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THE SHAKESPEARE CONNECTION: BEETHOVEN'S STRING QUARTET OP. 18 NO. 1 AND THE VIENNA HAUSTHEATER
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2021
Abstract
The ‘Amenda anecdote’ from 1856 associates the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 (Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato) with the vault scene of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Sketchbook jottings by Beethoven from 1799, in French, confirm that such a link really existed. The question of what incited him to represent in his music elements of Shakepeare has not been settled to any satisfaction. It seems unlikely that Beethoven read a French version of the play. Nor can a public theatrical or operatic staging have been the stimulus, for the original vault scene was not allowed to be performed by the authorities. This study approaches the Shakespeare connection from the perspective of a cultural practice that has received limited attention in the literature, that of Viennese Haustheater. A performance of the vault scene in this context, it is argued, informed Beethoven's quartet movement. The most crucial piece of evidence are the memoirs of Caroline Pichler, which mention a tableau given at her parents’ house at the end of eighteenth century. One of the claims of the study is that Beethoven's Shakespeare connection was a one-time digression from normal practice, and that it is thus hazardous to draw this particular event into a wider hermeneutic debate.
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References
1 Hanslick, Eduard, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1854), 44Google Scholar.
2 Elterlein, Ernst von, Beethoven's Clavier-Sonaten (Leipzig: Heinrich Matthes, 1856), 26–27Google Scholar. Elterlein regarded Hanslick's ideas as ‘fundamentally invalidated’ (‘gründlich wiederlegt’). He reiterated his views in Beethoven's Symphonien nach ihrem idealen Gehalt (Dresden: Adolph Brauer, 1858), 2–3. The romantic position that Beethoven's music was more than ‘mere sound’ (‘ein blosses Klingen’) and contained ‘certain images and a particular content’ (‘bestimmte Vorstellungen und einen nähere[n] Inhalt’) had already been defended by C. T. Seiffert in ‘Beethoven's Sonaten’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (7 June 1843), 419, and by Theodor Uhlig in ‘Ueber den dichterischen Gehalt Beethoven'scher Tonwerke’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 36 (1852), 131–133, 143–146 and 163–166.
3 Wiedemann, Ferdinand Johann, Musikalische Effectmittel und Tonmalerei (Doprat: Laakmann, 1856), 21Google Scholar. All translations in this article are mine unless stated otherwise.
4 Wiedemann, Musikalische Effectmittel, 20.
5 Lenz, Wilhelm von, Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie, five volumes, volume 4 (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1860), 17Google Scholar.
6 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen, two volumes (Leipzig: Gebrüder Reinecke, 1858). Ludwig Nohl, Beethoven's Leben, three volumes, volume 2 (Leipzig: Verlag von Ambr. Abel, 1867). Nohl described the Adagio from Op. 18 No. 1 as one of the first examples of Beethoven expressing ‘sorrow’ (‘Leid’): volume 2, 96. In the 1909 edition of Nohl by Paul Sakolowski (in which the original was tampered with; see Alfred Kalischer, ‘Bücher’, Die Musik (1902), 1109) the anecdote was specified in a footnote (volume 1, 290). Strikingly, it was not mentioned by Nohl in his account of Amenda in Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner: Ein Bild der Kunstbewegung unseres Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1874), 89–95.
7 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethoven's Leben, three volumes, volume 2 (Berlin: W. Weber, 1872), 114.
8 Gustav Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Leipzig: Peters, 1887), 485. At the time of his original Zweite Beethoveniana (Leipzig: Verlag J. Rieter-Biedermann, 1872) he had not yet known Grasnick 1 and 2. It was Hugo Riemann who incorporated the Nottebohm/Mandyczewski observations into his edition of Thayer's Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, five volumes, volume 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1922), 187–188.
9 Theodor Helm, Beethoven's Streichquartette (Leipzig: E. W. Fritsch, 1885); Hugo Riemann, Beethoven's Streichquartette (Berlin: Schlesinger'sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, 1910).
10 Paul Bekker, Beethoven (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), 474.
11 Paul Mies, Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethovens zur Erkenntnis seines Stiles (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1925), 151: ‘In the end, the poetic idea cannot have been very significant for the composer, for he suppressed the least allusion to it’ (‘die poetische Idee musste doch im Endurteil nicht sehr wesentlich für den Komponisten sein, dass er jede Andeutung unterdrückte’). See below for the influence of this assessment over later scholarship.
12 Anton Schindler, Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven, two volumes (Münster: Aschendorff, 1860), volume 2, 212–222.
