BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Friday, August 27, 1824

Assuming his plans remain consistent with his statement to Nanette Streicher in his letter to her yesterday, Beethoven returns to Vienna today.

Beethoven continues his to-do list. He begins with a repeat of an entry he made on Wednesday, August 25:

+To [attorney Johann Baptist] Bach concerning the re-printing.
+Karl to [Dr.] Staudenheim.
+He is always to take a carriage.
+Ask Haslinger whether it is possible to engrave the score from the parts.
+To Berlin.
+[Tenor Anton] Haitzinger. [He had sung in both of Beethoven’s May 1824 Akademie concerts.]

Beethoven also copies an advertisement from today’s Intelligenzblatt, Nr.1197 at 229:

+Kohlmesser Gasse No.475, Apartment, 4th floor [5th floor American], 3 spacious rooms, etc., view of the Danube.

Conversation Book 73, 24r-24v.This concludes Conversation Book 73. Conversation Book 74 will pick up on about August 31.

The Wiener Zeitung for today (Nr.197) at 824 makes reference to the Lithographic Institute’s newly-published set of six variations with coda for violin with piano accompaniment, on a theme from Ludwig v. Beethoven, composed by Joseph Böhm, Franz Clement, Georg Hellmesberger Sr., Léon de Saint-Lubin, Joseph Mayseder, and Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Böhm, Mayseder and Schuppanzigh were all violinists who had taken part in Beethoven’s Akademie concerts in May, 1824. This advertisement is repeated in the September 10 and 15 1824 edition of the Wiener Zeitung and again in the October 7 and 13 numbers.

[The theme by Beethoven is not here identified, but it was a theme from the Choral Fantasy, op.80. A fuller review of this set of variations will follow elsewhere in the October 30, 1824 issue of the Vienna Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. These variations were recently reprinted by Edition Offenburg, edited by Reinhard Goebel. A review of this reprint by Mary Nemet in Strings Magazine (January-February 2021) describes the Variations as “scintillating,” and “in turns audacious in difficulty and graceful in style, incorporating double-stops, fast passagework, a variety of bow strokes, harmonics, trills, and chromatic runs. The same nine-bar Coda is played on the piano following each 16-bar variation. St. Lubin goes the extra mile with his 98-bar Variation that nicely rounds off these very effective showpieces for the violinist.”]