Читать книгу Ludwig van Beethoven (Biography in 3 Volumes) - Alexander Wheelock Thayer - Страница 14

Beethoven as Neefe’s Assistant

To return to the young organist, who, since the publication of Wegeler’s “Notizen,” has always been supposed to have been placed at that instrument by the Elector Max Franz in the year 1785, as a method of giving him pecuniary aid without touching his feelings of pride and independence. The place of assistant to Neefe was no sinecure; although not involving much labor, it brought with it much confinement. The old organ had been destroyed by the fire of 1777, and a small chamber instrument still supplied its place. It was the constantly recurring necessity of being present at the religious services which made the position onerous.

On all Sundays and regular festivals (says the Court Calendar) high mass at 11 a.m. and vespers at 3 (sometimes 4) p.m. The vespers will be sung throughout in Capellis solemnibus by the musicians of the electoral court, the middle vespers will be sung by the court clergy and musicians chorally as far as the Magnificat, which will be performed musically. On all Wednesdays in Lent the Miserere will be sung by the chapel at 5 p.m. and on all Fridays the Stabat mater. Every Saturday at 3 p.m. the Litanies at the altar of Our Lady of Loretto. Every day throughout the year two masses will be read, the one at 9, the other at 11—on Sundays the latter at 10.

Such a programme gave the organist something at least to do, and when Neefe left Bonn for Münster, June 20, 1782, he left his pupil no easy task. Before the close of the theatrical season of the next winter (1782-’83) the master was obliged to call upon the boy for still farther assistance. “In the winter of 1784,” writes the widow Neefe, “my husband of blessed memory was temporarily entrusted with the direction of the church music as well as other music at court while the Electoral Chapelmaster L. was absent on a journey of several months.” The date is wrong, for Lucchesi’s petition for leave of absence was granted April 26, 1783. Thus overwhelmed with business, Neefe could no longer conduct at the pianoforte the rehearsals for the stage, and Ludwig van Beethoven, now 12 years old, became also “cembalist in the orchestra.” In those days every orchestra was provided with a harpsichord or pianoforte, seated at which the director guided the performance, playing from the score. Here, then, was in part the origin of that marvellous power, with which in later years Beethoven astonished his contemporaries, of reading and playing the most difficult and involved scores at first sight. The position of cembalist was one of equal honor and responsibility. Handel and Matthison’s duel grew out of the fact that the former would not leave the harpsichord on a certain occasion before the close of the performance. Gassmann placed the young Salieri at the harpsichord of the Imperial Opera House as the best possible means of training him to become the great conductor that he was. This was the high place of honor given to Haydn when in London. In Ludwig van Beethoven’s case it was the place in which he, as Mosel says of Salieri, “could make practical use of what he learned from books and scores at home.” Moreover, it was a place in which he could, even in boyhood, hear to satiety the popular Italian, French and German operas of the day and learn to feel that something higher and nobler was necessary to touch the deeper feelings of the heart; a place which, had the Elector lived ten years longer, might have given the world another not merely great but prolific, nay inexhaustible, operatic composer. The cembalist’s duties doubtless came to an end with the departure of the Elector for Münster in May or June, and he then had time for other pursuits, of which composition was one. A song, “Schilderung eines Mädchens,” by him was printed this year in Bossler’s “Blumenlese für Liebhaber,” and a Rondo in C for pianoforte, anonymous, which immediately follows, was also of his composition. A more important work, which before the close of the year was published by Bossler with a magniloquent dedication to Max Friedrich, was the three sonatas for pianoforte, according to the title, if true, “composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 11 years.”[25] The reader can judge whether or not the 11 should be 12.

To turn for a moment to the Beethoven family matters. This summer (1783) had brought them some sorrow again. The child Franz Georg, now just two and a half years old, died August 16th. This was another stroke of bad fortune which not only wounded the heart but added to the pecuniary difficulties of the father, who was now losing his voice and whose character is described in an official report made the next summer by the words “of tolerable conduct.” If the duties of Neefe during the last season had been laborious, in the coming one, 1783-’84, they were still more arduous. It was the first under the new contract by which the Elector assumed all the costs of the theatre, and a woman, Mme. Grossmann, had the direction. It was all-important to singers, actors and whoever was concerned that the result of the experiment should be satisfactory to their employer; and as the opera was more to his taste than the spoken drama, so much the more difficult was Neefe’s task. Besides his acting as chapelmaster in the place of Lucchesi, still absent, there was “every forenoon rehearsal of opera,” as Mme. Grossmann wrote to Councillor T., at which, of course, Neefe had to be present. There was ever new music to be examined, arranged, copied, composed—what not?—all which he must attend to; in short, he had everything to do which could be imposed upon a theatrical music director with a salary of 1,000 florins. It therefore became a busy time for his young assistant, who still had no recognition as member of the court chapel, not even as “accessist”—the last “accessist” organist was Meuris (1778)—and consequently no salary from the court. But he had now more than completed the usual year of probation to which candidates were subjected, and his talents and skill were well enough known to warrant his petition for an appointment. The petition has not been discovered; but the report made upon it to the privy council has been preserved, together with the following endorsement: “High Lord Steward Count von Salm, referring to the petition of Ludwig van Beethoven for the position of Assistant Court Organist, is of the humble opinion that the grace ought to be bestowed upon him, together with a small compensation.” This endorsement is dated “Bonn, February 29, 1784.” The report upon the petition is as follows:

Appointed Assistant Court Organist

Most Reverend Archbishop and Elector, Most Gracious Lord, Lord.