13 Carl Czerny, Über den richtigen Vortrag der sämtlichen Beethoven'schen Klavierwerke, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1963), 54, and Die Kunst des Vortrages der ältern und neuen Claviercompositionen oder Die Fortschritte bis zur neuesten Zeit – Supplement (oder 4ther Theil) zur grossen Pianoforte-Schule (Vienna: Diabelli, 1839), 62. See also Beethoven aus der Sicht seiner Zeitgenossen in Tagebüchern, Briefen, Gedichten und Erinnerungen, ed. Klaus Martin Kopitz and Rainer Cadenbach, two volumes (Munich: Henle, 2009; hereafter KC), 226 and 243.
14 Franz Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries, Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven (Koblenz: Rädeker, 1838; hereafter WR), 77–78.
15 KC, 615.
16 KC, 940.
17 Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, ed. Karl-Heinz Köhler, eleven volumes, volume 8 (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1981), 268.
18 Here is not the place to expound on modern and postmodern paradigms pointing to ‘emotional journeys’, ‘psychological narratives’ (within or beyond the musical organization), ‘contextual processes’ and other hermeneutic viewpoints (for a recent discussion see James William Sobaskie, ‘The “Problem” of Schubert's String Quintet’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 2/1 (2005), 57–92, especially 57–60). Rather, the classic formalist/hermeneutic dichotomy is addressed as a historical phenomenon.
19 It was not so much the musical repertory that was responsible for changes in the reception of instrumental music, but transformations in contemporary philosophy. In the aesthetics of post-Kantian idealism the genre was elevated from ‘meaningless play’ to a signifier of the realm of the infinite: see Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (1997), 387–420. On ‘Sonate, que me veux tu?’ see the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (14 November 1798), 109, (25 June and 12 November 1800), 682 and 120, and (4 March 1801), 398.
20 The topic has also been investigated by Steven M. Whiting in ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare: Dramatic Models for the Slow Movement of the String Quartet Op. 18, No. 1’, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 71/3 (2018), 795–838. Whiting offered the suggestion that Beethoven could have been inspired by a metrical rendering of Shakespeare's vault scene by August Wilhelm Schlegel, published in 1796 in German. This proposal runs into difficulties, though, since it does not help account for the French entries in Beethoven's sketchbook (see below). Moreover, Schlegel's translation was not the only one circulating: on 7 January 1797 the Dollischen Buchhandlung am Stephansplatz offered ‘Romeo und Julie. Trauerspiel in 5 Aufzügen nach Shakespear. 8. [1]796 17 kr.’ (Wiener Zeitung, 61).
21 KC, 10.
22 Peter Clive, Beethoven and His World: A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5–6. Amenda left because he felt the need to assist a disabled brother with twelve children. About the return trip he recollected that he arrived by boat in Riga on 31 October 1799; see Ludwig van Beethoven: Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg (Munich: Henle, 1996–1998; hereafter BGA), No. 43, note 1, and KC, 8. A few months later, on 26 February 1800, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote: ‘A short time ago, Mr. Amenda, son of a Kurland pastor, has returned home from his seven-year musical travels, and his excellent playing on the violin, his enjoyable compositions and his general sociability show that he knows how to amuse people. With powerful bow strokes, skilful passagework etc. he particularly excels in the Adagio, and he gains much applause from the audience’ (‘Vor Kurzem ist Herr Amenda, der Sohn eines Pastors aus Kurland, von seinen siebenjährigen musikalischen Reisen zurückgekehrt, und zeigt durch sein ganz vortreffliches Violinspiel, durch angenehme Kompositionen, und durch allgemeine Humanität, dass er zu reisen verstanden habe. Bey vieler Kraft seines Bogens, Fertigkeit in Passagen etc. zeichnet er sich noch ganz vorzüglich im Adagio aus, und findet reichen Beyfall beym Publikum’) (395).
23 At that time only this preliminary ‘Amenda version’ of the quartet existed, which was later rejected. It was entitled ‘Quartetto Nro II’ and was thus planned as the second of the Op. 18 set. Later (BGA, No. 67), Beethoven insisted that Amenda should not show this copy to others, for he had substantially improved the work. This letter was first published in Signale für die Musikalische Welt (1852), 33–34, when the ‘Amenda version’ had not yet been made public; see Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Chronologisches Verzeichniss der Werke Ludwig van Beethoven's (Berlin: Ferdinand Schneider, 1865), 37.
24 Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 36–42. Writing in a Toveyian vein, Kerman was critical about the ‘raw exterior emotion’ and the ‘melodramatic gestures’ in the music; he argued that Beethoven ‘was overestimating his potential for tragedy’.
