The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume IThayer, Alexander Wheelock
History
The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume I
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827
The relations between Haydn and his pupil did not long continue truly
cordial; yet Beethoven concealed his dissatisfaction and no break
occurred. Thoughtless and reckless of consequences, as he often
in later years unfortunately exhibited himself when indulging his
wilfulness, he was at this time responsible to the Elector for his
conduct, and Haydn, moreover, was too valuable and influential a
friend to be wantonly alienated. So, whatever feelings he cherished in
secret, he kept them to himself, went regularly to his lessons and, as
noted above, occasionally treated his master to chocolate or coffee.
It was, of course, Haydn who took the young man to Eisenstadt, and,
as Neefe tells us, he wished to take him to England. Why was that
plan not carried out? Did Maximilian forbid it? Would Beethoven’s
pride not allow him to go thither as Haydn’s pupil? Did zeal for his
contrapuntal studies prevent it? Or had his relations to the Austrian
nobility already become such as offered him higher hopes of success
in Vienna than Haydn could propose in London? Or, finally, was it his
ambition rather to make himself known as Beethoven the composer than as
Beethoven the pianoforte virtuoso? Pecuniary reasons are insufficient
to account for the failure of the plan; for Haydn, who now knew the
London public, could easily have removed all difficulty on that score.
Neefe’s letter was written near the end of September, 1793, when
already “a number of reports” had reached Bonn “that Beethoven had made
great progress in his art.” These “reports,” we know from Fischenich,
came in part from Haydn himself. Add to that the wish to take his
pupil with him to England--which was certainly the highest compliment
he could possibly have paid him--and the utter groundlessness of
Beethoven’s suspicions that Haydn “was not well-minded towards him,”
as Ries says in his “Notizen” (page 85), is apparent. Yet these
suspicions, added to the reasons above suggested, sufficiently explain
the departure of the master for London without the company of his
pupil, who now (January, 1794) was transferred to Albrechtsberger.
In the pretty extensive notes copied from the memorandum book already
so much cited, there are but two which can with any degree of certainty
be referred to a date later than 1793. One of them is this:
Schuppanzigh, 3 times a W. (Week?)
Albrechtsberger, 3 times a W. (Week?)
The necessary inference from this is that Beethoven began the year 1794
with three lessons a week in violin-playing from Schuppanzigh (unless
the youth of the latter should forbid such an inference) and three in
counterpoint from the most famous teacher of that science. Seyfried
affirms that the studies with the latter continued “two complete years
with tireless persistency.” The coming narrative will show that other
things took up much of Beethoven’s attention in 1795, and that before
the close of that year, if not already at its beginning, his course
with Albrechtsberger ended.[68]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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