BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sunday, September 19, 1824 (very approximately)

The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik [New Magazine for Music] issues of January 2, 9 and 12, 1838 (Nr.1,3, and 4 respectively of Vol.8), contain a serialized account of a visit to Beethoven. The article is credited to “G. Wedel,” a pen name that Thayer identifies as having been used by Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio (1803-1869). The story, after a very long introduction that fills the entire first installment and is omitted here, is ostensibly the author’s recounting of his friend Moritz’s visit to Beethoven in Baden in 1824. Given the first-person nature of the tale, however, it’s entirely possible that it was the tale of Zuccalmaglio’s own visit he is telling. Zuccalmaglio grew up in the Catholic Rhineland, which may have given him an entree to Beethoven that other visitors would not have.

The story of “Moritz’s” visit, as described by Zuccalmaglio, follows (pp.9-10 and 13-15).

“It was in 1824 when I was in Vienna for the first time, in this city of pleasure
and joyful ecstasy. A thousand sights, a thousand new performances wanted to occupy my time here, but I could not devote myself to any of them with proper attention until I had seen Beethoven.”

“The fact that the city had enclosed this man within its walls was, in my eyes, its greatest achievement, and it seemed incomprehensible to me that someone could live there who did not know of the magnificent man, who would not serve as a guide to his home.”

“But now I began with my questions and found that many people did not know how to give me an answer. At Haslinger’s, meanwhile, I found I had come to the right place; but what I heard there did not sound much more pleasant to me. As soon as the first green sprouts appeared in the trees, as soon as the first larks rose above the crops, Beethoven also used to leave the city, move to the country, and live there in busy seclusion with nature and art until the last green leaf had fallen from the tree.”

“He had, it was said, been in Baden for months, and there he would probably be inaccessible to me. I assured him that I had recommendations from important artists and that these would ensure that I would be well received in Baden, but Haslinger shook his head doubtfully and assured me that it would be difficult.”

“These doubts made me sad, but I decided to try my utmost to see the man I admired so much, so I got into a hired carriage and drove out to Baden. At any other time, the magnificent garden through which the road led us, in which the villages and towns seemed to be just so many pleasure palaces, would have occupied me most vividly, but now I left the fairy-tale Brühl, like all the other places of entertainment in the Viennese world, behind me without a care, and hardly gave a thoughtful glance to the magnificent Vienna Woods and the Leitha Mountains, which adorned my road on both sides like stage sets in ever-changing outlines.”

“No matter how bravely my charioteer drove his horses, he could hardly satisfy my impatience, which was far ahead of his chariot. Finally, he stopped in front of an inn in the town, and I was able to lock myself in a room there and draft the letter with which I wanted to announce myself to the artist and thus request access to him. During the whole journey I had already assembled some very nice thoughts, but now, as I sat in front of the paper and dipped my pen into it, I was suddenly alone and lonely; everything that came to mind seemed so shallow, so flat for the man, and when I tried to express myself in a meaningful way, it seemed too forced, too wooden, so that I tore up what I had written.”

“Since I had no time to lose, I finally said something like this in my letter: that a student of the arts who had always counted himself among his most ardent admirers would like the consolation of seeing him face to face, and also had a little letter from an acquaintance to give him. With a somewhat lightened heart I folded up my letter and had a servant show me the way to the artist’s apartment.”

“At that time he lived in a building belonging to the bathing establishment, behind which there was a lovely garden. With my heart pounding, I rang the bell and was let in by an old housekeeper, to whom I then explained my request in a very urgent manner. The old woman, who had the typical Viennese good nature and was flattered by the respect that shone through my whole being for her master, as a reflection of it extended even to her, looked at me attentively for a while, then shook her head in concern and said that things would probably not turn out according to my wishes. But I was not so easily dismissed and asked her to give her master my little letter, as I could not leave without having seen him.”

“‘It is not my fault if the gentleman does not want to see any strangers, but he is also too often overrun by prying eyes and prevented from doing his work and his errands, which is why he makes no exceptions so as to avoid having to see them all; however, since it is so dear to your heart, I will go against my orders and take the letter in; perhaps he will change his mind today, though I can give you little hope of that.’ So said the good old woman, and left me alone in her kitchen.”

