Stories of Beethoven’s 1808 benefit concert
In August 2003 Paul Goodwin conducted AAM in a reconstruction of Beethoven’s benefit concert of 22 December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien.
By all accounts, the event was quite extraordinary: over a period of four hours, the audience heard the first performances of Beethoven’s fifth and sixth symphonies (both radical additions to the symphonic repertoire), the piano concerto No.4 and movements from the Mass in C. However, if the passages below are to be believed, the evening was not without its problems.
Ferdinand Ries, a musician, composer and close acquaintance of Beethoven, later described the concert:
Beethoven gave a large concert [on 22 December 1808] in the Theater an der Wien at which were performed for the first time the C minor (No.5) and Pastoral (No.6) Symphonies as well as his Fantasia for Piano with orchestra and chorus. In this last work, at the place where the last beguiling theme appears already in a varied form, the clarinet player made, by mistake, a repeat of eight bars. Since only a few instruments were playing, this error was all the more evident to the ear. Beethoven leaped up in a fury, turned around and abused the orchestra players in the coarsest terms and so loudly that he could be heard throughout the auditorium. Finally, he shouted ‘from the beginning!’ The theme began again, everyone came in properly, and the success was great. But when the concert was finished the artists, remembering only too well the honourable title which Beethoven had bestowed on them in public, fell into a great rage, as if the offence had just occurred. They swore that they would never play again if Beethoven were in the orchestra, and so forth. This went on until Beethoven had composed something new, and then their curiosity got the better of their anger.
The composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, once Hofkapellmeister in Berlin at the court of Frederick the Great, was present at the concert and wrote in his diary on 25 December:
During this past week, when the theatres were closed and the evenings were taken up with musical performances and concerts, my eagerness and resolution to hear everything caused me no small embarrassment. This was particularly the case on the 22nd, because the local musicians gave the first of the season’s great musical performances in the Burg-theater for the benefit of their admirable Society for Musicians’ Widows; on the same day, however, Beethoven also gave a concert for his own benefit in the large suburban theatre, consisting entirely of his own compositions. I could not possibly miss this and accepted with heartfelt gratitude Prince Lobkowitz’s kind invitation to take me with him in his box. There we held out in the bitterest cold from half-past six until half-past ten, and experienced the fact that one can easily have too much of a good — and even more of a strong — thing. I, no more than the extremely kindly and gentle Prince, whose box was in the first tier very near to the stage, on which the orchestra with Beethoven conducting were quite close to us, would have thought of leaving the box before the very end of the concert, although several faulty performances tried our patience to the utmost. Poor Beethoven , for whom this concert provided the first and only small profit that he had been able to earn and retain during this whole year, had encountered a great deal of opposition and very little support both in its organisation and performance. The singers and the orchestra were assembled from very heterogeneous elements. Moreover, it had not even been possible to arrange a complete rehearsal of all the pieces to be performed, every one of which was filled with passages of the utmost difficulty. You will be amazed [to hear] all that was performed by this fertile genius and untiring worker, in the course of four hours.
Finally, the composer Louis Spohr records many years later in his autobiography (1860–61) a ‘tragicomical incident which took place at Beethoven’s last concert at the Theater an der Wien’, related to him by the Ignaz von Seyfried:
Beethoven was playing a new piano concerto of his, but already at the first ‘tutti’, forgetting that he was the soloist, he jumped up and began to conduct in his own peculiar fashion. At the first ‘sforzando’ he threw out his arms so wide that he knocked over both the lamps from the music stand of the piano. The audience laughed and Beethoven was so beside himself over this disturbance that he stopped the orchestra and made them start again. Seyfried, worried for fear that this would happen again in the same place, took the precaution of ordering two choir boys to stand next to Beethoven and to hold the lamps in their hands. One of them innocently stepped closer and followed the music from the piano part. But when the fatal ‘sforzando’ burst forth, the poor boy received from Beethoven’s right hand such a sharp slap in the face that, terrified, he dropped the lamp on the floor. The other, more wary boy, who had been anxiously following Beethoven’s movements, succeeded in avoiding the blow by ducking in time. If the audience had laughed the first time, they now indulged in a truly bacchanalian riot. Beethoven broke out in such a fury that when he struck the first chord of the solo he broke six strings. Every effort of the true music-lovers to restore calm and attention remained unavailing for some time; thus the first Allegro of the Concerto was completely lost to the audience. Since this accident, Beethoven wanted to give no more concerts.
AAM’s recreation of this concert on 10 August 2003 — lasting 5 hours, including three intervals — conjured up the full majesty of Beethoven’s music without suffering the painful experiences of that first night!