Mr. Beethoven Read online

  Mr. Beethoven

  PAUL GRIFFITHS

  New York Review Books New York

  This is a New York Review Book

  published by The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Text copyright © 2020 by Paul Griffiths

  All rights reserved.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Henningham Family Press.

  Extracts from The Letters of Beethoven, edited and translated by Emily Anderson (1986) appear here courtesy of W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

  Cover image: Adapted from View of Beacon Street, Showing the Tremont House Hotel, c.1830, printed by Senefelder Lithography Co.; Boston Public Library

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Griffiths, Paul, 1947 November 24– author.

  Title: Mr. Beethoven / by Paul Griffiths.

  Other titles: Mister Beethoven

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020058343 (print) | LCCN 2020058344 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375809 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375816 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Fiction. | Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, Mass.)—Fiction. | Music—United States— 19th century—Fiction. | Music—Classical influences—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6057.R515 M7 2021 (print) | LCC PR6057.R515 (ebook)| DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058343

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058344

  ISBN 978-1-68137-581-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  1—The Cabin

  2—The Dining Saloon

  3—The Port of Boston

  4—The Welcome-Party

  5—The Room

  6—The Breakfast Table

  7—The Writing Table

  8—Early Concerns

  9—Possibilities

  10—The Real Truth

  11—Portrait of Thankful

  12—Return to the Scene

  13—An Infinite Conversation

  14—Continuing Concerns

  15—A Sale

  16—Going Away (1)

  17—Going Away (2)

  18—Accommodations

  19—A Letter

  20—Dinner at Quincy (in General)

  21—Further Concerns

  22—The Fourth of July

  23—A Walk

  24—What Remains

  25—Dinner at Quincy (in Particular)

  26—Growing Concerns

  27—An Intervention

  28—A Midday Meeting

  29—A Précis

  30—In Search of Evidence

  31—Another Midday Meeting

  32—From a Journal of July 1833

  33—Yet Another Midday Meeting

  34—A Monologue

  35—The Indian Operetta

  36—Diminished Concerns

  37—A Farewell

  38—An Announcement

  39—And Immediately, a Visit

  40—Preparations Commence

  41—The Job Ahead

  42—A Gift

  43—The First Rehearsal

  44—Enter Satan

  45—A Protest

  46—Sam and Danny

  47—Astonishment

  48—An Interview

  49—The Breakfast Table (Again)

  50—The Composer’s Address to the Chorus

  51—Part One

  52—Intermission

  53—Part Two

  54—Departure

  Notes

  Biographical Note

  for Anne

  1—The Cabin

  “Mr. Beethoven?”

  The person so addressed, lying in the narrow bed built into the far side of the small cabin, moved only with the gentle roll of the ship. Eyes and mouth were closed. There was no sound.

  The boy, without stepping forward any further from where he stood at the doorway, his trailing hand still on the brass knob he had lately swiveled open, tried a louder call.

  “Mr. Beethoven?”

  Still nothing. Somebody had informed the boy the previous day, but he had forgotten, that the recumbent body before him never would be made to stir this way, not if he were to yell at the top of his voice, not if he were to sing out lustily in his emerging tenor the master’s “Ode to Joy,” a tune of which, of course, this boy would have had no inkling.

  What to do? He had been told to accompany the passenger down a deck to the dining saloon, where he would then have to don an apron quickly before serving the cabbage soup and boiled mutton, if these were on the menu for the evening. He could not return empty-handed. Nor could he just stand there; he was already at risk of taking longer over this mission than the steward would have been expecting.

  Could he have misremembered the name? No. The spelling would probably have foxed him, but he could reproduce what he had been told pretty well. Then he thought how stupid it was to imagine that the man lay still asleep only because he had been hailed by the wrong name. Any sound at all should have had him blinking awake. Even the click of the latch.

  The boy did a loud cough, having first raised his hand to his mouth for politeness. He took it down—who was watching?—and coughed again. There was still no response, and the boy, with no means to know why this passenger continued to lie so still, felt a cool flush just under his skin. He had witnessed burials at sea, conducted by captains who put on their vicarage voices, captains who stumbled over the sentences, captains who turned sullen for the rest of the voyage.

  He stood there, nothing happening, while down below the other cabin passengers would be looking about them with feigned nonchalance, and the steward would be standing smiling, a napkin over his horizontal left forearm, as if everything were proceeding quite normally, while inwardly the fellow would be calculating how the scale of remonstration would be rising with the this boy’s increasing dilatoriness, hard second on hard second.

  The boy let go the doorknob and took two steps further into the cabin, enough to be standing over the passenger. Behind him the door had closed, so that the cabin was notably dimmer, its only light seeping in through a small porthole. Even so, from this nearer position he could clearly see regular movements in the man’s nostrils and hear a periodic disgruntlement coming through the slightly parted lips.