25 Brandenburg alleged that the departure was delayed (BGA, No. 44, note 1). On 24 June, however, one day before Beethoven's present, Constanze Mozart wrote a commendatory letter for Amenda, who was on the verge of travelling to Prague together with a friend who played the guitar. There they gave a concert, and Amenda wrote details of this on the back of an undated letter he had received from Beethoven. Evidently, much time was taken for the return trip, and there is no convincing reason for doubting an arrival in Prague on 26 June. See Ludwig Nohl, ‘Zur Biographie Beethoven's’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 39 (1872), 46, 55 and 66. In Petersburg, Nohl had a meeting with descendants of Amenda, whose recollections seem trustworthy. New in Nohl's account (which must have eluded Brandenburg and Clive) was that Amenda, before coming to Vienna, had studied at the university in Bonn, where he may have heard about Beethoven's reputation. In fact, this may have incited him to seek contact with Beethoven in Vienna; their meeting may thus not have been coincidental. Also noteworthy are Nohl's remarks that Beethoven and Amenda regularly gave concerts in Vienna, and that the latter possessed a visiting card of his friend with the text ‘Louis van Beethoven’.
26 BGA, No. 186; admittedly, no names are given.
27 KC, 7–8 (15 January 1806).
28 KC, 8; BGA, No. 51. To be sure, this had nothing to do with same-sex desire.
29 Penetrating observations concerning this can be found in Adam Ockelford, ‘Relating Musical Structure and Content to Aesthetic Response: A Model and Analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 110’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 130/1 (2005), 74–118, particularly 91.
30 As Edward T. Cone formulated the matter in The Composer's Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 166: ‘We subconsciously ascribe to the music a content based on the correspondence between musical gestures and their patterns on the one hand, and isomorphically analagous experiences, inner and outer, on the other.’ He reiterated this view in ‘Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics’, 19th–Century Music 5/3 (1982), 239.
31 The word ‘dabei’ seems to imply ‘while composing’, but because it does not resist interpretation it was left untranslated. Incidentally, Beethoven's manner of speech here was conspicuously similar to what Ries reported about the ‘Eroica’, that Beethoven thought of Bonaparte while composing it: ‘Bei dieser Symphonie hatte er sich Buonaparte gedacht’ (WR, 77).
32 ‘Good!’ (the dubious exclamation mark included) can be found in Thayer's Life of Beethoven, ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 261; Philip Radcliffe, Beethoven's String Quartets (London: Hutchington, 1965), 24; and in Myron Schwager, ‘Beethoven's Programs: What is Provable?’, The Beethoven Newsletter (Winter 1989), 49. ‘Right’ can be found in Whiting, ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 795.
33 Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81.
34 ‘Wohl’ was left untranslated in Richard Kramer, Unfinished Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173, and Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: Norton, 2003), 165. For another problematic translation of ‘wohl’ see Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, Beethoven und seine “Unsterbliche Geliebte” Josephine Brunsvik (Zurich: Atlantis, 1983), 249.
35 A connection was also suggested in Whiting, ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 821.
36 A convincing layout of the genesis of the Op. 18 quartets may be found in Richard Kramer's doctoral dissertation, ‘The Sketches for Beethoven's Violin Sonatas, Opus 30: History, Transcription, Analysis’, two volumes (Princeton University, 1973), volume 1, 115–137. Grasnick 1 and 2 were originally a single volume when Beethoven was using them. See The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, ed. Alan Tyson and others (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 85. No sketches for the second movement in Grasnick 1 were found by Erna Szabo, ‘Ein Skizzenbuch Beethovens aus den Jahren 1798–99: Übertragung und Untersuchung’ (PhD dissertation, Universität Bonn, 1951), but Donald Tobias Greenfield identified some tentative ones on the final pages of the sketchbook in ‘Sketch Studies for Three Movements of Beethoven's String Quartets, Opus 18#1 and 2’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1983), 80–82. Erica Buurman found precursors for the opening theme of the movement in Landsberg 7, on pages dated mid-1798, in ‘Beethoven's Compositional Approach to Multi-Movement Structures in His Instrumental Works’ (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2013), 70–72.
37 Wilhelm Virneisel, Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch zu Streichquartetten aus Op. 18, two volumes (Bonn: Beethovenhaus, 1974), volume 1, 46–47, and volume 2, 8–9. The final phrase is often presented in the literature as ‘sou[s]pirs’, but ‘soupirs’ was common language in Beethoven's time: see the article ‘Le dernier Soupir’ in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden 20 (1805), 334.