“It is certainly not a pleasant feeling to have to leave a door through which one was so happy to have been let in, without having accomplished anything, not even to see a man to whom one is so attached with all one’s heart, not even to be able to pay homage, and yet this unpleasantness could well have happened to me now, indeed the probability was that my plan would not succeed. I would have stood like that for ten minutes in oppressive uncertainty, looking through the half-open kitchen door to the opposite gate, which concealed my king of the clay treasure [a reference to 2 Corinthians 4:7-9,] when the old woman’s footsteps resounded again in the hallway and tensed my chest for the decisive moment.”

“She came in! But when I noticed her smile, it was immediately clear to me that I had won the game, and she said to me with a friendly nod: ‘This time, young sir, the unusual has happened, my master has read your letter and wants to see you; if you can able to get through this way everywhere with your requests, you are a truly lucky child!’ I had not thought that I would succeed here! So she led me out of the kitchen to the opposite door and opened it for me.”

[The final installment of Zuccalmaglio’s tale begins here.] “I stood in Beethoven’s room, alone with the servants of the celebrated master in a sanctuary of music, and I felt a holy shudder pervading me. The room was spacious and high, its windows looked out onto the garden, and had its flowering trees as ornamental flowers. The furniture indicated middle class, nothing was splendid, but also nothing poor, everything seemed to fit together, and cleanliness and order prevailed, though here and there a discarded sheet of music betrayed a little artistic disorder. Truly magnificent in the midst of these instruments stood the artist’s grand piano, a gift from his generous admirers in England.”

“I saw the names of the greatest artists engraved on its sides in gold lettering, which gave this musical instrument a historical significance in addition to its usual significance; it shone at me like a tonal shield of Achilles. On the grand piano lay large packets of printed music books. On the desk were open manuscripts, perhaps the master’s last musical poems. On a shelf stood even larger packets of music books, like several books leaning against each other in tolerable order on another shelf.”

“I would certainly have lain alone in this room for hours, entertained myself, attached my thoughts to every speck of dust and spun them out, but I soon heard the door of the next room turning on its hinges, and so all my dreams were chased away by the master’s arrival.”

“He came towards me with a sure step. I knew him immediately from the pictures I had seen of him, of which Kreuzhuber’s [Joseph Kreihuber, who made a lithograph of Stephan Decker’s 1824 drawing of Beethoven] seemed to me the most similar at the time, and yet I had to find that they all only expressed something of his nature, that compared to the original, they did not round off into a whole. In particular, the thoughtful brow seemed to me to have been given no proper consideration by any of the illustrators, and the glow in the eyes that seemed to look right through me was not even remotely indicated.”

“The master’s curls had already turned white to a considerable extent, and were tumbling around his head in a not unfriendly mess. Despite his white hair, despite his high forehead and his sparkling eyes, the master did not have the expression of loneliness, isolation and gloomy withdrawal that I had imagined him to have; on the contrary, his whole face was radiant with a touch of extraordinary good-nature, and friendliness was evident in all his gestures and speech. As far as his physical size was concerned, this seemed to me to be almost below average, but he was of a stocky, compact build that, despite his advanced, accelerated age, still exuded strength and solidity.”

“As for his clothing, I only remember that he was wearing a long gray overcoat, which was probably his housecoat, as clean as it was unpretentious, as he had just got up from work to listen to me; that he wore a simple scarf around his neck, in short, that nothing in his costume was either dirty or sloppy, as one usually imagines intelligent artists to be dressed, or as neat and sophisticated as many I know who make themselves known in the halls of the upper class as exuberantly intelligent artists. His costume revealed the honorable German citizen.”