  He leaned down close to the ear nearer him, taking care to keep his lips away from the alien flesh, and this time, so as not to alarm, whispered.

  “Mr. Beethoven.”

  Still expecting a response, he was more than ever disconcerted, and may not have noticed, as he stood up, how puzzlement and anxiety about what was happening right there, in the cabin, were dismissing fear of reprisal below.

  He reached out a hand. Could he bring himself? yes, he could. Touching the man’s arm, but through the bedclothes, and so protected from direct contact, he gave a firm, short push, and again repeated the name.

  “Mr. Beethoven.”

  Yes, the eyes opened and the face came alive. The head turned a little, so that these newly opened eyes might look directly at the face of the one who had summoned them from whatever dream. The mouth opened, as if to speak, but then closed again without doing so, no doubt because the passenger realized that if he said anything the boy would be bound to answer, probably with a question—you could see from his look—and then what? The eyes closed agai
n.

  “Mr. Beethoven, you’re wanted below for supper.”

  But the boy did not get far into that sentence before he remembered at last that this passenger did not respond to speech. Could he bring himself again to touch the passenger? He could—though it would have been too much to expect him not to use his voice at the same time, as if somehow to make the rousing more civil.

  “Mr. Beethoven, please!”

  It was as before: the eyes opened and the head turned. A stare, from a stranger, can be a flooding of humanity through whatever dams of difference, enough to make the boy feel he knows this man, better than he knows the captain, better than he knows his grandfather, that suddenly he has in his mind full possession of this person.

  As he held the boy with those eyes, the man fumbled his hands out from under the bedclothes to grasp the nearby right hand of this new young friend. The boy felt the clutch and almost immediately a tug that would have unsteadied him had the grip not been relaxed right away.

  He understood. Bringing his left hand into action, clasping as well as he could with his slender fingers the two rough hands still holding on to his right, he pulled the man up into a sitting position. Then, when he was sure stability had been achieved, he let go. The man nodded thanks, breathing heavily as he sat there, keeping himself upright with his two flattened palms pressed down on the bed. Then he swung, with no warning, his legs out of bed, and with an alacrity that took the boy by surprise, stood up in his nightshirt, a little shorter than the boy and evidently waiting for something. yes, the boy would have to help him dress.

  2—The Dining Saloon

  It may have been lit by a chandelier and lined with oak paneling that threw back a sheen, but these accouterments boasted vainly against the modesty of the dining saloon. Under the starched napkin that was now placed over his left hand, the steward raised and lowered his index finger in a gesture the boy recognized as conveying relieved acknowledgment that the passenger had successfully been brought down, querying displeasure that the bringing had taken so long, and monitory promise that the matter was by no means concluded. The boy smiled, and some of the other passengers, whose attention had been drawn from their soup plates by the belated arrival of their last traveling companion and his young escort, smiled back, before the sounds of silver dipping against china, and of more or less discreet slurps, resumed. This early in the voyage, the passengers were all a little wary of exposing themselves to conversation.

  There would have been no real reason for the steward to move around the table to the one empty chair and pull it out, were there not the immediate need to make it clear to the boy that responsibility for the distinguished passenger had now passed from one to the other of them, and that the passing did not require any kind of communication. It was taken, what had not been given.

  In this kind of society, the steward is very unlikely to have had any notion of the nature of his passenger’s distinction. Even less chance that the boy would; he would have noted a tilt of the head or a raised eyebrow on the part of the steward sending him on his errand, and that would have been enough. It was distinction, the awareness of which may have made the boy all the more awkward in pulling and twisting the gentleman’s attire into place, with little help from the sleep-softened body, which by now would have been seated at the table and begun venturing on the plate of soup placed immediately before it, venturing with a spoon and a slurp both almost certainly noisier than the others’.

  Some of those others would, no doubt, have been more closely acquainted with their companion’s accomplishments. Perhaps all of them were. They were, after all, cabin passengers, paying notably more than those stowed side by side below decks. At some point there would have to have come, then, over the arhythmic percussion and subvocalizations of eating, another sound.

  “Mr. Beethoven,” the voice began, raised, as its owner turned from taking possession of the table to focusing on the late arrival, and then, recognizing that the latter made no response, and possibly remembering something, salvaged the intervention by changing it from an approach to an imparting of information, to be expressed at a lower level, with eyes now scanning the others:

  “Mr. Beethoven is, I understand, traveling to Boston to attend the first performance of a new work of his.”

  This situation or explanation of the gentleman’s presence, sitting there eating his soup while the others had stopped to listen to the speaker and were deliberately not looking at the person under discussion, could have been recalled from the pages of a musical magazine but was confided as if it had been private information. Taken as such, it would have seemed more to close the topic than open it, leaving everyone but the speaker to return to the rapidly cooling soup. After a moment, with spoon still lifted and eyes striving to keep back the appearance of disappointment, the speaker would have had to do the same.