38 Beethoven Werke, series 6, volume 3, Streichquartette 1, ed. Paul Mies (Munich: Henle, 1962), 133–138.
39 This was first promoted by Arnold Schering in Beethoven in neuer Deutung (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1934), 16, and it was elaborated by Bernd Edelmann in ‘Die poetische Idee des Adagio von Beethovens Quartett op. 18,1’, in Festschrift Rudolph Bockhold zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Norbert Dubowy and Sören Meyer-Eller (Pfaffenhofen: Ludwig, 1992), 247–267. The latter argued that the sigh motives are at the heart of the first theme, an idea endorsed by Lewis Lockwood: ‘essential in the movement is the expressive conflict of these two basic musical ideas’ (The Music and the Life, 165). Lockwood even suggested a connection between Juliet and Beethoven's piano pupil Julia Guicciardi (‘Reshaping the Genre: Beethoven's Piano Sonatas from Op. 22 to Op. 28 (1799–1801)’, Israel Studies in Musicology 6 (1996), 13), but there are no indications of a romance in 1799 – if one existed at all. Whiting rightly dismissed a ‘program that governs the whole sonata structure’ in ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 803.
40 Dieter Martin, ‘Deutsche Shakespeare-Opern um 1800’ (2005), Goethezeitportal www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/epoche/martin_shakespeare_opern.pdf (15 May 2020).
41 For an overview see Ursula Kramer, ‘Herausforderung Shakespeare: “Analoge” Musik für das Schauspiel an deutschsprachigen Bühnen zwischen 1778 und 1825’, Die Musikforschung 55 (2002), 129–144.
42 Most, but not all, was collected in Donald MacArdle, ‘Shakespeare and Beethoven’, The Musical Times 105 (April 1964), 260–261.
43 KC, 1005, 167, and Anton Schindler, Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven (Münster: Aschendorff, 1840), 266. A few years earlier, Schindler had claimed that while composing the Ninth Symphony Beethoven had ‘devoted nearly all his remaining free time to Shakespeare’; see Anton Schindler, ‘Etwas über Beethovens 7. Sinfonie in A dur’, in Bäuerle's Theater Zeitung (= Wiener allgemeine Theaterzeitung) (5 April 1831), 5. Needless to say, this should be taken with a grain of salt.
44 Egon Komorzynski, ‘Grillparzers Klavierlehrer Johann Mederitsch, genannt Gallus (1752–1835)’, in Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft series 3 volume 3 (1960), 67.
45 See Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (4 March 1801), 392, note 2, (8 July 1801), 683, (24 March 1802), 421–425, (15 September 1802), 830, and (27 July 1803), 722. This ‘romanticism’ was later associated with Beethoven, whose abrupt juxtapositions and disruptions were labelled ‘Bizarrerie’. In the issue of 8 June 1814 the AMZ commented: ‘Perhaps the orginality of his [Beethoven's] most perfect compositions can only be compared with the originality of Shakespeare. In his works the most profound humour and the most tender, romantic feelings have entirely merged’ (‘Vielleicht ist die Originalität seiner vollendetsten Werke nur mit der Originalität Shakespeare's zu vergleichen. Die tiefste Humor und das zarteste, romantische Gefühl sind in denselben völlig eins geworden’) (395).
46 Beethoven analysed Mozartean models and copied out Mozart's String Quartet k387; see Kramer, Violin Sonatas, volume 1, 455.
47 On 17 December 1796 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was offered for sale by bookseller Carl Schaumburg und Compagnie in Vienna (Wiener Zeitung, page 3630). On 1 September 1802 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (785–787) stressed its significance for a good understanding of both Shakespeare and Shakespeare-related music.
48 August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Ueber Shakspeares Romeo und Julia’, Die Horen (1797), Stück 6, 18–48; Schlegel, Shakspeare's Dramatische Werke, volume 1 (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1797). In the issue dated 4 January 1817 the Zeitung für die elegante Welt discussed a theatrical adaptation of Schlegel's text by Josef Schreyvogel (127–128).
49 BGA, No. 442.
50 In his Nachlass were four volumes: Nos 9 (1779, with Romeo and Juliet), 10 (1778), 3 (1783) and 4 (1804). They were embezzled by Anton Schindler; see Eveline Bartlitz, Die Beethoven-Sammlung in der Musikabteilung der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek (Berlin: Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, 1970), 210–211. A fifth Shakespeare item (from 1825), comprising Der Sturm (The Tempest) (Bartlitz, Beethoven-Sammlung, 216–217), may have been smuggled in by Schindler in order to substantiate claims about the Piano Sonatas Opp. 31 No. 2 and 57. On Beethoven's underlining and markings in Romeo and Juliet see Karl-Heinz Köhler, ‘Beethovens literarische Kontakte: Ein Beitrag zum Weltbild des Komponisten’, in Bericht über den internationalen Beethoven-Kongress, 10.–12. Dezember 1970 in Berlin, ed. Heinz Alfred Brockhaus and Konrad Niemann (Berlin: Verlag neue Musik Berlin, 1971), 487. For details about Eschenburg's translation see Whiting, ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 810–812.
