BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tuesday, October 5, 1824
Beethoven’s friend Tobias Haslinger comes from Vienna to Baden today. He and visitor from London Johann Andreas Stumpff will walk with Ludwig Nephew Karl into the countryside, possibly towards Vöslau to the southwest, in the direction of Count Moritz Fries’ vineyards. [They instead decide to wander to the Helenental Valley to the northwest.]
Before leaving, Karl observes that they have run out of food, so they won’t be able to be well fed beforehand. Haslinger wants to walk ahead with Stumpff to show him some things, and Karl and Ludwig are to follow.
Ludwig mentions the item he lost Sunday night. Karl’s understanding was that he lost it at the theater, so he went back there yesterday with the housekeeper to look for it, without success. Karl asks whether his uncle wants to walk with them, or follow later. Ludwig appears to decide to go later. Karl observes that Stumpff is making a great deal of money in England, so he can retire to Germany whenever he wants to.
The Beethovens eventually catch up to Haslinger and Stumpff, probably at the Helenenthal or on the way. Haslinger asks Beethoven at which village he composed the Pastoral Symphony. [The symphony was written over a period of years, but much of it may have been written in Heiligenstadt.]
Stumpff comments that ten years from now, Weber’s Freischütz will please audiences less than Mozart’s Figaro will in 50 years. Stumpff says he asked Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858), a co-founder of the Royal Philharmonic Society, what the requirements of a good composer are. He replied, “Noise, Noise (forte), and Noise (fortissimo).” He was being ironic.
Stumpff again confirms that Beethoven’s former pupil Ferdinand Ries is now back in Bonn.
Beethoven having mentioned Handel glowingly the other day, Stumpff would like to send a set of Handel’s work to him, at no cost. He plans to send two copies, including one for Archduke Rudolph, but he can reimburse Stumpff for his copy. But Beethoven must keep one of them.
Stumpff mentions that he came with greater peace of mind than he is leaving. He suggests that Beethoven should write nothing but symphonies, one after the other.
Stumpff says he saw a drama at the Burgtheater and thought it was superb. Haslinger says he would like to see the ocean some day. Stumpff suggests that Beethoven could make a tour to Trieste along with Haslinger, Ferdinand Piringer and Joseph Böhm. While he is here, Stumpff would like to go to the Kahlenberg [a scenic area in the Vienna Woods, overlooking the City.]
Karl observes that a herdsman has driven the cows back into the meadow. One drives them in three groups, with a bull in each. He quickly adds, “We ought to walk quickly because the bull is getting angry!”
The walk is thirsty work, so they stop by a neighboring tavern. The proprietor there gets none of the wine. It all has to be delivered to the Count, and they may otherwise sell no wine at all. There is a contract to that effect. “He has it in lease.” [It is unclear whether the Count is leasing the vineyards, or whether the establishment is leased.]
Herr Loydl, who is publisher Heinrich Albert Probst’s business go-between in Vienna, comes up. Karl mentions that he is a leather dealer.
At the tavern, they have wine, cheese and bread for refreshments. There is moorhen and duck, but the wanderers do not partake. In the change, Karl notes that the 20-kreuzer coin received is from 1763, and thus sixty-one years old.
The group returns to Baden. Stumpff is staying there tonight, at the hotel Zum goldenen Hirsch. Nephew Karl and housekeeper Barbara Holzmann return to Vienna with Haslinger in the evening.
Conversation Book 76, 23r-24r, 26v-29v. The pages are used out of order, so to a certain extent this reconstruction is conjectural in chronology. This walk concludes Conversation Book 76; the next book picks up again about October 10.
Stumpff also recounts the long walk, though it differs somewhat from the conversation book entries. “The next day Beethoven came to me with a clouded brow, very early in the morning, and complained bitterly in broken words about the treatment of his brother, who was possessed by filthy avarice, and how the plague of avarice was spreading more and more, so that it was becoming more and more difficult for an honest fellow to fill his stomach! ‘Yes, yes, that’s how it is!! – Oh, you misers! when will you be satisfied!’ He gave me two names who dishonour the divine art of music itself with this plague – ‘dirty misers!’.”