  It would be possible to work out which vessel this might have been, in whose dining saloon these people were delving into their cabbage soup with greater or lesser pleasure. Suppose the year was 1833, as could well have been the case; that would give the distinguished passenger enough time to have moved on from what had absorbed him almost exclusively through the mid-1820s: the string quartet.

  Not so long ago, the task of finding what could have been this particular ship—one sailing for Boston in 1833 from continental Europe, and from a port that would have been accessible at the time from Vienna without quite some difficulty—would have presented, well, quite some difficulty: a trip to the headquarters of the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., or, after 1994, to that department’s new facility at College Park, Maryland, where are housed, among other documents, passenger lists for vessels arriving at U.S. ports between the 1820s and the 1980s, these lists being printed forms, the earlier ones completed in neat, swift copperplate, presumably by immigration officials, detailing each passenger’s name, age, sex, occupation, “country to which they severally belong,” and “country of which they intend to become inhabitants” (given as “United States,” or “U. States,” or “U.S.,” or sometimes “America,” but, during the period in question, only rarely “U.S.A.”).

  Now the whole thing can be done at home. And it can be done at no cost, thanks to the Familysearch website supported by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—not, of course, for the purposes of narrative fiction, but rather to enable adherents of that faith to identify their ancestors, who, unable in life to hear the word of Joseph Smith, may nevertheless be saved if their descendants will stand baptism on their behalf.

  Skimming through the lists of the thousands who disembarked at Boston in 1833, looking for any names not obviously British or Irish, you might seize on “Abraham Hultz,” and so be led to the brig Florida, which sailed from Amsterdam with just seven passengers (leaving room, then, for your imaginary eighth), curiously, all of them men (family groups were more the norm) and relatively young (which was not so unusual). Abraham, at twenty, was the baby, and he—who had now given up on the soup—tops the list, presumably because he was first in line presenting himself to the authorities, for there is never any evident reason for how entries were ordered. Below him are Antoni and Francis Kizer, thirty and twenty-five respectively, both of them coopers and, surely, brothers, as might be confirmed by how they lift their spoons in synchrony. Next are a shoemaker, a farmer, and a baker—all useful trades where they were going—the first of them the same age as Francis Kizer, the other two twenty-eight. Last on the list was another twenty-five-year-old, J. J. Whatson, mariner, with the observation: “put on board and passage paid by U. S. Consul.” you might wonder if he, nervously darting his eyes around the table, was being sent home on account of some misdemeanor perpetrated in the Dutch capital—but why, then, as a cabin passenger, all expenses paid?

  Apart from this Whatson, given as belonging to the U.S., the passengers are all said to hail from Holland—though this seems unlikely, given their names. Hultz, possib
ly Jewish, could have come from anywhere, though possibly not from the Netherlands, since there are no Hultzes listed in the online Netherlands phone book. Nor are any Kizers to be found there (the Massachusetts phone directory, by contrast, includes many more than could plausibly have been descended from this pair), but plenty of Keizers. Perhaps Harman Wibling, the farmer, also suffered mistranscription, for this is another surname unknown to the Dutch resource. Or perhaps he was the sole living representative of his line, emigrating to leave a trickle of progeny in Danbury, Connecticut, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Unused to having a meal provided for him, he had already emptied his bowl by this point.) With Joan Floren, the aptly named baker, we at last have a potentially Dutch name, but not so with the shoemaker, Peter Wortley, who must have been British by birth.

  Yet there they all were, on board the brig Florida (which, by the way, was to be painted in watercolor only three years later at Palermo, Sicily, the resulting picture to be sold, in Boston, by the auction house of Skinner, Inc., in 2006 for $8,225), bound for a new life from which, they must have thought, they would never wish to return—unlike their companion passenger, old enough to be their father.

  Did each of the six, and the U.S. Consul, too, make separate arrangements with the captain? That they were all single men, and much of an age, might argue rather that they arrived as a group. If so, what brought them together, the possibly Jewish painter (Hultz), the two coopers, the very likely English shoemaker, the farmer, and the baker, all of them now awaiting with various shades of expectation the main course? They were skilled artisans, and would therefore have had some time for their own pursuits. Could they have been keen amateur musicians, the Hultz-Kizer-Wibling string quartet, joined by an English clarinetist and a bassoon-playing farmer? And the U.S. Consul, with some sympathy for his miscreant (who, his peppermint cordial spiked by laughing comrades, had been arrested for lashing out at a passing stranger), had placed him in this vessel, where, never separated from his French horn, he would be among friends. They could even get together to play their fellow passenger’s Septet.