BEETHOVEN & FRIENDS

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.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand (west of Lyon) to a French mother and an English father, George Onslow (1784-1853) was a composer and performer with a considerable reputation in both Germany and France during his lifetime. Onslow was a ‘gentleman composer’ – which is to say that he was from a famous noble British family and had an independent income. That gave him the freedom to write whatever he wanted; and as a capable cellist, Onslow was particularly interested in chamber music. In total he wrote 36 string quartets, 34 string quintets, four symphonies, four operas, a number of songs, piano pieces, and a variety of other chamber works including sonatas, piano trios and wind ensembles. Much of this music was published during his lifetime, and three of the four operas were staged in Paris at the Opéra Comique.

Onlow’s early string quartets – the piece we hear was written when he was about thirty – sound much more like Haydn than Beethoven. And in fact, we know that Onslow was absolutely unmoved by Beethoven’s late quartets, which he called ‘mistakes, absurdities, the reveries of a sick genius … I would burn everything I have composed if I someday wrote anything resembling such chaos’!

‘I think it comes from the fact that both of us were young exactly during Beethoven’s last years, and his manner and way was thus easily taken up in us.’

• Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel to Felix Mendelssohn, 1835

You’ll notice that Schumann puts Onslow’s name next to that of Felix Mendelssohn in the review quoted above. But Felix’s elder sister Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel (1805-47) was also a formidable composer. She was strongly discouraged by her father and other male relatives (including Felix) from publishing her music, since publishing counted as ‘trade’ and she was a well-to-do lady from a rich and highly regarded family. But her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel, was wholly supportive of her wish to both compose and share her works with the world; and so in the very last years of her life, Mendelssohn-Hensel did have the opportunity to see at least some of her many excellent works in print.

As she says in this letter to her brother, the Mendelssohn siblings were in their teens and early twenties during the last years of Beethoven’s life and had the chance to study his latest compositions as soon as they became available. Mendelssohn-Hensel’s one and only String Quartet is modelled in part on Beethoven’s ‘Harp’ Quartet; but it was originally written as a piano sonata and only transformed into a chamber work in 1834. Felix was sceptical of this piece when Fanny sent it to him for his comments, because he felt that the influence of Beethoven was too obvious. But his sister refused to change a note, despite his feedback. And even Felix admired this pointy-edged Allegretto unreservedly, writing to her that it was his favourite movement.

‘Rest assured that as an artist I cherish the greatest goodwill for you and that I shall always endeavour to prove this to you.’

• Beethoven to Czerny, 1816

Last but not least comes one of the most important musicians to carry forward Beethoven’s legacy into the later nineteenth century. Carl Czerny (1791-1857) started piano lessons with Beethoven when he was about ten and seemed destined for a career as a virtuoso performer. But his health was not robust enough for a life on the road, and he instead dedicated himself to teaching (from the age of fifteen) and composing. Over a long and busy career, Czerny published over 800 opuses, including symphonies, sacred music, chamber works… and a lot of music for solo piano, including treatises and teaching volumes. He also became a leading authority on performing Beethoven’s own music, particularly after the older man’s death.

But if you’re picturing a fusty old professor with a sense that things should be ‘just so’, nothing could be further from the truth. Czerny was well aware that tastes changed, and performance styles might too. He was pragmatic, hard-working and clearly a kind and much-admired teacher, numbering Franz Liszt among his pupils and Fryderyk Chopin among his friends. He apparently wrote as many as thirty string quartets, but they were never published and probably weren’t performed during Czerny’s lifetime – so this is a precious, rare opportunity to hear his music. In the movement that ends our concert, Czerny’s theme sounds suspiciously like it’s been lifted from Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’ Sonata for solo piano, Op. 13: a direct and very touching act of homage from a grateful pupil to a beloved teacher and friend.

© Katy Hamilton