Your Electoral Grace has graciously been pleased to demand a dutiful report from me on the petition of Ludwig van Beethoven to Your Grace under date the 15th inst.

Obediently and without delay (I report) that suppliant’s father was for 29 years, his grandfather for 46, in the service of Your Most Reverend Electoral Grace and Your Electoral Grace’s predecessors; that the suppliant has been amply proved and found capable to play the court organ as he has done in the absence of Organist Neefe, also at rehearsals of the plays and elsewhere and will continue to do so in the future; that Your Grace has graciously provided for his care and subsistence (his father no longer being able to do so). It is therefore my humble judgment that for these reasons the suppliant well deserves to have graciously bestowed upon him the position of assistant at the court organ and an increase of remuneration. Commending myself to the good will of Your Most Reverend Electoral Grace I am Your Most Reverend Grace’s

most humble and obedient servant

Sigismund Altergraff zu

Salm und Reifferscheid.

Bonn, February 23, 1784.

The action taken is thus indicated:

Ad Sup.

Ludwig van Beethoven.

On the obedient report the suppliant’s submissive prayer, granted. (Beruhet.)

Bonn, February 29, 1784.

Again, on the cover:

Ad sup.

Lud. van Beethoven,

Granted. (Beruhet.)

Sig. Bonn, February 29, 1784.

The necessity of the case, the warm recommendation of Salm-Reifferscheid, very probably, too, the Elector’s own knowledge of the fitness of the candidate, and perhaps the flattery in the dedication of the sonatas—for these were the days when dedications but half disguised petitions for favor—were sufficient inducements to His Transparency at length to confirm the young organist in the position which Neefe’s kindness had now for nearly two years given him. Opinions differ as to the precise meaning of the word Beruhet (translated “granted” in the above transcripts); but this much is certain: Beethoven was not appointed assistant organist in 1785 by Max Franz at the instance of Count Waldstein, but at the age of 13 in the spring of 1784 by Max Friedrich, and upon his own petition supported by the influence of Neefe and of Salm-Reifferscheid.

The appointment was made, but the salary had not been determined on when an event occurred which wrought an entire change in the position of theatrical affairs at Bonn:—the Elector died on April 15, and the theatrical company was dismissed with four weeks’ wages. There was no longer a necessity for a second organist; and fortunate it was for the assistant that his name came before Max Friedrich’s successor (in the reports soon to be copied) as being a regular member of the court chapel, although “without salary.” Lucchesi returned to Bonn; Neefe had nothing to do but play his organ, cultivate his garden outside the town and give music lessons. It was long before such a conjunction of circumstances occurred as would have led the economical Max Franz to appoint an organist adjunct. Happy was it, therefore, that one of the deceased Elector’s last acts secured young Beethoven the place.

Early Efforts at Composition

The excellent Frau Karth, born in 1780, could not recall to memory any period of her childhood down to the death of Johann van Beethoven, when he and his family did not live in the lodging above that of her parents. This fact, together with the circumstance that no mention is made of the Beethovens in the account of the great inundation of the Rhine in February, 1782, when all the families dwelling in the Fischer house of the Rheingasse were rescued in boats from the windows of the first story, added to the strong probability that Beethoven’s position was but the first formal step of the regular process of confirming an appointment already determined upon;—these points strongly suggest the idea that to Ludwig’s advancement his father owed the ability to dwell once more in a better part of the town, i.e., in the pleasant house No. 462 Wenzelgasse. The house is very near the Minorite church, which contained a good organ, concerning the pedal measurements of which, as we have seen, Beethoven made a memorandum in a note-book which he carried with him to Vienna.[26] In the “Neuen Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber” of this year, Part I, pp. 18 and 19, appeared a Rondo for Pianoforte, in A major, “dal Sig^re van Beethoven”[27]; and Part II, p. 44, the Arioso “An einen Säugling, von Hrn. Beethoven.”[28] “Un Concert pour le Clavecin ou Fortepiano composé par Louis van Beethoven âgé de douze ans,” 32 pp. manuscript written in a boy’s hand, may also belong to this year[29]; and, judging by the handwriting, to the period may also be assigned a movement in three parts of four pages, formerly in the Artaria collection, without title, date or remark of any kind.[30]

The widow Karth perfectly remembered Johann van Beethoven as a tall, handsome man with powdered head. Ries and Simrock described Ludwig to Dr. Müller “as a boy powerfully, almost clumsily built.”[31] How easily fancy pictures them—the tall man walking to chapel or rehearsal with the little boy trotting by his side, through the streets of Bonn, and the gratified expression of the father as the child takes the place and performs the duties of a man!