BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, June 7, 1826 (approximately)

Uncle Ludwig is feeling his compositions are unappreciated. Nephew Karl, who is with him, tries to cheer him up. “So many proofs you have about your works being praised and admired and—paid for; you should long ago be above such anxiety.”

The current housekeeper, Elise Seidl, says she cannot make such a mishmash with plums. She says she can only cook properly. Karl adds, “She is very rude.” She does not brook any complaints about her cooking. “She recently said that if she did not cook well enough to be paid 25 florins, then she did not know how the people who paid her 50-60 florins could have been satisfied!”

Uncle Ludwig has an appointment with the tailor, apparently to make pants. Karl asks what time the appointment is. He thinks Uncle Ludwig is being overcharged. “No one pays that.” It takes 3 1/4 ells of fabric for a pair of pants, which should be about 10 florins.

Uncle Ludwig asks how many pairs of pants Karl needs. He says 1 is fine; one pair that he has was shorter to begin with and now it has shrunk too much.

Uncle Ludwig writes down Seidl’s address, Alstergasse 131, which is also the building where the police district headquarters is located.

Conversation Book 112, 2r-3v.

Today’s Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Nr.23) at 180 reviews the Rondo espressivo in E major, op.93, for piano by Beethoven’s former pupil Carl Czerny, published in Leipzig by H.A. Probst. The reviewer is rather harsh, saying, “It is hardly credible that a man like Czerny, who published an F minor sonata for piano – a true masterpiece – should really have composed this bland, cobbled-together oeuvre.” The reviewer demands that someone “show me a piece of music of the same length that, with the same excessive use of passages, arpeggios, and all of the tours de force available to the piano, is more difficult and at the same time more boring than this Finale and the short movements coming before it. But why take a bet in which the proposer knows in advance that he must win?”

In all likelihood, he thinks, this is a fraud, where the most famous names are plastered onto a substandard work by the publisher, as happened to Joseph Wölfl, Muzio Clementi and Mozart [not to mention Beethoven, even before his death and especially afterwards], and would be disowned by Czerny. The review warns musicians and amateurs alike not to look at the name of the composer, but the value of the composition, and recommends finding a music dealer that will allow you to try out the piece at home before purchasing it. [Despite the reviewer’s suspicions, this Rondo espressivo is indeed a genuine, if lesser, Czerny composition. It does not seem to have ever been recorded and is one of many the Czerny works that has fallen into relative obscurity, although it was apparently reprinted in 2006.]