The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (83 page)

Mozart’s estrangement from the archbishop of Salzburg left him living on the income from his performances or sale of his music. This was risky, and no major composer since Handel had ventured it. Now he wrote
memorable concertos (most of those from K. 413 to K. 595) for his own performances in Vienna. At long last, and after a strenuous pursuit, in 1787 Emperor Joseph II engaged Mozart as chamber composer. But while his predecessor Gluck had received twelve hundred gulden annually, Mozart received only eight hundred. In these last years, being otherwise occupied, Mozart composed few symphonies, but the three he produced in the summer of 1788—the symphonies in E Flat (K. 543), G Minor (K. 550) and C (the “Jupiter,” K. 551)—were unexcelled in symphonic brilliance and in new uses of the orchestra.

In Vienna finally, from age thirty to thirty-six, Mozart produced some of his most durable music on the flightiest themes and showed his ability to respond to passing tastes.
Le Nozze di Figaro
(1786),
Don Giovanni
(1787), and
Così fan tutte
(1790) were based on comic librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838), a man of many talents. Da Ponte had taken the name of the bishop who converted him from Judaism to Catholicism. He was said to have consulted Casanova himself for an authentic Don Giovanni. He eventually came to America, became professor of Italian in Columbia College in New York City, and the leading exponent of Dante and Italian opera here. In 1791 Mozart adopted a plot supplied by an old Salzburg acquaintance for
Die Zauberflöte
.

In July 1791 a stranger came to Mozart and commissioned a requiem. The fee was large, and the only condition was that the transaction never be revealed. The ailing and hypochondriac Mozart wondered whether this request was an omen of his own funeral. The requiem remained unfinished at Mozart’s death on December 5, 1791. Constanze gave the manuscript to be completed by Mozart’s friend Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who delivered it to the stranger as a finished work by Mozart. The stranger, the perverse Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach, then had it performed as a work of his own, which made it a “double forgery.” Eventually Constanze allowed it to be published under Mozart’s name. And the ghostwritten
Requiem
was performed at the memorial service for Beethoven on April 3, 1827, a week after his death.

Mozart had for some time had the notion that he was being poisoned by his relentless rival Antonio Salieri. But this proved quite groundless, and Salieri himself took the trouble on his deathbed to make an official denial. Mozart seems to have died of several recurring ailments, aggravated by overwork and malnutrition. “I have finished before I could enjoy my talent,” Mozart declared at thirty-six. According to Viennese custom, he was buried unceremoniously in a mass grave in a churchyard outside the city.

T
ESTED
and demonstrated in obscure Mannheim, the music of instruments would be re-created by Beethoven. When it became more than an ambient art, background for festivities and ceremonies of church and court, it was the focused delight of music-loving audiences who paid to listen. Haydn and Mozart had shaped a classical style for the orchestra to be heard by a specialized concert audience, attuned to a newly developing art and its new instruments. Beethoven (1770–1827) would discover a new range and create his own world of the orchestra and its symphonies. And, incidentally, with his own proper instrument, the piano, he created a new sonata world. As the art of music became something for itself, it became more professional, more complex, and less accessible to the public. But Beethoven, who inherited the forms of classical music from Haydn and Mozart, elaborated them in his own way for wider audiences.

More than an elaborator of musical forms, Beethoven opened the gates. Nothing could have been more ironic than Beethoven’s role as prophet and exemplar of a new European community of music, for there had never been a composer more isolated from his audience—by the deafness that prevented his hearing (except in his mind’s ear) what the audience would hear and by an irascible temperament that aroused enemies and tested friends.

Yet there never was a time when a translingual art was more needed in Europe, for the languages of the marketplace had marked the boundaries of the nations that emerged from the parts of the Roman Empire. In the long run, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe would be messengers of the human comedy and create a legacy of Western literature. But in their time they were eloquent of national personalities, of the differences among peoples. The classical age of Western music—the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—was a time of spreading literacy. No longer confined to church and monastery, to noble courts or universities or prosperous merchant households, readers were beginning to be everywhere, even among women and the laboring classes.
In the next decades the widely read books of Balzac and Dickens would remind Frenchmen and Englishmen of their special virtues and vices, and national literatures would create needs for the translingual arts.