“The arrival of the long-awaited man threw me into such a state of excitement, into such embarrassment, that I could not find the words to greet him and had to make do with an involuntary bow. Beethoven, however, walked towards me with a friendly smile, welcomed me warmly, and joked harmlessly about what I had so enthusiastically written about him. During this reception I came to my senses again, to speak, and told him how fortunate I was to finally see the man before me who had hovered before me as a hero from my earliest youth, who had had a powerful influence on my entire being and had determined my career, art.”

“But as I spoke to him, I saw only too clearly that he did not understand my words, could not understand them; now I remembered what I had heard before, that the master was hard of hearing, that he had become deaf, that he who spoke to the whole world, at all times, through his tones, could not hear a reply and stood alone, isolated in the joyful life of language. This feeling penetrated me so powerfully, brought me out of all my composure, that I could no longer hide my tears and burst into loud sobs and tears in front of the master.”

“Beethoven immediately understood my pain; however, the strength of his mind was superior to it, and while I was melting away in grief, his features were not darkened by any cloud of sorrow; on the contrary, he seemed much more cheerful to me; and he tried to comfort and calm me. Like a father caressing his child, he stroked my cheek and embraced me. ‘I am not completely cut off from the world and those who love me,’ he began again, ‘here I have my book and here are writing materials, so they can answer any of my questions in writing.'”

“With this, the master placed a paper notebook in front of me, which was already more than half full of answers that the visitors had given to his questions. A booklet which, thanks to the various authors and the man to whom it was addressed, was bound to be extremely important and rich in content, even though I was certainly one of the weakest contributors at the time, and which, with its previous and subsequent works, is more worthy of publication than many other pamphlets by great men that come to light today, if it were not for the lack of questions to the answers.”

“Once I was standing in front of the booklet, he quickly managed to distract me from the shocking scene and draw my mind into more cheerful realms. He asked me about my youthful works, about life in my home town, about the famous masters I had met on my travels and about one from whom I had brought him a written recommendation. He approved of my opinions, sometimes he corrected them, and continued the strange conversation with such ease, with such cheerful humor, that I finally completely overlooked his lack of hearing and was enchanted to find the man who had astonished the whole world with his profoundly serious masterpieces so gentle, approachable, and communicative in his domestic circle.”

“Yes, I must still admire the acumen with which he always reduced the conversation to one point, to one word, anticipated my answers and introduced them, so that I usually only had to write down a single word to make myself completely clear to him. But because I knew that I had disturbed him while he was working, I tried to steal as little of his precious time as possible, and after letting him know how delighted I was at his kind reception, I took my leave. As he dismissed me, he urged me to tell him where and how he could be of service to me, asked me to turn to him in such cases and to visit him again in Vienna as soon as he returned to the city, then he gave me his hand in a friendly manner and let me go.”

“In the hallway I waved a friendly farewell to the old housekeeper and, wonderfully strengthened and glowing, hurried to my carriage, which was to take me back to Vienna. While I had sat quietly on my way there and, withdrawn into my inner being, followed my fantasies, on my way back I spun grove and field, forest and valley, river and shore, the two magnificent mountain ranges and the blue sky arching above them, all the joy, all the life of the earth and the skies around the magnificent man, and from them I created mighty Beethoven symphonies.”

“I will never forget this journey. It seems to me that it was only from this point on that I really learned to understand the master, to grasp and preserve his depth. I particularly flatter myself that I have since then better appreciated his last works, works that the master wrote after he was afflicted with his hearing disorder, after he had been cut off from all resounding speech, from every note of love and friendship. It seems to me that Beethoven has immersed himself in a spiritual world that is entirely his own, and that his own views seem to have emerged. Cut off from the outside world, he has become a seer and, like John, leads us to an island of magnificent faces.” [A reference to John, putative author of Revelations and its tales of visions, written on the Isle of Patmos.]

Since the visit of “Moritz” is not mentioned in any surviving conversation books, if it is not wholly fictional then it probably occurred on one of the dates for which the books are missing. Perhaps Beethoven gave the conversation book used today as a souvenir to Moritz. In that case, it is appropriate that we have assigned this visit for today, since the conversation books begin again about tomorrow. Our thanks to frequent contributor Birthe Kibsgaard for pointing out this anecdote to us.