BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO: Thursday, June 10, 1824

Today is moving day to the country for Beethoven. Nephew Karl comes to see him. Apparently Ludwig came by his boarding room very late but missed Karl as he was walking around the garden.

Uncle Ludwig goes to a restaurant (most likely the one downstairs from his Vienna apartment) to wait for the transport wagon. While there, he reads yesterday’s newspaper and copies down an advertisement for Johannesbrunnen wine in water, as a mineral water cure in stone cups, not in glass bottles.

He also notes from the same newspaper the book The Art of Becoming a Skillful Swimmer in a Short Time, translated from the English, for 1 florin W.W. Beethoven accidentally writes down the wrong bookshop, picking up the name from the previous advertisement.

Eventually the men come to move Beethoven to the country, and he heads to Penzing for the summer. But his stay ends up being quite brief.

Conversation Book 71, 29r-29v. This concludes Conversation Book 71. It is possible that there is a short conversation book missing here, because the next book picks up on June 17, 1824. But if he had no visitors in this first week at Penzing, he probably communicated with housekeeper Barbara Holzmann using whatever scraps of paper were at hand, since she seldom writes in the conversation books.

A review of the opera Jessonda (1822) by Louis Spohr in today’s issue of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung incidentally contains at 391 an interesting view of Beethoven: “In Beethoven’s case, a mind that is always awake but operates in secret protects against excessive plunges into debauchery. Yet one can also see and feel in his symphonies not infrequently the work of a mind that is too strong and consequently disturbing, since here it is precisely the predominance of the imagination that must best serve.”