Within a year of Beethoven’s death in 1827, the composer’s friend and music publisher Tobias Haslinger set out to establish a complete edition of his works, for which Haslinger planned to include metronome markings. This latter aspect was not without its complications, for although Beethoven had been completely won over by the revolutionary timekeeper in the final decade of his life, he died before metronomizing the majority of his scores. The publisher, therefore, entrusted this portion of the project to several musicians closely associated with the late composer’s musical circle: violinists Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Karl Holz and pianist Carl Czerny.

Both violinists were intimately familiar with Beethoven and his music. Schuppanzigh had led various string quartets that worked intensely with the composer and had served in the guise of concertmaster for a number of significant Beethoven orchestral premieres, including that of Wellington’s Victory (a work that played no small part in the metronome’s larger history, as we shall see), and Holz had played second violinist to Schuppanzigh as a quartet member and served as Beethoven’s factotum during the last period of the composer’s life. Carl Czerny had come to Beethoven as a piano student in 1801 and continued working with him on and off for two years, after which the two maintained a close relationship (Czerny, as it so happened, served as piano instructor to Beethoven’s nephew Karl, a figure we will meet again during the period Beethoven set out to metronomize his Ninth Symphony). And because Czerny had studied any number of Beethoven’s works with the composer—according to the pianist, he could also play all of Beethoven’s piano music from memory—he was as informed as anyone about the appropriate tempos of his teacher’s repertoire for piano.

Sadly, Haslinger’s planned release of Beethoven’s oeuvre was compromised when a number of publishers refused to cede their rights to Beethoven’s scores. In 1846 Czerny moved ahead with a similar, if less ambitious, undertaking. The pianist’s Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School included the publication of metronome markings for nearly all of Beethoven’s solo piano music, along with those for works for piano and one other instrument.