Читать книгу Ludwig van Beethoven (Biography in 3 Volumes) - Alexander Wheelock Thayer - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Maria Theresia—Appearance and Character of Elector Max Franz—Musical Culture in the Austrian Imperial Family—A Royal Violinist—His Admiration for Mozart—His Court Music.

Maria Theresia was a tender mother, much concerned to see all her children well provided for in her lifetime and as independent as possible of her eldest son, the heir to the throne. This wish had already been fulfilled in the case of several of them. … The youngest son, Maximilian (born in Vienna, December 8, 1756), was already chosen coadjutor to his paternal uncle, Duke Karl of Lorraine, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. But to provide a more bountiful and significant support, Prince Kaunitz formulated a plan which pleased the maternal heart of the monarch, and whose execution was calculated to extend the influence of the Court of Vienna in the German Empire. It was to bestow more ecclesiastical principalities upon the Archduke Maximilian. His eyes fell first upon the Archbishopric and Electorate of Cologne and the Archbishopric and Principality of Münster. These two countries had one and the same Regent, Maximilian Friedrich, descended from the Suabian family of Königseck-Rothenfels, Counts of the Empire. In view of the advanced age of this ruler his death did not seem far distant; but it was thought best not to wait for that contingency, but to secure the right of succession at once by having the Archduke elected Coadjutor in Cologne and Münster. Their possession was looked upon as a provision worthy of the son of an Empress-Queen. As Elector and Lord of the Rhenish shore, simultaneously co-director of the Westphalian Circuit (a dignity associated with the archbishopric of Münster), he could be useful to his house, and oppose the Prussian influence in the very part of Germany where it was largest.

Thus Dohm begins the seventh chapter of his “Denkwürdigkeiten” where, in a calm and passionless style, he relates the history of the intrigues and negotiations which ended in the election of Maria Theresia’s youngest son on August 7, 1780, as coadjutor to the Elector of Cologne and, on the 16th of the same month, to that of Münster, and secured him the peaceful and immediate succession when Max Friedrich’s functions should cease. The news of the election at Cologne reached Bonn on the same day about 1 o’clock p. m. The Elector proceeded at once to the Church of the Franciscans (used as the chapel since the conflagration of 1777), where a “musical ‘Te Deum’ ” was sung, while all the city bells were ringing. Von Kleist’s regiment fired a triple salvo, which the cannon on the city walls answered. At noon a public dinner was spread in the palace, one table setting 54, another 24 covers. In the evening at 8½ o’clock, followed the finest illumination ever seen in Bonn, which the Elector enjoyed riding about in his carriage. After this came a grand supper of 82 covers, then a masked ball “to which every decently clad subject as well as any stranger was admitted, and which did not come to an end till nearly 7 o’clock.”

Max Franz, the New Elector

Max Franz was in his twenty-eighth year when he came to Bonn. He was of middle stature, strongly built and already inclining to that corpulence which in his last years made him a prodigy of obesity. If all the absurdities of his eulogists be taken for truth, the last Elector of Cologne was endowed with every grace of mind and character that ever adorned human nature. In fact, however, he was a good-looking, kindly, indolent, somewhat choleric man; fond of a joke; affable; a hater of stiff ceremony; easy of access; an honest, amiable, conscientious ruler, who had the wisdom and will to supply his own deficiencies with enlightened and skilful ministers, and the good sense to rule, through their political foresight and sagacity, with an eye as much to the interests of his subjects as his own.