51 Rudolf Pečman, ‘Ludwig van Beethoven und Jiří Antonín Benda’, in Bericht über den internationalen Beethoven-Kongress, ed. Brockhaus and Niemann, 454. Whiting (‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 815) provides a review from the Gazette de Bonn (10 November 1789).
52 See the review of the premiere, on 7 April 1797, of the ‘grosse Opera seria in drey Aufzügen, betitelt: Romeo e Giulie’ (Wiener Zeitung, 12 April 1797). For a later, more extended review see Zeitung für die elegante Welt (2 June 1804), 528. It was still being staged in 1817; see Zeitschrift für die elegante Welt (12 August 1817), 1264. In 1810 Beethoven accompanied the singer Antonie Adamberger in a ‘well-known’ recitative and rondo, ‘Ombra adorata aspetta’, from this opera (see KC, 3).
53 Owen Jander, ‘Genius in the Arena of Charlatanry’, in Musica franca: Essays in Honor of Franc D'Accone, ed. Irene Alm and others (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1997), 593, note 17.
54 On the ending of Zingarelli's libretto see Whiting, ‘Beethoven Translating Shakespeare’, 817–821.
55 See Norbert Bachleitner, Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2017), 251: ‘Practically all Shakespeare plays had to be trimmed in order to be viable for performance on an Austrian stage’ (‘Fast alle Stücke Shakespeares mussten mit der Schere bearbeitet werden, wenn man sie auf einer österreichischen Bühne aufführen wollte’). No adverse effects on public morality were allowed, and stories about brigands, robbers, pirates, licentious adventurers or secret associations were forbidden, as well as glorifications of the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. Nor were assaults on religion, the church or the clergy allowed (470–477).
56 Carl Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte der Theater Wiens I’, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft 25 (1915), 278.
57 Josef Schreyvogels Tagebücher, ed. Carl Glossy, two volumes (Berlin: Verlag der Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte, 1903), volume 2, 456–457.
58 On 3 December 1794 the Eschenburg edition was offered for sale in the Wiener Zeitung (page 3465): ‘Shakespears (Wilhelm) Schauspiele, von J. J. Eschenburg a[us] d[em] Englisch[en] übersetzt, 20 Bände, 8. Mannheim 1780, ganz neu braun steif rückwärts mit Titel gebund[en] 12 fl’. On 28 April 1798 (Wiener Zeitung, page 1,288) the Dollischen Buchhandlung offered a ‘Mannheim 1783’ edition consisting of twenty-two volumes. Shortly afterwards the firm announced a further new edition, of which the first volume was offered on 4 July 1798 (Wiener Zeitung, page 2,003).
59 Beate Angelika Kraus, ‘Beethoven liest international’, in Beethoven liest, ed. Bernhard R. Appel and Julia Ronge (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 2016), 92–99.
60 This is shown in facsimile in Virneisel, Beethoven: Ein Skizzenbuch, volume 2, 8. Similarly, sketches for the Prometheus ballet (1800–1801) have the expressions ‘les trois graces’, ‘les enfans pleurent’ and ‘Promethe mort’; see Karl Lothar Mikulicz, Ein Notierungsbuch von Beethoven (Hildesheim: Olms, 1972), 65–67, 77, 83, 99, 101 and others, and the evaluation of these entries by Egon Voss in ‘Schwierigkeiten im Umgang mit dem Ballett ‘Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus’ von Salvatore Viganò und Ludwig van Beethoven’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 53/1 (1996), 29–30.
61 Richard Kramer, ‘“Das Organische der Fuge”: On the Autograph of Beethoven's String Quartet in F major, Opus 59, No. 1’, in The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, ed. Christoph Wolff (Cambridge, MA: Isham Library, 1980), 231.
62 See the report by Karl Gottlieb Freudenberg in KC, 277, who noted that command of French was perceived as a Bildunsgradmesser (yardstick of sophistication).
63 Some of their letters can be found in Rita Steblin, ‘“A dear, enchanting girl who loves me and whom I love”: New Facts about Beethoven's Beloved Piano Pupil Julie Guicciardi’, Bonner Beethoven-Studien (2010), 89–152, and Steblin, ‘Franz Xaver Kleinheinz, “A very talented pianist who measures up to Beethoven”: New Documents from the Brunsvik Family’, Bonner Beethoven-Studien (2016), 107–174. That both Brunsvik sisters read French literature can be inferred from BGA, No. 219.
64 After a while, the use of French elicited discontent. When Ferdinand Ries dedicated his Piano Sonatas Op. 1 to Beethoven in 1806, the reviewer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was displeased by the ‘worn-out and by now shallow French expressions, [which are] too often used for even trite productions’ (‘abgebrauchter, u. durch öftern Gebrauch beym Gleichgüligsten, trivial gewordener, französischer Redensarten’); Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (4 March 1807), 362–365.
