Welcome to the Beethoven Mixtape! Aggy, Oli, Eli, George and I are here to open your ears to the music of a whole range of composers who taught Beethoven, inspired him, learned from him, worked as his rivals, and counted him as one of their closest friends – the composers, in other words, who are very often unknown and unheard because they were in the orbit of the man we now position as The Composer of his age.
But of course, it’s never quite that simple. The writers of early biographies and music histories (many of them Austro-Germans with a vested interest in promoting their own countrymen), building on Beethoven’s own considerable PR skills, pushed many of these other composers into the background, and ironically made our understanding of Beethoven himself all the poorer for it. After all, he didn’t write in a vacuum: he hugely admired and esteemed composers from other countries, looked to contemporaries for new ideas to pursue (and things to avoid!), and was not always universally admired. And whilst he may have been a fantastically skilled and imaginative writer of music, he was also pretty terrible at certain general life skills, which he relied on others to help him with, as we’ll see. So let’s meet our Mixtape Musicians…
‘Don’t come to me any more! You are a false dog, and may the hangman do away with all false dogs.’
— Beethoven to Hummel, 1799
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) was one of Beethoven’s most famous rivals. A brilliant child prodigy, he was taught by Mozart (with whom he also played billiards) before building an impressive career as a keyboard virtuoso and conductor. Haydn got him a job as his successor at the Esterházy Court in Eisenstadt, about 30 miles south of Vienna; but Hummel was happiest in later years when he was freed from this kind of aristocratic set-up and able to run the musical activities of cities further afield. He spent the last few decades years of his career in Weimar as a friend and colleague of the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
As a Mozart pupil – between the ages of eight and ten! – Hummel got to sit in on the private string quartet play-throughs Mozart held with friends like Haydn, Johann Baptist Vanhal and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. That meant hearing composer-string players together, performing at the highest level. So it’s no wonder that Hummel went on to write several string quartets himself, including the one we start with, in around 1804.
Oh, and that quotation above? Beethoven and Hummel had a bit of a love-hate relationship, not least because they kept being pitted against each other by aristocrats and promoters who enjoyed live competitions. But the day after calling him a ‘false dog’, Beethoven wrote to apologise, invite Hummel over, and apparently promised to cook for him, since he fancied himself as a very good chef. Based on reports of the people who had to eat his meals, alas, he was actually terrible.
‘I shall always love and admire you, and you will always remain the one person among my contemporaries whom I esteem the most.’
— Beethoven to Cherubini, 1823
Luigi Carlo Zanobi Salvadore Maria Cherubini (1760-1842) was, as the tone in this letter excerpt makes clear, one of Beethoven’s all-time musical heroes. The son of a professional musician (like Hummel and indeed Beethoven himself), Cherubini was born in Italy but moved to Paris in 1786 and spent the rest of his life there. He was a wildly successful opera composer and Beethoven freely acknowledged that he looked to Cherubini’s music as a direct model for his own opera, Fidelio. He later became the Director of the Paris Conservatoire, and wielded considerable power and influence in the French musical scene – but he found himself repeatedly at odds with Napoleon, since he refused to speak well of composers the French emperor admired just to be seen to be agreeable.
Cherubini didn’t start writing string quartets until he was in his mid-fifties and composed his Sixth Quartet (which was also his last) when he was seventy-seven. He later told Felix Mendelssohn that quartet writing ‘keeps me busy and amuses me, because I don’t attach the slightest pretension to it’.
‘Through uninterrupted industry you will receive: Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.’
— Count Waldstein to Beethoven, 1792
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) needs little introduction here. But it’s worth pointing out that as well as having taught Beethoven – and that wasn’t an altogether easy task for either of them – he was also instrumental in introducing Beethoven to the various Viennese aristocrats who went on to support, promote, and even have lessons with Beethoven as his career bloomed in the first years of the nineteenth century. Haydn’s Two Quartets Op. 77 were initially planned as a set of six for Prince Lobkowitz, whose name we most often hear in association with Beethoven. (As it happens, Lobkowitz was also the dedicatee of the Hummel quartet on this programme.) But by 1799, when he started the project, Haydn was sixty-seven years old and finding it harder and slower to write. He may not have finished all six pieces, but there’s still plenty of bounce and vigour in the finale we hear tonight.
‘Please have the chocolate prepared. We have taken the supreme decision to have breakfast with you; and important matters are going to be dealt with…’
— Beethoven to Zmeskáll, 1818
We can reasonably describe Beethoven’s dear friend Nikolaus Zmeskáll von Domanovecz und Lestine (1759-1833) as his most important helper in managing day-to-day existence. Zmeskall was a senior civil servant for the Hungarian Chancellery in Vienna, meticulous in his record-keeping and handling of all kinds of administrative tasks. Beethoven, who had been given a pretty meagre basic education, looked to Zmeskall for help with everything from cutting quill pens and hiring servants to checking the spelling of his would-be patrons’ surnames.
Zmeskall might have had hereditary noble titles – which Beethoven of course enjoyed making fun of – but he was not at all a rich man. He lived on his decent but relatively modest salary and found his way into high social circles not through cash, but through music. He was a very capable amateur cellist and a composer, with at least fifteen string quartets to his name. Which is why Beethoven himself chose to dedicate his Quartetto Serioso to Zmeskall in 1814.
‘We are accustomed to the quartet genre as it was developed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. In recent years, we have recognized Onslow and [Felix] Mendelssohn as worthy successors to this tradition.
— Robert Schumann, 1838
This note by Katy Hamilton continues below.
