4

PROMETHEUS

In Greek mythology Prometheus was a divine helper of mankind, albeit an ambivalent one. Having stolen fire from Zeus, the supreme deity, he gave it to the human race. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (as Virgil wisely warned), for fire was to prove a mixed blessing. In obvious respects it was a boon, providing light and heat; but in time it would lead to destructive technologies that would enslave mankind. Zeus, furious at the theft, exacted a twofold punishment. He created Pandora, the first woman, to spread misfortune among the human race, a task she ably achieved with her allegorical box (actually a jar) of assorted evils. He then had Prometheus bound to a stake on Mount Kaukasos where an eagle regularly flew in to snack on his liver, which regenerated itself between the bird’s agonizing visits.

It is not hard to see why this myth might have had powerful private significance for Beethoven. From at least 1800 he had been forced to confront his increasing deafness as a permanent condition that would now never be reversed. He had done his best to maintain a brave optimism that this or that doctor prescribing this or that treatment might miraculously effect a cure. But in his heart he must have known it was of no avail and that he must resign himself to a future in which he could no longer earn his living as a lionized performer and instead subsist only on what he could earn from his compositions. Like Prometheus’s liver, his deafness seemed self-perpetuating and destined to cause him constant anguish.

When asked in 1800 to write the orchestral music for a ballet called The Creatures of Prometheus he presumably welcomed it as just another paid commission, albeit an important one, since it was for Vienna’s Burgtheater and was to be designed by the famous ballet-master Salvatore Viganò. But as he worked on the lengthy score (a good hour’s worth of music) the Promethean myth of the eternally suffering hero must have suggested striking parallels with his own predicament and even with his idealized but inconsistent identification with Napoleon Bonaparte. Was Napoleon not a bringer of freedom’s fire, a great uplifted torch, as a gift to mankind? And was this freedom not being stolen from the formerly godlike figures of Europe’s reigning monarchs and popes? True, he would doubtless pay for it later: in Greek mythology hubris was always punished. But the gift had been given. The secret of mankind’s freedom was out and surely could never now be recaptured.

And then—a step further—why might Beethoven not view himself as a spiritual henchman of Bonaparte, his music bringing fire and light and showing that the brotherhood of man would prevail? Chained to the rock of his private fate he might be constantly tormented, but like Prometheus himself he had unconquerable will. That at least endured: Beethoven never lost his belief in the ultimate triumph of his music and its message to all humanity.

It inevitably sounds fanciful and novelistic to ascribe such detailed intentions to anyone, let alone to a genius working in an abstract art at a time of great political unrest well over two centuries ago. And yet the evidence is strong that Beethoven’s muse, at least, perceived such parallels. It is unfortunate that the original choreography for Viganò’s Prometheus ballet has not survived, so the exact onstage context of each of the sixteen numbers remains guesswork. What is not guesswork is the significance of the ballet score to the ‘Eroica’ Symphony that was beginning to occupy another part of Beethoven’s brain. There are significant parallels between the works. The adventurous sonorities and effects of the fullest orchestra he had so far used became those of the ‘Eroica’: the ballet’s use of three horns, for example, which were to reappear so memorably in the trio of the symphony’s Scherzo; the use of syncopation; the influence of his French contemporaries in the martial passages with their drums and trumpets.

However, despite—or maybe because of—Beethoven’s large and complex score, the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus was not a great success. A certain J. C. Rosenbaum went to a rehearsal and later wrote, ‘The ballet was not at all well received, the music little better.… At the end the ballet was more hissed down than applauded.’¹ By then Haydn was back from his second visit to England. Since the huge success of his 1798 oratorio The Creation (Die Schöpfung) the celebrated composer was at the height of his fame, often referred to affectionately as ‘Papa’ Haydn. He went along to a performance of the ballet, probably curious to see what his brilliant but difficult pupil had been doing while he had been away. The next day Beethoven ran into his former teacher in the street. According to Robbins Landon, Haydn stopped him and said:

“‘Now, yesterday I heard your ballet and it pleased me very much.’ Beethoven thereupon answered, ‘Oh, my dear Papa, you are very kind, but it is very far from being a “Creation.”’ Haydn, surprised and almost offended by this answer, said after a short silence, ‘That is true, it is not yet a “Creation” and I very much doubt whether it will ever succeed in being one.’ Whereupon each of them, somewhat dumbfounded, took leave of the other. The play on words, ‘Geschöpfe’ and ‘Schöpfung’, which Beethoven used to taunt his former teacher, does not come off in English; but even without it the insult must have appalled the courteous Haydn. Relations between the two men were now deteriorating to the point of no return, and from the documentary evidence at our disposal it is clearly Beethoven who wished to disassociate himself from Haydn, not vice versa.”²

From Landon’s account it is difficult to see what was offensive in what Beethoven said. The great Haydn scholar’s gloss notwithstanding, it must be remembered that Beethoven had a lifelong habit of crude and ill-judged puns. By a long way this was neither the first nor last occasion that his hit-or-miss wordplay gave unintended offence to someone. Yet no matter what jealousy he might still have nurtured for his laurelled ex-teacher’s international success, it seems most unlikely that Beethoven’s clumsy attempt at wit was a deliberate ‘taunt’ and, given that Haydn was well aware of the ‘Grand Mogul’s’ social awkwardness, it seems equally improbable that he would have taken offence.

It is a great pity that although the ballet’s overture is quite often played, the rest of the music remains little known to the majority of concertgoers even though they would instantly recognize the last tune in the finale. Beethoven reused the one he had just written for the seventh of a set of twelve little contre-dances (WoO14), which in turn might have had its roots in his early Bonn piano quartets.^* The first violins have the tune: