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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1970
The bicentenary of a major composer performs a variety of functions, some praiseworthy and rewarding, some trivial. First and foremost it is an occasion for reassessing his stature at the present time, and partly to this end it calls forth a vast number of performances of his music. Some of the performances are likely to be of unknown or little-performed works, and these, as well as the greater and more familiar pieces, are valuable material for making a second assessment of the composer, this time in relation to his contemporaries. It is from a study of that sort that we gain a surer picture of the circumstances that aided and that limited his achievement, and of the degree to which he was governed by the artistic conventions, habits and ideals of his age, even where he is recognized to have been at the same time the possessor of an original, indeed unique vision. But there is at least one more type of assessment that is surely appropriate to a bicentenary and not necessarily touched on by the other two: an assessment of his working methods. This is my justification for approaching a theme that might otherwise appear somewhat grandiose, namely a discussion of how Beethoven composed.
1 The Letters of Beethoven, tr. and ed. Emily Anderson, London, 1961, ii. 927: ‘Jezt aber wo wie es scheint meine Gesundheit besser ist, zeige ich wie sonst auch nur gewisse Ideen an, u. bin ich mit dem Ganzen fertig im Kopf, so wird alles aber nur einmal aufgeschrieben’.Google Scholar
2 ‘Personliche Erinnerungen an Beethoven’, Hallelujah, vi (1885), 231; quoted in Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben (completed by Hermann Deiters and Hugo Riemann), 3rd edn., Leipzig, '9'7–23, iv. 420.Google Scholar
3 ‘Ich trage meine Gedanken lange, oft sehr lange mit mir herum, ehe ich sie niederschreibe. Dabei bleibt mir mein Gedachtniss so treu, dass ich sicher bin, em Thema, was ich einmal erfasst habe, selbst nach Jahren nicht zu vergessen. Ich verandere manches, verwerfe und versuche aufs neue so lange bis ich damit zufrieden bin; dann aber beginnt in meinem Kopfe die Verarbeitung in die Breite, in die Enge, Hohe und Tiefe, und da ich mir bewusst bin, was ich will, so verlasst mich die zu Grunde liegende Idee niemals, sie steigt, sie wachst empor, ich hore und sehe das Bild in seiner ganzen Ausdehnung, wie in Einem Gusse vor meinem Geiste stehen, und es bleibt mir nur die Arbeit des Niederschreibens’. Although Schlosser's account was not published till 1885 he claims to have recorded Beethoven's remarks verbatim (wōrlich).Google Scholar
4 Not ‘Edward Schulz’, as is stated by Thayer and by almost all writers after him; cf. my letter to the Musical Times, civ (1963), 343. The account in The Harmonicon is signed only with a sigma, but a reference back in a later volume (v (1827), 85, footnote) shows that the author's initials were ‘J. R. S.’; and his full name was probably Johann Reinhold Schultz. Edouard Schulz was a salon pianist of the 1840s and 1850s.Google Scholar
5 The Harmonicon, ii (1824), 10.Google Scholar
6 Cf. the Catalogue of the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection, New York, 1970. I must here record my gratitude to Mr. Herbert Cahoon, Curator of Autograph Manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library, for much unobtrusive help in connection with the autograph of the Beethoven trio.Google Scholar
7 Thayer, op. cit., iii. 108 (where in a strange series of misprints the word ‘Trio’ appears as ‘Quartett’ three times).Google Scholar
8 Ibid., iii. 109.Google Scholar
9 Cf. in this connection Beethoven's remark to Schindler at the end of his life, on entrusting the score of Leonore to him, that that brain-child had caused him sharper labour-pains than any other and was the dearest to him on that account (Wiener Theaterzeitung, 6 and 8 April 1844).Google Scholar
10 It is also true of the String Trio Op. 9, No. 2—another work in D major. Cf. Emil Platen, ‘Beethovens Streichtrio D-Dur, Opus 9 nr. 2’, Colloquium Amicorum (Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 70. Geburtstag), ed. Siegfried Kross and Hans Schmidt, Bonn, 1967, pp. 260–82.Google Scholar
11 Cf. a comment by Gerald Abraham on the C major opening to the main theme of the finale of the E minor quartet, Op. 59, No. 2, in Beethoven's Second-Period Quartets, London, 1942, p. 39. It is a curious fact that in all Beethoven's works in the key of E every movement is in the tonic.Google Scholar