The lifetime of Beethoven, the era of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, saw the rise of popular government. As literature became public, as authorship became a paying profession, as poets, novelists, historians, biographers, essayists, and artists reminded Europeans of their peculiar hopes and idiosyncrasies, people were alerted to their right to govern themselves. Another art was needed to affirm their community. Haydn and Mozart opened a European concert world where language was no barrier—Haydn in his London triumph, Mozart with his international travels as a prodigy. But the grand gesture of public music, which transcended the community of music lovers, was to be the work of Beethoven.

Beethoven’s conspicuous and enduring triumphs were with the orchestra and the symphony, in the new world of instruments. Yet, as Wagner observed, Beethoven would embody the singing voice in the myriad-instrument orchestra. His homophonic instrumental style offered an unmistakable dominant melody accompanied and reinforced by subsidiary voices, a top melody with chords beneath. Beethoven used the entire orchestra of strings and woodwinds to state his theme. This style already appeared in his First Symphony (1800), and was demonstrated in the familiar opening theme of the Fifth Symphony (1807) and the adagio movement of the Ninth Symphony (1823). The unforgettable simple element in each of these complex structures reached all who were puzzled by the contrapuntal elegancies of other master composers.

He reached beyond the concert hall, too, when he wrote music on themes outside the world of music. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the music of instruments, in contrast to the music of words, did not aim to depict nonmusical subjects. Since the music of instruments was a merely ambient art, providing atmosphere for ritual or ceremony, it lacked the dignity of a fine art that produced a work beautiful in itself. “Program,” or “illustrative,” music developed in Europe about 1700, when instrumental music, borrowing the techniques of vocal music, was becoming a distinct respectable art. “Program” music could dignify the music of instruments. A program would guide the unprofessional audience, reassuring the listener that what he heard was not “mere” music but something significant in experience. The orchestra had powers—beyond words or even visual images—to express, to depict, and to narrate. So program music became vehicle and messenger to the whole community, not just to lovers of sonatas and concertos, not just to concertgoers, but to all who enjoyed nature, who loved, who felt joy or sorrow, lamented defeat, or rejoiced in victory. Program music was newly public.

In this, too, Beethoven was a prophet and pioneer. Not until 1881 did the
expression “program music” enter our English language for “music intended to convey the impression of a definite series of objects, scenes, or events; descriptive music.” At the same time a “program” came to mean a printed list describing the music in a concert. Then “absolute music” came into use for the opposite of program music and meant “self-dependent instrumental music without literary or other extraneous suggestions.” And some avant-garde music lovers (such as G. B. Shaw, who called it “abstract” music) gave this name to the oldest form of instrumental music. Beethoven would be pathmarker of the program music that dominated the West in the nineteenth century, the era of Romantic music. In place of
Musiker
(musician) Beethoven preferred to be known as
Tondichter
(tone poet). He sometimes protested against reading events into his symphonies, but he was not unwilling to help the public “understand” his music.

The prototype of program music was Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, in F Major (the “Pastoral,” published in 1809 as
Sinfonie pastorale
). He described it in the advertisement for its first concert (December 22, 1808) as “A recollection of Country Life.” For each of the five movements he provided an explanatory inscription:

(1) Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country

(2) Scene by the Brook

(3) Merrymaking of the Country Folk

(4) Storm

(5) Song of the Shepherds, Joy and Gratitude after the Storm

This “program” came verbatim from a work by a little-known German writer entitled
Musical Portrait of Nature
. Beethoven’s familiar characterization of a violin part used in the first performance revealed his intention that his music should refer to something other than itself—“More expression of feeling than painting” (
Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei
). In this symphony his contemporaries heard a plain expression of Beethoven’s own feelings for nature, which seem to have been accentuated by his increasing deafness. In summer it was said that he stripped down to his underpants for long morning and evening walks in the woods. “Nature was like food to him,” the British pianist Charles Neate noted, “he seemed really to live in it.”