“‘I must recover in unspoilt nature again and wash my mind clean again. – How are you today? – Will you go with me today to visit my unchanging friends – the green bushes and the tall trees, the green hedges and hiding places where brooks rush? Yes, to look at the vines that now hold out their grapes from their hills to the sun that fertilised them? Yes, my friend? There is no envy of bread or deceit there. Come – come – What a glorious morning, promises a beautiful day.’ –”
“Beethoven was very neatly dressed today, as if he were going to a concert hall: in a new blue tailcoat, blue trousers, yellow waistcoat and very white ruff, and a hat with a high crown, as was the custom in Vienna at the time, and shiny boots were the finishing touches to his outfit!”
“Now we walked briskly towards Helenental, a very popular place visited by all classes, where the Emperor himself strolled with his noble family and where those who met often had to squeeze through a narrow path. On the way we talked about his great works, which I deliberately made the subject of in order to amuse him. I remarked to him what a great effect his symphonies always have in our concert hall and his Pastoral Symphony, the favorite symphony of our ladies in London, whose eyes sparkled with pleasure and doubled my enjoyment. But how a Beethoven could represent the events of nature with sounds is a wonder to everyone, adding, ‘that the art lovers, inspired by such creations, longed for a tenth symphony’.”
“‘Yes, in England, where people still have a taste for the great, compositions of substance are also performed with dignity, as I have heard. I must also go to London and will stay with you.'”
“We then passed a newly built castle, which, as he said, was built by Duke C. [Archduke Carl, the new castle being the Weilburg Palace, built in 1820. The palace was destroyed in World War II.] – ‘See here (our) great taste in choosing the place where modern castles should be built! Isn’t it true that where one sees the ‘Rudera’ [rubble] of the castles of the past, that is where they belong! Oh, if only my arm were powerful enough to move such a building where it belongs!'”
“We were now approaching a very romantic place. Tall, old, magnificent trees raised their tops towards the blue sky, dark bushes drank in the sun’s rays and threw them back onto a green carpet of grass, on which the inhabitants of the bushes hopped about, trying to catch the food intended for them. A trickling stream could be heard rushing, unseen here, shooting down from a height. Here Beethoven sat down on a grass bench.” [Photo of Helenental Valley courtesy of Upper Austria Tourism.]
“‘Here, surrounded by these natural products, I often sit for hours and my senses revel in the sight of nature’s children conceiving and giving birth; here the majestic sun is not concealed from me by a man-made roof of dirt; here the blue sky is my sublime roof. When I look at the sky in wonder in the evening and see the host of light bodies, called suns or earths, eternally swinging within its boundaries, then my spirit swings over these stars, so many millions of miles away, to the original source from which all creation flows and from which new creations will forever flow.'”
“‘When I now and then try to give form to my excited feelings in sounds – alas, then I find myself terribly deceived: I throw my soiled sheet of paper on the ground in annoyance, and feel firmly convinced that no earth-born person will ever be able to represent the heavenly images that floated before his excited imagination in happy hours, either with sounds, words, paint or chisel!'”
“Having thus given vent to the heat in his breast, he quickly rose from his seat and looked up at the sun.”
“‘Yes, it must come from above, what is to touch the heart, otherwise it is only notes – body without spirit – isn’t it? What is body without spirit? Dirt, or earth, isn’t it? The spirit should rise from the earth, in which the spark of the gods is banished for a certain time, and like the field to which the farmer entrusts precious seed, it should blossom and bear much fruit, and thus multiply and strive up to the source from which it flowed. For only by persistently working with the powers given to it does the creature worship the Creator and Preserver of infinite nature!'”
“If I wanted to record everything that struck me in such a brief interaction with such a noble individual, unique in his kind, I would have to write a book, and my urgent and complicated professional duties do not allow me to do that – which have the greatest demand on my head and time, just as I lack the gift of briefly and succinctly describing what I feel and see, and which can only be acquired through thorough school instruction in the language and many exercises in it: advantages that were never granted to me, since I came to England as a young man and have been occupied for more than 35 years with perfecting an art that must be made understandable more with sounds than with words.”
TDR V, 129-131.