SESSION EIGHT November 3, 2016 BEETHOVEN THE MAN Last Years Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. So wrote the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in the 20th century’s most famous poem about the end of life. Rage is a word often used to describe Beethoven. Gentle is not a word used to describe him, and he did not go gently. Two weeks ago, in Session 6, we observed the great surge in Beethoven’s popularity in his early and mid-forties: more performances, more publishers vying for his works, and a soaring income from performances, sales, royalties, and annuities. This was soon followed by a major decline in the popularity of his music and in his income. BEETHOVEN IN 1823 This sympathetic but realistic portrait at age 53 suggests that the continuous pain and discomfort Beethoven suffered contributed to his decline in composing, along with worsening health and behavior. WORSENING BEHAVIOR Accompanying these declines was a marked decline in his health and behavior. In grief over the death of his brother Carl, Beethoven turned to anger, and a prolonged, expensive and ultimately futile attempt to gain legal control of his nephew, also named Karl after his Father, from the influence of what he considered an immoral and uncaring Mother. This vendetta against his sister-in-law was only one of many signs of Beethoven’s increasingly erratic behavior. Franz Grillparzer, Beethoven’s long- time friend who would eventually deliver the eulogy at Beethoven’s funeral, remained sympathetic to Beethoven even as he documented his troubling behavior in a series of diary entries such as this: The sad condition of the master during the latter years of his life prevented him from always distinguishing clearly between what had actually happened and what had been merely imagined…And yet for all his odd ways, which often bordered on being offensive, there was something so inexpressibly touching and noble in him that one could not but esteem him, and feel drawn to him.” DECLINING HEALTH The final years of Beethoven’s life were years of great physical pain and suffering. His many illnesses, detailed earlier in Session Two, became more severe. His ability to care for himself declined further, increasing his discomfort and his risk from poor eating, excessive drinking, and prolonged exposure to cold, drafts, and bad weather. In his final year friends who tried to attend to him noted that he ate almost nothing, but drank more and more. He complained of thirst, loss of appetite, and severe swelling throughout his body. Several physicians declined to attend him, fearing they would be blamed for his worsening illness, even for his death. One physician who did attend described him as “bent double with pain in his liver and intestines, with his feet and abdomen terribly swollen.” From these symptoms the medical community has deduced that Beethoven was suffering from edema (“dropsy” in Beethoven’s time), a painful swelling of various parts of the body, which is now considered a major symptom of kidney disease. Other observers say he also had jaundice, the yellowing of flesh and skin often accompanied with high fever, chills and abdominal pain, now considered a symptom of chronic hepatitis. FAMILY CONFICT As was so often the case, Beethoven responded to his misery by becoming obsessive about other mat-ters. As you already know, his long and ultimately futile attempts to rescue his nephew Karl from the clutches of Karl’s presume- ably evil and immoral Mother lasted until almost the end of Beethoven’s life and cost him a small fortune in legal fees and lost work. KARL VAN BEETHOVEN, 1806-1858 Karl himself was deeply troubled by the incessant legal and verbal wrangling between his Mother and his Uncle. Despite Beethoven’s demands that he apply himself to his schooling, he was a poor student. A secret, illegal search of his rooms, arranged by Beethoven, yielded a gun. Karl’s own ambivalence was shown by his frequent running away from his Mother to be with his Uncle, then vice versa, despite each of them demanding that he cut off all contact with the other. Seeking a way out of this emotional tangle, Karl joined the Prussian army, but even this did not end the family warfare. Desperate to avoid further con-flict, Karl attempted suicide in 1826, the year before Beethoven died. After his recovery, he reconciled with his Uncle and came to appreciate him, even spending several weeks at his bedside during Beethoven’s final illness in the spring of 1827. DECLINING POPULARITY By age 52 the popularity of his compositions had greatly declined, as we see from a diary entry recounting a conversation he had with the editor of a visitor from Leipzig: You will hear nothing of me here. What should you hear? Fidelio? They cannot give it, nor do they want to listen to it. The sym- phonies? They have no time for them. My concertos? Everyone grinds out only the stuff he himself has made. The solo pieces? They went out of style long ago, and here fashion is everything. At most Schuppanzigh occasionally digs up a string quartet. Even if we disregard the familiar self-pitying quality of these remarks, the facts were largely true. In his early fifties Beethoven was largely unappreciated, half- forgotten, and all for the most familiar reason: his music was out of fashion, out of the mainstream of the new, more romantic world of the 1820s. Although he was universally acclaimed as the great-est living composer, this did not lessen his increase-ing isolation, both as a man and as a composer. FINANCIAL TROUBLES As Beethoven’s output as a composer diminished after age 50, so did his income: there were fewer concerts, fewer new pieces to be published, and fewer opportunities to be paid for dedicating his works to wealthy or powerful benefactors. Due to his near total deafness he had long since stopped conducting and performing in public. His only remaining sources of income were his annuity and interest income from his bank notes. These were not sufficient to cover his expenses, which remained high. He continued to employ at least two servants at all times. He insisted on eating fine foods, well prepared, and on drinking a great deal of fine wine. His financial support of Karl was expensive, as he insisted that the boy should attend an expensive private school for which Beethoven paid the tuition. And his legal fees for the many legal attempts to wrestle legal control of Karl from his Mother were never ending. The result was that Beethoven went rather deeply into debt, borrowing thousands of florins from friends and publishers, in return for future compo- sitions that were never finished, or even begun. In all these financial ups and downs, he continued to be supported by his small circle of aristocratic patrons, many of them aging themselves. Even after the bankruptcy of Archduke Rudolph that support continued, to the very end of Beethoven’s life. THE ROMANTIC GENERATION It was not only the Viennese craving for the latest fashion that led them to neglect Beethoven. The new generation of composers, born around 1810 and already prolific composers in their teenage years, had different interests and a different world view. These young masters, including Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin and Robert Schumann, admired Beethoven as insightful teenagers often admire their grand-fathers – an admirable old man but not relevant in their young lives. They did not wish to emulate his approach or the kind of music he wrote. The very things that inspired Beethoven – the noble aspira- tions of the Enlightenment, the revolutionary ideals of Napoleon, the vast political and social upheavals caused by wars and empires, were only history to them. They were Romantics through and through. They had a new focus, a new artistic obsession, which was to express the secret, unpredictable, often chaotic emotions of our inner world, as they parade unpredictably through our minds and psyches. Their literary inspiration was two generations of romantic poets: in the English language Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and above all Robert Burns, all well-known throughout Germany in translation; and in the German language, Goethe and Eichendorff. The generation of 1810 did not rebel against their musical Grandfather Beethoven; it simply turned in a different direction, cultivating new forms and a more lyric, less dramatic style that suited their own romantic purposes. They focused on short pieces, such as songs and character pieces for piano, that capture the essence of an emotional moment or a fleeting mood. Their major musical influences were not Beethoven but the 1790 generation, primarily Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber. True enough, the shadow of Beethoven still cast a long shadow on Schumann and Mendelssohn both German-born (but not on Chopin, born in far-away Poland) – who wrote a few symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas in the old genres that Beethoven had brought to such a high level of intensity. But with few exceptions, their greatest works were not in these genres. As Robert Schumann put it so well: On the whole, it looks as if the sonata has run its course. This is as it should be, for we cannot repeat the same forms for centuries. “FASHION IS EVERYTHING” So if, as Beethoven said, “fashion is everything,” it had passed him by before his creative life came to an end. Throughout his life Beethoven continued to up-hold the ideals of the Enlightenment, of classicism, and of aristocratic excellence.