Chapter VI

Incidents and Labors of 1824--Bernard’s Oratorio--Visitors at Baden--New Publishers--A Visitor from London--Beethoven’s Opinion of his Predecessors--The Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127.

At the end of the chapter preceding the last, which recorded the doings of the year 1823, Beethoven was left in his lodgings in the Ungargasse, occupied with work upon the Ninth Symphony, which was approaching completion, oppressed with anxiety concerning his health and worried about his brother’s domestic affairs. As the story of his life is resumed with the year 1824, there has been no serious change in his physical condition, but complaints of ill health are frequent in his communications with his friends. His eyes continue to trouble him till late in March; Schindler cautions him not to rub them, as that might increase the inflammation; Karl suggests buying a shade to protect them from the glare of the light; and when Count Brunswick wants to take him along with him to Hungary, Schindler advises him to take the trip, as it might be beneficial for his eyes.

[Sidenote: KIND INTEREST IN KARL’S MOTHER]

For a moment we have a glimpse at the gentler side of the composer’s nature in a letter which he sends when the year is about a week old to the widow of his brother, the wicked mother of his adopted son, in lieu of the New Year’s call which they had been prevented by work from making. He should have come to wish her happiness for the year, he says, had he been able: “but I know that, nevertheless, you expect nothing but the best of good wishes for your welfare from me as well as Karl.” She had complained of being in need, and he says he would gladly have helped her, but had himself too many expenditures, debts and delayed receipts to prove his willingness at the moment; but he would now give it to her “in writing” that thenceforth she might retain the portion of her pension which had been set apart for her son. If, in the future, he could give her money to better her condition, he would willingly do so; moreover, he had long before assumed the debt of 280 florins and 20 kreutzers which she owed Steiner. Manifestly a truce had been established between the woman and her brother-in-law, and in the absence of any evidence that she was in any way concerned in an escapade of Karl’s later in the year, it would appear that she never violated it; it was not the woman whom Beethoven hated, but the youth whom he loved, who brought grief and an almost broken heart into his last days. Nevertheless, there is more than passive contentment exhibited in this letter; there is also an active magnanimity which finds even warmer expression in a letter which he seems to have written at an earlier date to his friend Bernard. Bernard[116] had been helpful to Beethoven in drawing up the memorial to the court in the matter of the guardianship and was among the friends whom Beethoven consulted about Karl’s education and bringing up. To him Beethoven writes:

I beg of you before the day is over to make inquiries about F. v. B. [Frau van Beethoven] and if it is possible, to have her assured through her physician that from this month on _so long as I shall live_ she shall have the enjoyment of the whole of her pension, and I will see to it that if I die first, Karl shall not need the half of her pension. It was, moreover, always my intention to permit her to keep the whole of her pension so soon as Karl left the Institute, but as her illness and need are so great she must be helped at once. God has never deserted me in this heavy task and I shall continue to trust in Him. If possible I beg of you to send me information yet to-day and I will see to it that my _tenacious brother also makes a contribution_ to her.

The nephew was now attending the philological lectures at the university and living in the winter and spring months with his uncle. He had left Blöchlinger’s Institute in August 1823 and matriculated at the university. He was active in the service of Beethoven, doing work as his amanuensis, carrying messages, making purchases, and so on; in fact, Beethoven seems to have taken up more of his time than was good for his studies. He loved him tenderly and was unceasingly thoughtful of his welfare; but the jealousy of his affection led him to exercise a strictness of discipline over him which could not fail to become irksome to a growing stripling. He left him little liberty, and, yielding to a disposition prone to passion, he not seldom treated him with great severity. The youth appears in the Conversation Books as lively, clever and shrewd, and Beethoven, proud of his natural gifts of mind, was indulgent of his comments on others, permitting him apparently to speak lightly and discourteously of the men upon whose help and counsel he was obliged to depend. The result of Beethoven’s extremes of harsh rebuke and loving admonition, of violent accusation and tender solicitude, was to encourage him in his innate bent for disingenuousness and deception, and he continued the course which he had begun as a boy of repeating words of disparagement touching those against whom his uncle levelled his criticisms, and of reporting, no doubt with embellishments of his own invention, the speeches which told of the popular admiration in which the great composer was held. By this species of flattery he played upon the weakness of his uncle and actually obtained an influence over him in the course of time which he exploited to his own advantage in various directions. He was naturally inclined to indolence and self-indulgence, and it is not strange that Beethoven’s self-sacrifice in his behalf never awakened in him any deep sense of gratitude, while his unreasonable and ill-considered severity aroused a spirit of rebellion in him which grew with his advance towards adolescence. Beethoven never seems to have realized that he had outgrown the period when he could be treated as a child, and it was a child’s submission which he asked of him.

Grillparzer’s opera-book was a frequent subject of conversation between Beethoven and his friends in the early months of 1824, but petitions and advice were alike unfruitful. He did not go to work upon it nor yet upon a composition which presented a more urgent obligation. This was the oratorio which he had agreed to write for the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and on which he had received an advance of money in 1819. Here the fatal procrastination, though it may have been agreeable to Beethoven, was not altogether his fault. Bernard began the book, but seems to have put it aside after a few weeks. In April, 1820, he tells Beethoven in a Conversation Book, “I must finish the oratorio completely this month so that it may be handed to you in Mödling.” In August, possibly, somebody writes: “I have put it seriously to _Sanctus Bernardus_ that it is high time that it be done; that Hauschka was urging a completion. He will finish it this month, _id est_ in 5 days, and see you this evening at Camehl’s.... When I told Bernard that Hauschka had come to you about it he was embarrassed and--it seems to me that he is throwing the blame on you. He does not want to show his poetical impotency.”

[Sidenote: GROWING IMPATIENCE ABOUT AN ORATORIO]

For four years after giving the commission, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde waited before it put any signs of impatience on record. Towards the close of October, 1823, Bernard gave a copy of the text of the oratorio, which was entitled “Der Sieg des Kreutzes” (“The Victory of the Cross”), to Beethoven and also one to Sonnleithner for the society. After waiting nearly three months, the directorate of the society at a meeting held on January 9, 1824, took action, the nature of which was notified to both Beethoven and Bernard. The latter was informed that as the society had left the choice of the text which he was to compose to Beethoven, it could not say whether or not the society would make use of the poem which he had sent until Beethoven had set it to music, and the censor had given it his sanction. He was also asked to coöperate with the society in stimulating Beethoven to finish the work “so long expected by the musical world.” Beethoven was told that the choice of a book for the oratorio which the society had commissioned him to write four years before had been left to him; that it had been informed that Bernard had undertaken to write it; that its inquiries as to when the music would be completed had always been answered by the statement that the poem had not been received. Not presuming to ask a composer of his eminence to outline the plan of a musical composition before he had become familiar with the work as a whole and had satisfied himself touching its plan and execution, the society, therefore, had thitherto always directed its inquiries to Bernard, who had delivere