In particular, his powers of improvisation soon became legendary. If they also contained an element of pugnaciousness it was partly because that was his character, but it was also because improvising always implied a challenge. In effect it meant inventing a composition on the spot, often on a subject supplied by one of his audience, in a way that made for coherent listening with plenty of showmanship thrown in. As the de facto capital of European music, Vienna was full of highly accomplished musicians from all over the Habsburg Empire, including many well-known pianists, all of whom had their champions. It was a highly competitive musical scene, and by no means always good natured. One famous incident took place at a party in Prince Lobkowitz’s palace. Lobkowitz was by then one of Beethoven’s patrons, and the party he threw was in honour of Ignaz Pleyel, a man thirteen years older than Beethoven. Pleyel’s latest quartets were played, after which the prince called on Beethoven himself to play, which Beethoven clearly resented. He walked to the piano with bad grace, on the way snatching up the second violinist’s part of Pleyel’s last quartet, which he then slammed upside-down on the piano’s music stand and began to improvise. Carl Czerny, an outstanding pianist himself, described what followed:

He had never been heard to improvise more brilliantly, with more originality and splendour than on this evening. But for the entire improvisation there ran through its middle voices, like a thread or cantus firmus, the notes—in themselves utterly insignificant—which he found on the random page of the quartet he had grabbed and on which he built up the most daring melodies and harmonies in the most brilliant concerto style. At the end poor old Pleyel could only show his amazement by kissing Beethoven’s hands.¹

All the same, Beethoven’s piano-playing style, invariably praised for its astonishing technique, was not always preferred to those favouring the earlier style of the Viennese school of Mozart and Haydn. The piano was in a state of rapid development at that time, and instruments varied considerably. They also bore scant resemblance to the modern piano with its vastly greater volume of sound over a much wider range of notes. In Beethoven’s boyhood fortepianos were still only patchily available, and his early Bonn works would often have been played on a harpsichord. When he reached Vienna he discovered that Viennese pianos were extremely light in touch, with little sustaining power. Consequently their sound died quite quickly, which was good for a slightly superficial or tinkly style of rapid playing but less good for smoothly sustained slow passages. Mozart had been praised by many for the speed and clarity of his scales and passagework. But Mozart was dead—and Beethoven had famously disparaged his playing as ‘choppy’ (he heard him play on his brief visit to Vienna in 1787). Beethoven’s own speciality—apart from the unequalled rapidity of his double trills, runs and skips—was his slow legato playing and richness of tone. This demanded not only a much better instrument but a different technique. Beethoven’s early piano sonatas with their requirements of fortissimo as well as pianissimo playing were to do much to stimulate piano-makers into building heavier and more powerful instruments with faster actions and pedals. In the early part of the nineteenth century it was said that Beethoven had given the piano its ‘soul’. If that meant anything, it was an indication that the instrument was evolving rapidly to meet the demands of much more expressive music that needed to be audible in halls larger than salons. But even in the 1790s it was noted that Beethoven’s playing of his slow movements would often move his aristocratic listeners to tears. No other pianist of his day managed that.

Beethoven’s comparative penury in those early days in Vienna also threw him into less grand company, and there is abundant evidence that he fell in with people of his own age who shared revolutionary and radical beliefs. No doubt they endorsed Robespierre’s stirring motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The storming of the Bastille had occurred when Beethoven was eighteen and a half, and the extent to which he as a youth was affected by the French Revolution has been much debated. It is probably less significant than the question of how much of his adolescent idealism later persisted in the adult composer, what shape it took, and the degree to which it influenced the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. French twentieth-century biographers’ opinions usually fell somewhere on the spectrum between that of the composer Vincent d’Indy, who implausibly claimed that Beethoven was entirely uninfluenced by the French Revolution and its progressive ideas (an impossibility, given his age and background), and the writer Romain Rolland, who hailed him as a true ‘Son of the French Revolution’.²

Almost as soon as he had arrived in Vienna, Beethoven joined in a public subscription for a book of Jacobin verse by one Eulogius Schneider (‘the Marat of Strasbourg’), whom Beethoven had known back in Bonn when Schneider was teaching Greek literature at the university. The storming of the Bastille had clearly galvanized Schneider’s muse, and one of his poems began ‘Oh dear Guillotine! How welcome thou art!’ which nicely set the volume’s general tone.

Like Prague, Vienna of the day was a magnet for students and artists of all kinds living bohemian lives of semi-penury as well as genuine Bohemians from what is today’s Czech Republic, many of whom were outstanding musicians. In fact, young hotheads needed to watch their step. The recent developments in France were sending shivers of alarm through Europe’s royal families. No matter how enlightened any despot fancied himself to be, a despot he remained. Within days of the fall of the Bastille the Austrian emperor Joseph II reversed many of the liberal social policies he had previously endorsed. A certain Count Pergen, a zealous reactionary, was appointed minister of police to take over the management of censorship from Mozart’s old patron and lodge brother, Baron Gottfried van Swieten.³ Within a short time newspapers were censored, suspected radicals arrested and imprisoned without trial, and even the Freemasons were menaced. When Joseph died in 1790 his brother and successor Leopold II maintained the police state Joseph had inaugurated in such panic. When Leopold himself died after a reign of barely two years, he was succeeded by his son, Francis II, who likewise had no intention of dismantling the state security apparatus. By then the Austrians had mostly forgiven Joseph his reformist excesses and looked back to his reign with affection.

The power and reach of the secret police in Austria’s unwieldy empire were considerable, and even small provincial cities such as Salzburg had long been full of spies. The clandestine reading of mail was common if correspondents were suspected of even mildly subversive views. Like many others, Mozart and his father had occasionally used a private code in their letters when mentioning politically sensitive matters. Things were even worse in Vienna, despite the capital’s apparent preoccupation with music-making and pleasure-seeking. The young Beethoven rapidly acquired a reputation for political intransigence and unconventional religious views that was to last the remaining thirty-odd years of his life. In a diary entry in 1793 he wrote, ‘Do as much good as you can—love freedom above everything. Never deny the truth, not even to the throne.’ For the rest of his life he showed no reluctance whatever in loudly airing what he thought of as the truth with splendid impartiality, whether speaking to the throne, to a cardinal or to a stranger in a pub. He would share his scathing attacks on politicians and the aristocracy with anyone who would listen. Yet his was more the outspokenness of an opinionated egotist than of a revolutionary, and it was often aided by drink, a violent temper if thwarted and an increasing refusal to observe dress codes and conventions. This was especially apparent when dealing with the aristocracy, whom he treated familiarly as equals when, indeed, he deigned to recognize them at all.