BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Friday, August 25, 1826

Unpaid assistant Karl Holz visits Beethoven. He is surprised that Nephew Karl has not written to his Uncle Ludwig from the hospital.

Holz tells Beethoven that he has learned that in Rodaun [an area slightly southwest of Vienna] there are also baths that are pretty similar to the ones in Meidling. “The area there is very beautiful.”

Holz mentions the issues with Imperial War Agent Ignaz Dembscher, brought on by Beethoven’s demand that Dembscher pay violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh if he wants to use the score of the op.130 quartet for a private concert. “I think I already told you about the tension and Dembscher’s naughty behavior towards me, therefore I wrote to him last Friday [August 18th; Holz had previously told Beethoven about this letter on Tuesday, August 22.] “I thought it necessary to dissolve our musical relationships. Do not seek the reason for this in Beethoven, nor in Schuppanzigh, nor in me, but only in yourself. Sine ira et odio [Without anger and hatred]. With utmost respect, your most humble…”

“Now, today,” Holz continues, “he wrote a letter to me, which I will return, however, with my notes. He complained to someone else that I showed so little respect to his great house. I bet that if you had written a letter like that to the Archduke, then he would have taken it just as well as the Herr Agent did the opposite. I have nothing from him and I am happy that it is over. I care so little about it that I do not even want to annoy him. If I wanted to be as nasty as him, I could easily take revenge. I could have the canon [Es muss sein, WoO 196] printed with an anecdote that would then be ripped away by the reader.” Holz adds, “It was also well-known at the stock exchange that you wrote the canon: Es muss seyn. Either he should have taken it all as a joke and not paid anything, at worst, or if he paid in earnest, then he should not have dwelt on it so. How inconsequent! I have known him for many years, and yet I did not know him.” Should I write him, Beethoven asks. Dembscher does not deserve even one line from you, Holz thinks. [Holz would publish the anecdote in 1844; Dembscher had died in 1838. Holz’s motive was more likely refuting the spurious claim made by unethical biographer Anton Schindler that the canon had arisen from a dispute with a housekeeper.]

Beethoven inquires after Holz’s friends, the Bogner family. They are doing well, he says. “I like to go there because it is a family who ignores all the compulsory rules of etiquette and ceremonials. There one can feel at home.” [Holz has definitely made himself at home in the Bogner household; he will propose to one of the daughters next month.]

Bogner has established certain humorous taxes for his guests:
He who takes off his hat in the garden out of courtesy pays — 5 florins.
He who does not take off his coat if he feels too hot — pays 10 florins.
He who is thirsty and does not ask for something to drink pays — 20 florins.

Holz asks about Beethoven’s mattress and whether it is hard. Beethoven does not have a deerskin. Holz suggests that Beethoven should do something for his health. [This remark may tie back to the comment about the baths at Rodaun.]

Conversation Book 118, 30r-33v.

Today, according to the account register of music publisher Mathias Artaria, he pays an engraver named Kurka 24 florins for the engraving of the title page to the op.130 string quartet, Nr.835. Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana, at p.365.

Sometime during the month of August, 1826, Beethoven’s former unpaid assistant Franz Oliva gets a new passport. He had gone to Russia on business on a one-year passport, and never returned, resulting in a summons for him to appear before the court, which was published in the newspaper. Beethoven may have written him to advise Oliva of this legal trouble, causing him to get the new passport.

Oliva ended up overstaying this second passport too; he seems never to have returned to Austria. A citation dated June 6, 1828, issued by the government of Lower Saxony, recites: “Since Franz Oliva, Russian College Professor [and two others] who in the month of August 1826 received passports from the Lower Saxony Departmental Government for travel abroad for a period of one year, have neither returned after the passport period expired, nor after the summons issued by the Vienna Magistrate on March 8th of this year, nor have they applied for new passports, they are hereby summoned to return within one year and to answer for their unauthorized absence. Otherwise, proceedings will be initiated against them according to the provisions of the Imperial Emigration Patent of 1784.” Wiener Zeitung Amts-Blatt supplement of June 26, 1828, at 1021. Oliva will spend the rest of his life in Russia, working as a professor of German language and literature at the Imperial Lyceum in St. Petersburg.