65 He was already using ‘Louis’ in 1795; see Zoltan Falvy, ‘Beethovens Beziehungen zu Ungarn: Zur Auffindung von zwei unbekannten Briefen des Meisters’, Musica 9 (1956), 125. ‘Louis’ was also used by Therese Brunsvik during their meetings in 1799; see Marie Lipsius (‘La Mara’), Beethovens Unsterbliche Geliebte: Das Geheimnis der Gräfin Brunsvik und ihre Memoiren (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1909), 64. See also note 25.
66 For a survey of the various manifestations of Haustheater see Birgit Joos, Lebende Bilder: Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit (Berlin: Reimer, 1999).
67 Carl Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte I’, 1–2 and 272–273. See also Bachleitner, Die literarische Zensur, 244.
68 According to Tia DeNora (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley: University of Califonria Press, 1995), 53), something similar happened with musical concerts: ‘the lively salon life of the 1790s did hinder the growth of a public musical life in Vienna’.
69 Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte I’, 143. On Haustheater productions outside Vienna see Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte I’, 304. For a debate about the pros and cons of Haustheater see W. Hebenstreit, ‘Sind Privat- oder Liebhaber-Bühnen zu dulden?’, in Wiener-Moden-Zeitung und Zeitschrift für Kunst, schöne Literatur und Theater (14 and 18 September 1816), 473–478 and 481–486.
70 Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte I’, 169–170.
71 Jahrbuch der Tonkunst von Wien und Prag (Prague: Im von SchönfeldischenVerlag, 1796), 25; Rita Steblin, Beethoven in the Diaries of Johann Nepomuk Chotek (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 2013), 173.
72 See Edith Koll, ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wiener Haustheater im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Neue Forschungsergebnisse aus der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, ed. Franz Patzer (Vienna: Jugend & Volk, 1979), 180.
73 KC, 161.
74 Wiener Theater Almanach für das Jahr 1795 (Vienna: Camesina, 1795), 8.
75 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe geschrieben auf einer Reise nach Wien und den Oesterreichischen Staaten zu Ende des Jahres 1808 und zu Anfang 1809, two volumes (Amsterdam: Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir, 1810), volume 2, 41. For more on the tableaux of Madame Händel see ‘Ueber die mimischen Darstellungen der Madam Hendel in Leipzig’, in Zeitschrift für die elegante Welt (1810), 329–333 and 353–355.
76 Journal des Luxus und der Moden 23 (1808), 450. It is also consistent with French Haustheater performances organized by Ludwig Starhemberg in London, in 1798–1799 for Austrian guests (one of whom was Ferdinand Waldstein); see Josef Heer, ‘Der Graf von Waldstein und sein Verhältnis zu Beethoven' (PhD dissertation, Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm Universität Bonn, c1933), 22.
77 Carl Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte der Theater Wiens II (1821 bis 1830)’, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft (1920), 80.
78 Over the years, ‘tableau’ was also used to denote a fully fledged theatrical play; see, for instance, Der Sammler 12 (1820), 16.
79 Glossy, ‘Zur Geschichte I’, 142.
80 Ludwig Böck, ‘Die Gesellschaft’, in Ein Wiener Beethoven Buch, ed. Alfred Orel (Vienna: Gerlach und Wiedling, c1921), 50–51.
81 The phenomenon of the tableau was briefly discussed by Richard Will in The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 52, where it was noted that ‘later eigtheenth- and early nineteenth-century tableaux vivants and “attitudes” sought . . . to suggest the action of an entire (usually classical) story by representing an evocative moment, sometimes with music’. The phenomenon was traced back by him to Denis Diderot in mid-eighteenth-century France. Nancy November argues that a tableau consisted of ‘simple plots . . . in which action should take second place to a more static and expansive working out of the characters’ psychological depths’: ‘Instrumental Arias or Sonic Tableaux: “Voice” in Haydn's String Quartets Opp. 9 and 17’, Music & Letters 89/3 (2008), 351.
82 Johann Nepomuk Chotek recorded the contents of this ‘Concert und 3 Tableaux’; see Steblin, Chotek, 170–172. The discerning Max Unger raised awareness of this event in ‘Nova Beethoveniana’, Die Musik (1912/1913), 216.
