclined towards Freemasonry.
Joseph II was musical, a great admirer of Mozart and especially of his operas. It was he who commissioned Die Entführung aus dem Serail in German rather than in the usual French or Italian, and in Vienna this break with tradition was welcomed as refreshingly nationalist. However, Joseph’s basic attitude was less revolutionary than reformist. Frederick the Great had proclaimed that a monarch was not the absolute master of the state but only its first servant. Joseph, as an enlightened despot, might have aspired to this ideal but in the event merely discovered how little power some servants actually wielded. He succeeded in changing very little of the Austrian state, finding himself opposed at every turn by the dead weight of the Church and the conservatism of the aristocracy, the military and the imperial bureaucracy. He tried to change too many things too quickly in the face of powerful men and institutions with too much to lose. Ironically, having been known as ‘the people’s emperor’, he wound up considerably more disliked than loved. Ill and alone and facing revolt on all sides, he asked that his own sad epitaph should be: ‘Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all he undertook.’ To this day the humble copper sarcophagus he lies in is in stark contrast to the monstrous elaborations in bronze that lie around him in Vienna’s Imperial Crypt, the Kaisergruft.
At the time, though, Joseph’s progressive ideas were widely celebrated beyond the Austrian Empire’s boundaries, and when news of his death reached his brother the Elector in Bonn, the twenty-year-old Beethoven was given two weeks to write a commemorative cantata. This, the best work of all the composer’s early Bonn period, was never performed, probably because it was not finished in time but also on account of its difficulties. For a first attempt at a big choral work with full orchestra it is much better than commendable and full of ambitious and effective writing. The impressively solemn C minor opening strikes a note of distilled sorrow that is strangely personal and affecting for what was, after all, a commissioned occasional piece. The Elector’s own sadness at the loss of his brother must have pervaded his court. A similar fate befell the cantata Beethoven then wrote to celebrate the accession of Joseph’s successor, his brother Leopold II. The sumptuous orchestration of both these early compositions shows the influence of contemporary French composers such as Le Sueur, Méhul and Gossec, all of whom were busily writing imposing celebratory music at the behest of the Revolution’s new institutions.
Thereafter the Elector redoubled his efforts to recruit first-rate musicians for his court orchestra, and soon it was being spoken of as rivalling the famous orchestra at Mannheim. All the players wore scarlet uniforms trimmed abundantly with gold. At last, as a violist, the ex-urchin Beethoven was clad in splendid livery. Better still, he was now valued as easily the best pianist in Bonn and far beyond. Karl Junker, a visiting chaplain who was also a keen amateur musician, referred to him as ‘the dear, good Bethofen [sic]’. He not only heard Beethoven play but gave him a theme on which to extemporize and spoke of Beethoven as an ‘amiable, light-hearted man’, praising him for the
almost inexhaustible wealth of ideas, the altogether characteristic style of expression in his playing, and the great execution he displays.… Yet he is exceedingly modest and free from all pretensions.… His style of treating his instrument is so different from that usually adopted that it impresses one with the idea that by a path of his own discovery he has attained that height of excellence whereon he now stands.6
In December 1790 the Elector’s orchestra feted Haydn as he passed through Bonn on the way to England for his first visit. On his return in July 1792 the orchestra gave him a celebratory breakfast by the Rhine at Godesberg, a few miles upstream. It is still uncertain whether it was on this occasion or the earlier one that Beethoven showed the great man one of his compositions—very probably the Cantata on the Death of Joseph II—and was no doubt pleased when, according to Wegeler, he was ‘encouraged to further study’. But certainly on this second visit it was planned that Beethoven should go to Vienna to study with Haydn and then accompany him to England for the great man’s second visit to London, for which Haydn had been contracted by the Bonn-born impresario Johann Peter Salomon. Haydn was privately toying with the idea of staying permanently in England, so warm and lucrative had his reception been there, and it turned out that Beethoven too was thinking seriously about a career in London. The evidence for this is a poem in his Stammbuch (commonplace book) by another of the von Breuning brothers, Christoph, dated 19 November 1792:
See! The shady grove, which entices the singer
hasten then without delay
over the surging sea
where a more beauteous grove offers you its shade
and a bard [Salomon] stretches out his hand to you in friendship,
who from our fields
fled to Albion’s protection.
There let thy song ring loudly and victorious,
let it ring wildly through the grove, across the waves of the sea
to those fields
whence thou hast fled with joy.7
In the same commonplace book is Count Waldstein’s more famous farewell to his younger friend:
Dear Beethowen! [sic]
You are now going to Vienna in fulfilment of a wish that has for so long been thwarted. The genius of Mozart still mourns and weeps the death of its pupil. It has found a refuge in the inexhaustible Hayden [sic], but no occupation; through him it desires once more to find a union with someone. Through your unceasing diligence, receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Hayden.
Your true friend Waldstein.
Bonn, the 29th Oct. 17928
In this way Beethoven finally left Bonn for Vienna, and possibly also for England, in early November. It was as well for him, because Bonn was about to be overtaken by political events that had looked increasingly menacing ever since 1789. Even as he left, the French army was closing in on Mainz and Limburg. In France itself the monarchy of a thousand years’ standing had just been abolished, and Louis XIV had been arrested, tried and found guilty of high treason (to be guillotined the following January as ‘Citizen Louis Capet’). Joseph II’s sister, Marie Antoinette, had been in prison in Paris since the Revolution, and another of her late brother’s mortified self-accusations of failure had been over the botched attempt to rescue her (she would herself be guillotined in October 1793).
The boy from Bonn finally arrived in Vienna in November 1792. The deal he had with the Elector was that with the Elector’s financial help he would stay and study in Vienna for an unspecified period before returning to his service in Bonn. (Beethoven had presumably kept to himself his intention of defecting to England in case the plan didn’t come off.) Two days after Beethoven’s twenty-second birthday in December, the news reached him of his father’s death. Worse, it turned out Johann had managed to embezzle the money Ludwig had carefully arranged for his younger brothers. He also discovered that the 400 florins he was expecting as a full year’s stipend from the Elector to get him settled in the city turned out to be a mere 100 for the first quarter, and by June the following year the stipend itself had dried up entirely because of the Elector’s own worsening financial state. Eighteen months after Beethoven’s departure Elector Maximilian Francis’s reign over Bonn and his adjacent territory came to an end when he fled the advance of the French army that soon annexed the entire left bank of the Rhine. An era had come to an end. Bonn’s university was shut down, a ‘Freedom Tree’ was planted in the market square and the Code Napoléon adopted as civil law. The Elector retreated to the city of his birth, Vienna, where he died in 1801 at the age of forty-five, ill and grotesquely fat. Beethoven had planned to dedicate his first symphony gratefully to the man in whose employ he had learned his trade and come of age as a composer and performer, but the Archduke was dead before it could be finished.
* See Appendix.