12 Cf. Joseph Kerman, ‘Beethoven Sketchbooks in the British Museum’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xciii (1966–67), 77; for a complete transcription of the sketchbook see Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zur Pastoralsymphonie Op. 68 und zu den Trios Op. 70, 1 und 2, ed. Dagmar Weise, 2 vols., Bonn, 1961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Musikalisches Wochenblatt, ix (1878), 429.Google Scholar
14 It is possible that the binder, while discarding the other stubs, retained these two which were ‘allowed for’ in the old foliation.Google Scholar
15 Musikalisches Wochenblatt, viii (1877), 593. It is evident that at the time he wrote this essay Nottebohm had not yet seen the London sketchbook.Google Scholar
16 Max Unger, Eine Schweizer Beethovensammlung, Zurich, 1939, pp. 168–9; Hans Schmidt, ‘Verzeichnis der Skizzen Beethovens’, Beethoven-Jahrbuch, vi (1965–68), 7–128, No. 121.Google Scholar
∗ But see Postscript, p. 19.Google Scholar
17 Schmidt, ibid., Nos. 66, 120 (Op. 68); 196 (Op. 70, No. 1). Only one of these, No. 120, has sixteen staves; it is excluded both by watermark and by rastrology from having been part of the London sketchbook. Comparison with other sketchbooks suggests that the London book may originally have had 96 leaves. For Op. 70, No. 2 see note 20.Google Scholar
18 That is not to say that this was necessarily Beethoven's first idea for the finale. At the top of page 110 in Landsberg 10 (on a leaf that directly follows f. 53v and includes sketches for the first two movements) there is a sketch for a D major melody in 2/4 time which may very well be an earlier idea for the opening of the finale. The same idea is repeated and extended on the upper part of page 132 in Landsberg 10, where its continuation fills ten or eleven staves. It is referred to again briefly on f. 54v. The possibility cannot be excluded that a leaf or two has been lost before f. 55r.Google Scholar
19 Lewis Lockwood, ‘On Beethoven's Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation’, Acta Musicologica, xlii (1970), 42–47. The term ‘continuity draft’ was suggested by Joshua Rifkin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Apart from what is in the London sketchbook and in Landsberg 10 the only sketches for Opus 70, No. 2 that are known are two pairs of leaves in Paris (Schmidt Nos. 221 and 227) and two single leaves in Vienna (Schmidt Nos. 305 and 393). The last of these is on sixteen-stave paper, and so far as rastrology and watermark are concerned it could—despite Dagmar Weise's remarks (op. cit., i. 14)—have come from the London book, though I think it unlikely that it did in fact do so.Google Scholar
21 Cf. Alan Tyson, ‘Sketches and autographs’ and ‘Steps to publication—and beyond’, The Beethoven Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune, London, 1971, esp. pp. 451–2 and 466–8.Google Scholar
22 Cf. Lewis Lockwood, ‘Beethoven's Unfinished Piano Concerto of 1815: Sources and Problems’, The Musical Quarterly, lvi (1970), esp. 639–40; idem, ‘The Autograph of the First Movement of Beethoven's Sonata for Violoncello and Pianoforte, Opus 69’, The Music Forum, ii (New York, 1970), esp. p. 78.Google Scholar
23 The page is illustrated in Plate X of the Cary Collection catalogue.Google Scholar
24 It often happens that in rescoring a passage Beethoven fails to eliminate every trace of the earlier version. In this case the violin's second note in bar 27, an inoffensive but somewhat surprising g', immediately makes sense when seen as a survival from the original scoring of the passage.Google Scholar
25 Cf. Tyson in The Beethoven Companion, pp. 453–6.Google Scholar
26 But his devotion to sketching, both at home and on his walks, was something which he never troubled to conceal and which invited comment from his contemporaries. According to Seyfried, he was fond of quoting a line from Schiller's Joan of Arc when taxed in the street with carrying music paper around with him: ‘Without my banner I dare not come!’Google Scholar
27 In the autograph the intercalated bars are actually not 120–21 and 336–7 but 118–19 and 335–6, but the effect is precisely the same.Google Scholar
28 His eye may have caught f. 57r, stave 10, which has the fermata but no written-out cadenza, instead off. 60r, staves 11–13.Google Scholar