In the music of his oratorio
Israel in Egypt
(1739), Handel had depicted the plagues, and the works of others had imitated birdsong, waterfalls, and battle sounds. Beethoven unified the stages of feeling into a coherent music drama. And program music would flourish with the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century, in the works of Weber (1786–1826), Berlioz (1803–1869), and Liszt (1811–1886). Later the music of Richard Strauss (1864–1949), in which the program threatened to drown out the music, helped account for the disrepute of “descriptive” music, and the turn to new forms of
absolute “anti-Romantic” music. Later still, totalitarian governments made program music a way of enslaving artists to politics.

Beethoven was the first of the great musicians to be a public man, an advocate through his music on the issues of his time. Bonn, where he was born and raised, was a center of sympathy for the French Revolution. As Napoleonic armies surged across Europe and twice occupied the Austrian capital of Vienna, Beethoven found it difficult to avoid public commitment. Unlike Haydn or Mozart, he was not satisfied to be a mere ornament for church or court. There was no precedent for the public role of his “Eroica,” his Third Symphony. In 1804, he had originally entitled the work “Bonaparte” in honor of the Napoleon (then first consul) who still seemed the “liberator” of Europe. But when Beethoven heard that Napoleon had made himself emperor, he was enraged, and in a scene witnessed by his friend Ferdinand Ries exclaimed, “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he too will trample on all the rights of man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” Beethoven tore off the title page, threw it on the floor, and rewrote it with the title “Eroica.” When the work was published it bore the subtitle “To celebrate the memory of a great man.” But Beethoven’s political judgments oscillated with his personal fortunes and opportunities. Lionized by Talleyrand and Metternich, by the reigning czar, by kings and queens—the cementers of the old order at the Congress of Vienna in 1814—he composed especially for them, embracing the role of their prized entertainer.

Beethoven’s background hardly suggests the revolutionary role he would play in Western music. Born in Bonn in northwestern Germany to a family of musicians, Beethoven was well set for a conventional career. His grandfather was musical director for the archbishop-elector of Cologne. His alcoholic father, noting young Beethoven’s precocious talent at the piano, tried to make him into a Mozart-style prodigy. Returning drunk from the taverns late at night, he would rouse the sleeping Ludwig for lessons. He failed in these efforts, for Beethoven would be a slow developer.

Still, at twelve he was named a court organist and at thirteen continuo player to the Bonn opera. Through his mentor, the composer Christian Gottlob Neefe, he was introduced to Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
, and in 1783 had his first composition published at Mannheim. Some would later describe Beethoven as “the last flower on the Mannheim tree.” He began the habit he never lost of reading widely in the classics, including Shakespeare. At fifteen, he was sent to Vienna to study with Mozart, who is supposed to have said that this young man would “make a great name for himself.” After only two months his mother’s death brought him back to Bonn, where he began to make his way, helped by influential aristocratic
friends. Frau von Bruening, widow of the chancellor, engaged him as music teacher for her children. When Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, a Viennese patron of music, visited Bonn in 1788 he was impressed by young Beethoven and commissioned him to write a piece for ballet. Waldstein offered this over his own name, and then secured a number of other commissions for Beethoven. In July 1792, when Haydn passed through Bonn on his way back from London, he admired a cantata score of Beethoven’s composition, and invited the young man to be his pupil in Vienna. The timing was providential. Waldstein and Beethoven’s teacher persuaded the elector of Bonn to support Beethoven’s study in Vienna. And in November, Beethoven left Bonn, never to return. The forces of Napoleon were approaching the city. All his life Beethoven would be caught in the maelstrom of revolution and counterrevolution, in the age of Robespierre and Metternich.