In his boyhood he was rather stupid. Swinburne dismisses him in two lines: “Maximilian is a good-natured, neither here-nor-there kind of youth.” The brilliant, witty, shrewdly observant Mozart wrote to his father (Nov. 17, 1781): “To whom God gives an office he also gives an understanding. This is really the case with the Archduke. Before he became a priest he was much wittier and more intellectual and talked less, but more sensibly. You ought to see him now! Stupidity looks out of his eyes; he talks eternally, always in falsetto; he has a swollen neck—in a word, the man is completely transformed.” His mother had supplied him with the best instructors that Vienna afforded, and had sent him travelling pretty extensively for an archduke in those days. One of his journeys was to visit his sister Marie Antoinette in Paris, where his awkwardness and breaches of etiquette caused as much amusement to the anti-Austrian party as they did annoyance to the Queen, and afterwards to his brother Joseph, when they came to his ears.

In 1778 he was with Joseph in the campaign in Bavaria. An injury to his knee, caused by a fall of his horse, is the reason alleged for his abandonment of a military career; upon which he was prevailed upon, so the “Historisches Taschenbuch” (II, Vienna, 1806) expresses it, to become a candidate for the Coadjutorship of Cologne. If he had to be “prevailed upon” to enter the church, the more to his credit was the course he pursued when once his calling and election were sure.

The rigid economy which he introduced at court immediately after his accession in 1784 gave rise to the impression that he was penurious. It may be said in his defence that the condition of the finances required retrenchment and reform; that he was simple in his tastes and cared nothing for show and magnificence, except upon occasions when, in his opinion, the electoral dignity required them. Then, like his predecessors, he was lavish. His personal expenses were not great, and he waited until his revenues justified it before he indulged to any great extent his passion for the theatre, music and dancing (stout as he was, he was a passionate dancer), and his table. He was, through the nature of his physical constitution, an enormous eater, though his drink was only water.

The influence of a ruler upon the tone and character of society in a small capital is very great. A change for the better had begun during the time of Max Friedrich, but under his successor a new life entered Bonn. New objects of ambition were offered to the young men. The church and cloister ceased to be all in all. One can well understand how Wegeler in his old age, as he looked back half a century to the years when he was student and professor—and such a half-century, with its revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, its political, religious and social changes!—should write (“Notizen,” p. 59): “In fact, it was a beautiful and in many ways active period in Bonn, so long as the genial Elector, Max Franz, Maria Theresia’s youngest son and favorite, reigned there.” How strongly the improved tone of society impressed itself upon the characters of the young is discernible in the many of them who, in after years, were known as men of large and liberal ideas and became distinguished as jurists, theologians and artists, or in science and letters. These were the years of Beethoven’s youth and early manhood; and though his great mental powers were in the main exercised upon his art, there is still to be observed through all his life a certain breadth and grandeur in his intellectual character, owing in part, no doubt, to the social influences under which it was developed.

It is highly honorable to the young Max Franz that he refused to avail himself of a privilege granted him in a Papal bull obtained for him by his mother—that of deferring the assumption of priestly vows for a period of ten years—but chose rather, as soon as he had leisure for the step, to enter the seminary in Cologne to fit himself for consecration. He entered November 29, rigidly submitted himself to all the discipline of the institution for the period of eight days, when, on December 8, the nuntius, Bellisoni, ordained him sub-deacon; after another eight days, on the 16th, deacon; and on the 21st, priest; thus showing that if there be no royal road to mathematics, there is a railway with express train for royal personages in pursuit of ecclesiastical science. Returning to Bonn, he read his first mass on Christmas eve in the Florian Chapel.

The cause of science and education the Elector had really at heart. In 1785 he had established a botanic garden; now he opened a public reading room in the palace library and sent a message to the theological school in Cologne, that if the improved course of instruction adopted in Austria was not introduced, he should found other seminaries. On the 26th of June he was present at the opening of a normal school; and on August 9th came the decree raising the Bonn Hochschule to the rank of a university by authority of an Imperial diploma.