83 Steblin, Chotek, 179–180. See also the magazine Thalia: Ein Abendblatt, den Freunden der dramatischen Musen geweiht (11 April 1812), 119–120: ‘The concert was opened with the well-known overture Coriolan by Mr van Beethoven. This was followed by the tableau: Coriolan after Shakespeare by Hamilton, arranged by Mr. Tremel’ (‘Den Anfang machte die bekannte Ouvertüre aus Coriolan, von Hern. van Beethoven. Darauf folgte das Gemählde: Coriolan, nach Shakespeare von Hamilton, angeordnet von Hrn. Tremel’). It has never been ascertained what motivated Beethoven to compose his Coriolan overture (in 1807), and no particulars about a commission or payment have survived. Collin's play was revived on 24 April 1807 (it had been premiered as early as 24 November 1802 with music from Mozart's Idomeneo), but by then the overture had already been performed at Lobkowitz's (and evidently as well at Lichnowsky's; see Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (8 April 1807), 336). Irrespective of Beethoven's ultimate wording, ‘composed for the tragedy of Collin’ (BGA, Nos 277 and 278; 26 April 1807), it is possible that the original incentive was a Haustheater about the Roman general organized by Lobkowitz.
84 Matthew Head, ‘Beethoven Heroine: A Female Allegory of Music and Authorship in Egmont’, 19th-Century Music 30/2 (2006), 109.
85 Journal für Literatur, Kunst, Luxus und Mode 20 (1815), 38–43. One of the noblemen taking part in this production was Ferdinand Waldstein.
86 Der Sammler 7 (1815), 80.
87 Schreyvogels Tagebücher, ed. Glossy, volume 2, 442.
88 Der Sammler 8 (1816), 220; Schreyvogels Tagebücher, ed. Glossy, volume 2, 443–444.
89 Der Sammler 12 (1820), 91.
90 Zeitschrift für die elegante Welt (10 April 1817), 566–568.
91 Franz Schubert's contribution to private Haustheater was documented by Otto Biba; see ‘Schubert's Position in Viennese Musical Life’, 19th-Century Music 3/2 (1979), 112.
92 Der Sammler 8 (1816), 192.
93 The term, designating ‘middle-class’, is taken from DeNora, Construction of Genius, 167.
94 Caroline Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben, two volumes (Munich: Müller, 1914). In the Jahrbuch der Tonkunst von Wien und Prag, 19, young Caroline was adduced as ‘one of the most prominent female pianists of Vienna’ (‘Sie ist eine der ersten Klavierspielerinnen Wiens’). She had personal contact with Mozart, Haydn, Paisiello, Cherubini and Schubert, and heard Beethoven play at concerts (but never met him).
95 Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten, volume 1, 150–151. Offered for sale in the Wiener Zeitung of 30 October 1802 (page 3,899) was ‘a complete set of Haustheater props and all that belongs to it, still very new’ (‘eine ganze Haustheater-Einrichtung, mit allen Zugehörungen, noch ganz neu’).
96 In France, the ideal tableau consisted of an ‘easily comprehended series of distinctive scenes’: Will, Characteristic Symphony, 52.
97 Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten, volume 1, 151.
98 Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten, volume 2, 146.
99 Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten, volume 1, xiii–xiv.
100 Berlinische musikalische Zeitung (1793), 151.
101 KC, 10.
102 Ludwig van Beethoven: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, ed. Kurt Dorfmüller, Norbert Gertsch, Julia Ronge, Gertraut Haberkamp and Georg Kinsky, two volumes (Munich: Henle, 2014), volume 1, 100.
103 Pichler only recollected about Beethoven that she had ‘heard him play’, without further detail (Denkwürdigkeiten, volume 2, 151). Wilhelm Virneisel was led to speculate that she met him in her salon in 1804, together with the poet Karl Streckfuss: ‘Aus Beethovens Skizzenbüchern’, in Colloquium Amicorum Schmidt-Görg, ed. Siegfried Kross and Hans Schmidt (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1967), 432–433. However, this must remain conjectural.
104 Remarkably, Beethoven was openly invited to write music to Shakespeare plays some years later: ‘If only the greatest of romantic composers, L. v. Beethoven, would enrich us with a musical Shakespeare gallery! . . . How would these specimens of supreme poetry be illuminated, and their effect increased, by means of introductory overtures in full-scale Shakespearian vein, and entr'actes accompanying our feelings, preparing us for what lies in store. . . . With what majestic power, for example, would a Beethoven overture offer us glimpses at the dark realm of Macbeth! How would his music blend into one divine wreath [the concepts of] love and grief, death and transfiguration in Romeo and Juliet!’ (‘Möchte uns doch dagegen der grösste Romantiker der Tonkunst, L. v. Beethoven, mit einer musikalischen Shakespeare-Galerie bereichern! . . . Wie erleichtert und vermehrt würde nun aber die Wirkung dieser Werke der höchsten Poesie, wenn Ouverturen, ganz in Sh’.s Geist gedacht, sie eröffneten, in Zwischen-Akten unsern Gefühlen begegneten, und für das Kommende sie vorbereiteteten. . . . Mit welcher gigantischer Kraft würde uns Beethoven z. B. in einer Ouverture zum Macbeth in die Tiefen des Reiches der Finsternis hinab schauen lassen! wie würde er in einer Composition zu Romeo u. Julie Liebe und Schmerz, Tod und Verklärung, zu einem himmlischen Kranze verschlingen!’); Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (8 December 1813), 806. This gives pointed expression to the similarities of style perceived between Shakespeare and Beethoven at the time.
