His impatience with Vienna for not at once offering him a suitable paid post merely increased his antipathy towards its citizens in general. It would have depressed him immeasurably had he known he was in fact destined to live there for the remainder of his life, restlessly changing his lodgings and escaping to the surrounding countryside whenever he could. He was essentially a small-town boy who never really felt at home in the big city. He soon gave up on the Austrians’ revolutionary potential and had harsh things to say about them, both in conversation and in letters. ‘So long as your Austrian gets his brown beer and sausages he’s not about to join a revolution’, he wrote to a friend back in Bonn, the publisher Nikolaus Simrock, on 2 August 1794. ‘Double-damned mangy, Viennese trash!’⁴ he would growl. Or if referring to an individual, ‘Scruffy scoundrel! Stingy riff-raff!’⁵ Vienna was a city of two hundred thousand people, and in his opinion most of them were either aristocratic fops and wastrels or scum from all corners of the Habsburg Empire, the whole lot being dedicated to carnal pleasures of the lowest and most frivolous kind. By comparison Bonn (he must have told himself and others countless times) was not at all like that, being a quiet and self-contained Rhenish town of fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants with a musically literate Elector, an excellent court orchestra and people who knew how to behave—excluding, regrettably, his own late father (whose name he would never mention). For all that he himself was fated to die of drink-induced liver failure, Beethoven retained some distinctly provincial, even Puritan, attitudes, especially on sexual matters.

From quite early on the Vienna police must have opened a file on this difficult foreigner given to frequent anti-clerical pronouncements and loud saloon-bar dissections of eminent public figures. Since he habitually referred to priests by the derogatory term Pfaffen and his letters were full of profanities, it was put about by his enemies that he was an out-and-out atheist, although there would come a day when ‘pantheist’ would be a more accurate description. As for his politics, Beethoven’s first biographer, Anton Schindler, was probably correct when he observed that in his leanings Beethoven was a Republican.⁶ The extraordinary Albanian polymath and scholar Fan S. Noli (1882–1965) was even more specific:

All the slogans of the French Revolution can be found in Beethoven’s writings and, sometimes, in places where we hardly expect them, in business letters and love letters. And it must be borne in mind that all those slogans were anathema to the old regime of Vienna, which considered them dangerous to the state and forbade their use to its citizens.⁷

Yet despite the perils, Beethoven thrived, increasingly successful as both performer and composer, presumably well enough protected by his aristocratic mentors. Then in February 1798 the French Directorate sent General Jean Bernadotte to Vienna as its ambassador. He was young, handsome, dashing and had distinguished himself as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in his Italian campaign. Viennese ladies fell for him in heaps; the city authorities much less so. Ambassador he might have been; diplomat he was not. Apart from sporting the French tricolour in his hat and addressing everybody impartially as ‘citizen’, he and his retinue would hiss in the theatre when anyone cried, ‘Long live Emperor Francis!’⁸ Bernadotte was musical and brought with him France’s foremost violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer. Prince Lichnowsky, by this time one of Beethoven’s several noble patrons, introduced Beethoven to Bernadotte and Kreutzer. By all accounts the feisty composer and the two Frenchmen hit it off. Bernadotte had brought with him a collection of revolutionary music from Paris by composers such as Méhul, Le Sueur, Gossec, Catel and Kreutzer himself, which Beethoven studied eagerly.

Some of this music would already have been familiar to him from his days in the court orchestra in Bonn, but there was much that was new. This was music for open-air festivities and official celebrations, often martial. The essence of the style was that it should be stirring, the supreme example being Rouget de Lisle’s magnificent setting of ‘La Marseillaise’, written in Strasbourg in 1792 just after France had declared war on Austria. Above all, it was designed to be ‘people’s music’; anything too ‘learned’, such as counterpoint, had been purged from it. Rather it emphasized memorable, singable tunes that crowds could easily pick up, often with a degree of quasi-Masonic solemnity.⁹ (Something of the same prescription would be used after 1860 for the Church of England’s Hymns Ancient and Modern with their narrow vocal range and simple Mendelssohnian harmonies.) It might not be too fanciful to see the tune Beethoven used in 1823 to set Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ for the Ninth Symphony as owing something to this French revolutionary music.

General Bernadotte’s appointment was destined to last fewer than three months. In April he was recalled, having gone too far in his revolutionary fervour by flying the French tricolour from his hotel, which incited a stone-throwing mob of patriotic Viennese to attack the building. This in turn led to Bernadotte making bombastic flourishes with his sword and noisily vowing to slay ‘members of the rabble’ (formerly ‘citizens’). He had to be saved by a detachment of the emperor’s cavalry as the crowd set fire to the French flag.

In November 1799 Napoleon led a coup against the increasingly corrupt and inefficient post-revolutionary Directorate and replaced it with the Consulate, in true Roman style appointing himself First Consul. The Battle of Marengo in 1800 was his decisive victory over the Habsburg empire, driving the Austrians out of Italy and greatly reinforcing his own pre-eminent position. In the Vienna of 1800 it would have been easy for Beethoven, in common with many thoughtful and politically aware people, to foresee that within a very few years the whole of central Europe might well come under French administration, and who knew for how long? Certainly Napoleon seemed militarily unstoppable.

To this uncertain political future could be added Beethoven’s worry at his failure so far to find a secure paid position in Vienna. True, he had acquired a stable of aristocratic patrons who between them were generously supportive, even in the face of his occasional bouts of boorishness: a tribute to their musical discernment. They included Prince Joseph Lobkowitz, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, Prince Karl Lichnowsky and Count Andreas Razumovsky. These gentlemen are posthumously due history’s gratitude in that they were perceptive enough to humour, indulge and support Beethoven financially with commissions despite his contempt for their social position and their city. But like most artists throughout the ages (and everybody else) what Beethoven really wanted was the financial security of a regular income. He already entertained a socialist—or possibly schoolboy—fantasy of the ideal artist’s life, when there would exist a single ministry of art for the entire world. The artist would merely hand in his work in exchange for the money he needed.¹⁰ Such a utopian dream hardly accorded with the system of patronage that still obtained in the city where the immigrant Beethoven earned his living.

In the first two or three years of the new century he began quietly planning a move to Paris. His idea was that not only would the French capital be an improvement on Vienna but to take up residence there might also be a canny career move. Apart from anything else, Beethoven was ambitious to see his compositions published abroad. By now he had acquired a young student and admirer, Ferdinand Ries, who in exchange for lessons acted as an informal agent, one of whose duties was to make contact with foreign publishers. On 6 August 1803 Ries wrote to the publisher Simrock in Bonn, saying Beethoven would be staying in Vienna for only another eighteen months, being determined to move to Paris. Ries was depressed about this plan and admitted he had jokingly dropped broad hints to Beethoven that he hoped he could go with him as the composer’s ‘student and financial manager’. It is safe to assume Beethoven had been mulling over this radical move for some time before telling Ries.