Upon the suppression of the Jesuits in 1774, Max Friedrich devoted their possessions and revenues to the cause of education. New professorships were established in the gymnasium and in 1777 an “Academy” was formed. This was the first step; the second was to found an independent institution called the Lyceum; and at his death an application was before the Emperor for a university charter. Max Franz pushed the matter, obtained the charter from his brother, and Monday, the 20th of November, 1786, was the day appointed for the solemn inauguration of the new institution. The Court Calendar for the next year names six professors of theology, six of jurisprudence, civil and ecclesiastical, four of medicine, and ten of philology and other branches of learning. In later editions new names are added; in that of 1790, Wegeler is professor of midwifery.

Though economical, Max Franz drew many a man of superior abilities—men of letters and artists—to Bonn; and but for the bursting of the storm which was even then gathering over the French border, his little capital might well have had a place in German literary history not inferior to that of Weimar. Nor are instances wanting in which he gave generous aid to young talent struggling with poverty; though that he did so much for Beethoven as is usually thought is, at least, doubtful.

This man, not a genius, not overwhelmingly great mentally, nor, on the other hand, so stupid as the stories told of his boyhood seem to indicate, but honest, well-meaning, ready to adopt and enforce wise measures devised by skilful ministers; easy, jocose and careless of appearances, very fond of music and a patron of letters and science—this man, to whom in that period of vast intellectual fermentation the Index Expurgatorius was a dead letter, gave the tone to Bonn society.

A Gifted Imperial Family

That solid musical education which she had received from her father, Maria Theresia bestowed upon her children, and their attainments in the art seem to have justified the time and labor spent. In 1749, at the age of seven and six, Christina and Maria Elizabeth took part in one of the festive musical pieces; Marie Antoinette was able to appreciate Gluck and lead the party in his favor in later years at Paris. Joseph is as much known in musical as in civil and political history. When Emperor he had his daily hour of music in his private apartments, playing either of several instruments or singing, according to the whim of the moment; and Maximilian, the youngest, acquired a good degree of skill both in singing and in the treatment of his favorite instrument, the viola. Beethoven once told Schindler that the Elector thought very highly of Mattheson. In his reminiscences of a visit to Vienna in 1783, J. F. Reichardt gives high praise to the musical interest, skill and zeal of Emperor Joseph and his brother Archduke Maximilian, and a writer in “Cramer’s Magazine,” probably Neefe, tells of a “remarkable concert” which took place at court in Bonn on April 5, 1786, at which the Elector played the viola, Duke Albrecht the violin, “and the fascinating Countess Belderbusch the clavier most charmingly.”

Maximilian had become personally acquainted with Mozart in Salzburg in 1775, where the young composer had set Metastasio’s “Il Re pastore” to music to be performed in his honor (April 23rd); from which time, to his credit be it said, he ever held the composer and his music in kindest remembrance. When in 1781 Mozart determined to leave his brutal Archbishop of Salzburg and remain in Vienna, the Archduke showed at all events a desire to aid him.

Yesterday (writes the composer November 17, 1781) the Archduke Maximilian summoned me to him at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. When I entered he was standing before a stove in the first room awaiting me. He came towards me and asked if I had anything to do to-day? “Nothing, Your Royal Highness, and if I had it would always be a grace to wait upon Your Royal Highness.” “No; I do not wish to constrain anyone.” Then he said that he was minded to give a concert in the evening for the Court of Wurtemberg. Would I play something and accompany the aria? I was to come to him again at 6 o’clock. So I played there yesterday.

Mozart was everything to him (continues Jahn); he signalized him at every opportunity and said, if he were Elector of Cologne, Mozart would surely be his chapelmaster. He had also suggested to the Princess (of Wurtemberg) that she appoint Mozart her music teacher, but received the reply that if it rested with her she would have chosen him; but the Emperor—“for him there is nobody but Salieri!” cries out Mozart peevishly—had recommended Salieri because of the singing, and she had to take him, for which she was sorry.

