Napoleon, Beethoven and the Turk
My late friend Tony Buzan, educational guru and inventor of Mind Maps also developed the concept of the Mastermind Group: individuals who, for various reasons, could prove a source of personal inspiration and motivation. My youthful Mastermind group (I had at an early age stumbled on the idea, if not the nomenclature) included the musical genius Ludwig van Beethoven, the Duke of Wellington, military commander, twice Prime Minister, and the chess -loving battlefield genius, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon thought it impossible that a machine could play chess and beat him. He was right: the mechanical chess playing Automaton, known as “The Turk” (above) was an automaton created for the court of the Empress Maria Theresa by the ingenious mechanic, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Although apparently a mechanical device, a human master was cunningly concealed in the recesses of the structure. In 1809, Napoleon visited Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where he actually faced the Turk across the chessboard. According to an eyewitness report, Napoleon made the first move. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move, doubtless to test the mechanism’s ability to detect such subterfuge. This foreplay was repeated several times, until the Turk, responding with a sweep of its arm, knocked all the pieces off the board. Napoleon was reportedly amused, and then played a real game with the machine, completing nineteen moves before conceding defeat.
There are alternative versions of the story, which seem to grow in the telling, with Napoleon contesting one game with a magnet on the board, and another with a cloth he placed around the head of the Turk, in an attempt to obstruct its sight of the board. Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, Josephine’s son and Napoleon’s stepson, at that time Viceroy of Italy, was so impressed by the Automaton’s performance against Napoleon, that he purchased the apparatus in 1811 for 30,000 Francs (a modern equivalent of around $630,000).
I have a personal Turk anecdote. Readers may recall my column, relating how I was forced to take a Latin exam to qualify for a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge. My Latin had become extremely rusty after three years of neglect, but to my delighted astonishment, the task was to translate Horace’s “Ode to Spring” (Diffugere Nives, Redeunt iam gramina campis…) the only Latin poem I knew by heart, both in the original and translation!
Amazingly, there had been a prequel. In the Cretaceous period when I had to sit my A level examinations, the S level was considered more difficult. My German “S” level consisted entirely of a comprehension piece about Von Kempelen’s Chessplaying Turk. I did not even need to read the text to answer the questions, though as a precaution I did, just in case the piece contained errors, which would have necessitated adjusting my responses.
Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (or M ä lzel; August 15, 1772 – July 21, 1838) was a German inventor, engineer, and flamboyant showman, best known for manufacturing a metronome, a cornucopia of musical automata, and exhibiting the notorious Turk chess machine. He at first collaborated with Beethoven to compose a piece of music for his metronome.
The son of an organ builder, Maelzel was born in Regensburg where he received a comprehensive musical education. He moved to Vienna in 1792 where, after several years of study and experiment, he produced his orchestrion, a mechanical musical device, which was publicly exhibited, and afterward sold for 3,000 florins. In 1804, he invented the panharmonicon, an automaton able to play the musical instruments of a military band, powered by bellows and directed by revolving cylinders storing the notes. This attracted universal attention; the inventor became celebrated throughout Europe, was appointed imperial court-mechanician at Vienna, and even attracted the admiration of Ludwig van Beethoven.This instrument was later sold to a Parisian admirer for 120,000 francs.
In 1805, the year of Napoleon’s triumph at the Battle of Austerlitz, so vividly retold in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Maelzel purchased Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automaton chess player, The Turk, invited Napoleon to challenge it, as we have seen, then took it to Paris and sold it to Eugene Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, at a large profit. Returning to Vienna, he devoted his talents to the construction of an automaton trumpeter, which, with lifelike movements and sudden changes of uniform, performed French and Austrian field signals and military airs. In 1808 he invented an improved ear trumpet, and by 1813 Maelzel and Beethoven were on familiar terms. Thanks to the upgraded ear trumpet, the deaf Beethoven could perhaps hear what Maelzel was actually saying.
Maelzel conceived and musically sketched a crucial battle from the Spanish Peninsular War, Wellington’s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria. Beethoven composed the music, to be played on Maelzel’s “mechanical orchestra”, the panharmonicon; together they also gave several concerts, at which Beethoven’s symphonies were interspersed with the performances of Maelzel’s automatons.
In 1816 Maelzel established himself in Paris as manufacturer of his metronome. Within a year, Beethoven and Maelzel appear, after a temporary breakdown in relations, to have been reconciled. Beethoven wrote glowingly of Maelzel’s metronome and declared he would henceforth cease using traditional tempo indications. (Fortunately for us, he did not.)
In that same year, Maelzel left Paris for Munich, and then again took up residence in Vienna. At this time he found the means to repurchase von Kempelen’s chess automaton, and, after spending several preparatory years in constructing and improving a number of mechanical inventions, he formed an enterprise devoted to exhibiting his array of mechanical wonders in the New World.
He died on board ship in the harbour of La Guaira, Venezuela, reportedly from alcohol poisoning; a sad end to a colourful and enterprising career.
Wellington’s Victory, also called the Battle Symphony, is a 15-minute-orchestral work, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven to commemorate Wellington’s decisive victory over Marshal Victor and Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain on 21 June 1813. This unusual work, which links chess, Beethoven, Wellington and Napoleon, was cleverly dedicated to the Prince Regent, later King George IV, and proved to be a substantial money-spinner for Beethoven.
After the Battle of Vitoria, Maelzel persuaded Beethoven to write a composition commemorating this serious blow against Napoleonic forces, one that he could notate on his “mechanical orchestra”, the panharmonicon. This was a contraption that was able to play many of the military band instruments of the day. Beethoven, though, produced a composition for a large band (100 musicians), so large, indeed, that Maelzel could not build a machine huge enough to perform the music. The composer’s requirement to include the sound of 193 live cannon might also have proved a problem for the overworked panharmonicon.
The piece was first performed in Vienna on 8 December 1813 at a concert which had been organised to benefit Austrian and Bavarian soldiers, wounded at the Battle of Hanau, with Beethoven conducting. It was an immediate crowd-pleaser and met with great acclaim by concertgoers of the day. Also on the programme were the premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and a work performed by Maelzel’s mechanical trumpeter. The Battle Symphony itself incorporated Rule Britannia, God Save the King and the French martial tune, Marlborough goes to war (based on an odd French marching song about onions and which also bears more than a passing resemblance to “For he’s a jolly good fellow”). Beethoven avoided incorporation of the Marseillaise, since this revolutionary anthem was considered treasonable in conservative Vienna.
This first performance, which featured 100 musicians, and, as we have seen, called for the intervention of 193 live cannon, has been noted as being particularly loud. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it as a “sonic assault on the listener” and the “beginning of a musical arms race for ever louder… symphonic performance”, remarking that the performance was “seemingly designed to make the listener as deaf as its composer”.
A performance of Beethoven’s Battle Symphony
As a young player I became fascinated by the concept of impenetrable defence, as manifested by Wellington during the Peninsular, Torres Vedras and Waterloo campaigns. I studied Wellington’s strategies in the works of the historian Sir Arthur Bryant and tried to apply them to the chess board.
Here is one such game: Keene vs Bryant (1963). It features impenetrable defence against Black’s dangerous looking passed pawn. Black tries to batter his way through but finds all his efforts thwarted and eventually his army is surrounded and disintegrates. My opponent in this game was R. Bryant, not Sir Arthur!
Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s .
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