105 Greenfield, Sketch Studies, 216. Such a procedure may have been of a structural nature. At least, something similar has been observed about the opening movement of the Ninth Symphony: ‘The composer appears to be reviewing plans for the symphonic whole before refocusing on the first movement exposition. Possibly a short pause in the sketching precipitated this momentary stepping back to assess wider concerns’; Jenny L. Kallick, ‘A Study of the Advanced Sketches and Full Score Autograph for the First Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Opus 125’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1987), 45. John K. Knowles makes similar remarks about the first movement of the Seventh Symphony in ‘The Sketches for the First Movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony’ (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1984), 430 and 435.
106 Ludwig Nohl found a leaf dating from 1799 with the first eight bars of the violin part of the finale of Op. 18 No. 1 (together with a lengthy sketch for the song ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben’), which includes, in a foreign hand, the cryptic inscription: ‘The final section of his recent Septet as a motto for the text’ (‘Der Schluss von seinem letzten Septuor als Motto für den Text’). Perhaps this ‘text’ was a reference to a Haustheater performance, for which the finale of the recently composed septet was used. See Max Unger, ‘Neue Liebe, neues Leben: Die Urschrift und die Geschichte eines Goethe-Beethoven-Liedes’, Zeitschrift für Musik 103 (1936), 1062.
107 Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Aut. 28, fol. 46r; see Hans-Günther Klein, Ludwig van Beethoven: Autographe und Abschriften Katalog (Berlin: Merseburger, 1975), 106. For a dating of the leaf see Douglas Porter Johnson, Beethoven's Early Sketches in the ‘Fischhof Miscellany’ (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977), 343–345.
108 See, for example, the review of Phantasieen über die Kunst by Ludwig Tieck, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (3 March 1800), 401–407.
109 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (11 August 1813), 526–527.
110 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, ‘Review and Literary Notices’ (of Marx's Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1859)), in Atlantic Monthly 6 (1860), 364–369 and 502.
111 Hadow, William Henry, Beethoven's Op. 18 Quartets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 16Google Scholar.
112 Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets, 41.
113 Lockwood, The Music and the Life, 165.
114 Churgin, Bathia, Transcendent Mastery: Studies in the Music of Beethoven (New York: Pendragon, 2008), 335Google Scholar. Curiously, she included the ‘melancholic’ Op. 18 No. 6 in her list, which shows the danger of driving artificial wedges into the oeuvre for the sake of categorization. This tends to blur, for example, Beethoven's remarkable flexibility with regard to format: the WoO 74 piano variations call for the performance of a song as the theme, the Piano Sonata Op. 81a invites singing or reciting ‘Le-be-wohl’, and had Wegeler followed Beethoven's wishes (WR, 48), the Piano Sonata Op. 26 would now have carried a text.
115 Lockwood's assumption reminds one of Alexander Pushkin's phrase ‘An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscipts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings’ (cited from Kallick, ‘Ninth Symphony’, 8). As for the salvation of sketches, while one reason was clearly to go back at them – as Beethoven himself articulated in 1812, ‘One of the many ideas that cannot be used on the spot may be worth saving up’ (Unger, Max, ‘From Beethoven's Workshop’, The Musical Quarterly 24/3 (1938), 325Google Scholar) – many were of little practical use, and one wonders if he perhaps wanted them to become objects of systematic public scrutiny. Post-Kantian idealism dominated, and during moments of introspection Beethoven may have reflected upon the labyrinth of his own mind and on his capacity to conjure up such worlds of imagery that it made criticism resort to metaphorical excess. Already in 1809, prior to E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous text on the Fifth Symphony, the Journal des Luxus und der Moden had noted that Beethoven's symphonies ‘are about a higher world of wonder and spirituality, which magically unfolds itself before the inner senses of the enraptured listener, confronting him with a full panoply of heterogenous imagery and sensations’ (‘So viel ist wohl gewiss, das in Beethoven's Sinfonien eine höhere Wunder- und Geisterwelt liegt, die sich vor dem innern Sinn des entzückten Zuhörers zauberisch schön entfaltet, und ihm eine Fülle der mannichfaltigsten Bilder und Empfindungen zuführt’) (April 1809, 243).
116 As advocated by in, William Kinderman ‘Transformational Processes in Beethoven's Op. 18 Quartets’, in The String Quartets of Beethoven, ed. Kinderman, William (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 25Google Scholar.