Jahn gives no reason why Mozart was not engaged for Bonn. Perhaps he would have been had Lucchesi resigned in consequence of the reduction of his salary; but he kept his office of chapelmaster and could not well be dismissed without cause. Mattioli’s resignation was followed by the call of Joseph Reicha to the place of concertmaster; but for Mozart no vacancy occurred at that time. Maximilian was in Vienna during most of the month of October, 1785, and may have desired to secure Mozart in some way, but just at that time the latter was, as his father wrote, “over head and ears busy with the opera ‘Le Nozze di Figaro.’ ” Old Chapelmaster Bono could not live much longer; which gave him hope, should the opera succeed, of obtaining a permanent appointment in Vienna; and, in short, his prospects seemed just then so good that his determination—if he should really receive an offer from the Elector—to remain in the great capital rather than to take his young wife so far away from home and friends as the Rhine then was, and, in a manner, bury himself in a small town where so few opportunities would probably be given him for the exercise of the vast powers which he was conscious of possessing, need not surprise us.

Was it the good or the ill fortune of the boy Beethoven that Mozart came not to Bonn? His marvellous original talents were thus left to be developed without the fostering care of one of the very greatest of musical geniuses, and one of the profoundest of musical scholars; but on the other hand it was not oppressed, perhaps crushed, by daily intercourse with that genius and scholarship.

Maximilian, immediately after reaching Bonn as Elector, ordered full and minute reports to be made out concerning all branches of the administration, of the public and court service and of the cost of their maintenance. Upon these reports were based his arrangements for the future. Those relating to the court music are too important and interesting to be overlooked, for they give us details which carry us instantly into the circle which young Beethoven has just entered and in which, through his father’s connection with it, he must from earliest childhood have moved. They are three in number, the first being a list of all the individuals constituting the court chapel; the second a detailed description of the singers and players, together with estimates of their capabilities; the third consists of recommendations touching a reduction in salaries. A few paragraphs may be presented here as most intimately connected with significant personages in our history; they are combined and given in abstract from the first two documents. Among the tenors we find

Father and Son in the Court Chapel

J. van Beethoven, age 44, born in Bonn, married; his wife is 32 years old, has three sons living in the electorate, aged 13, 10 and 8 years, who are studying music, has served 28 years, salary 315 fl. “His voice has long been stale, has been long in the service, very poor, of fair deportment and married.”

Among the organists:

Christian Gottlob Neefe, aged 36, born at Chemnitz; married, his wife is 32, has served 3 years, was formerly chapelmaster with Seiler; salary 400 fl. “Christian Neffe, the organist, in my humble opinion might well be dismissed, inasmuch as he is not particularly versed on the organ, moreover is a foreigner, having no Meritten whatever and of the Calvinistic religion.”

Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 13, born at Bonn, has served 2 years, no salary. “Ludwig Betthoven, a son of the Betthoven sub No. 8, has no salary, but during the absence of the chapelmaster Luchesy he played the organ; is of good capability, still young, of good and quiet deportment and poor.”

One of the items of the third report, proposing reductions of salaries and removals, has a very special interest as proving that an effort was made to supplant Neefe and give the post of court organist to young Beethoven. It reads:

Item. If Neffe were to be dismissed another organist would have to be appointed, who, if he were to be used only in the chapel could be had for 150 florins, the same is small, young, and a son of a court musici, and in case of need has filled the place for nearly a year very well.

The attempt to have Neefe dismissed from the service failed, but a reduction of his salary to the pittance of 200 florins had already led him to look about him to find an engagement for himself and wife in some theatre, when Maximilian, having become acquainted with his merits (notwithstanding his Calvinism), restored his former allowance by a decree dated February 8, 1785. When Joseph Reicha came to Bonn in Mattioli’s place is still undetermined with exactness; but a decree raising him from the position of concertmaster to that of concert director, and increasing his salary to 1,000 florins, bears date June 28, 1785. In the general payroll of this year Reicha’s salary is stated to be 666 thalers 52 alb., “tenorist Beethoven’s” 200 th., “Beethoven jun.” 100 th.