BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Friday, May 7, 1824

Today is the big day: The Akademie concert featuring the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, as well as the Vienna premiere of three movements of the Missa Solemnis, will be held at the Kärntnertor Theater this evening at 7 p.m.

Nephew Karl heads to the theater box office at around 8 a.m. in order to get there by 8:30 so he can supervise the ticket sales during the day.

Unpaid assistant Anton Schindler comes to Beethoven’s apartment and makes a list of people who should get tickets for locked reserved seats, for Beethoven’s approval.

In the parterre, the following tickets:
3 to alto Caroline Unger
2 to soprano Henriette Sontag
1 to Carl Friedrich Hansler, manager of the Josephstadt Theater
2 to conductor Michael Umlauf
3 to Beethoven’s physician, Dr. Jacob Staudenheim

In the 4th gallery:
2 for the bookprinter, who printed 500 copies of the poem An die Freude yesterday on short notice
1 to Beobachter editor Joseph Anton Pilat (for his printing the announcement in this morning’s newspaper)
2 to Franz Kirchhoffer, Beethoven’s financial advisor and go-between with Ferdinand Ries in London
1 to Theaterzeitung editor Adolf Bäuerle, also for the announcement with the notation “if you allow it,” since Beethoven was angry about Bäuerle having printed the Petition without Beethoven’s knowledge and making him look bad.
3 to Brother Johann [who will be bringing his wife Therese and her daughter Amalie Waldmann]

Schindler takes the rented fiacre to deliver these tickets, and also delivers the invitations to the Archdukes, while Beethoven goes to get his haircut and to run other errands.

While Beethoven is out, Nephew Karl returns home for mid-day dinner and leaves a note, “Dearest Uncle! Since I must be in the box office at 3 o’clock, I’ve eaten quickly because it would take too long to wait for you. We’ll see each other this evening. In general, it has gone well. The boxes are sold; a few even overpaid, with 25 and 50 fl. In the 4th floor, all the seats are gone. I still hope to dispose of the remaining in the parterre and 1st gallery. Your son, Carl.”

Beethoven returns home, and mid-afternoon Schindler returns. He has promised a fair copy [it is unclear of what, possibly a vocal score] to one of the girls, but Beethoven says he does not have any extras and is furious at Schindler. Schindler tries to defend himself, “But how can you think so badly of me? I thought there was still a second fair copy here. Otherwise, by God! it would not have occurred to me to promise it to the girl.”

Beethoven is unhappy that people may find out how disorganized the plans for the concert have been. They are already talking about it, Schindler says. Even the nobility is well aware of it. “Now you must also know that Archduke Franz asked how it was going with the rehearsals–he had heard that everything wasn’t coming together quite right. Therefore they already also know everything there. He was already told quite precisely about the intrigues. He then asked if everything were true, and regrets very much that this happened to you here. I told him that it was your desire to have this Akademie take place before the departure of the Emperor–but that was in vain. He replied that he will take it upon himself to report about everything to his Majesty.”

Schindler gives his report about the practice conductor Umlauf had at the piano with Sontag and Unger yesterday. Umlauf was shouting at them. “Disgusting that they want to display themselves in this manner!” Schindler is confident in Sontag, who wagers she will not miss a note, but Unger feels too weak. She didn’t even want to come to the rehearsal. Schindler suggested that they come to him or to Conradin Kreutzer to practice. Unger became ashamed and said she would come to him. “Kreutzer was extremely rude to her and asked whether she also treated Rossini’s music in this way.”

Beethoven asks if there are any more skilled instrumentalists who could be brought in, but Schindler assures him there are none left at all.

Schindler adds [in what might be a later forgery] “Please forgive me for noting that this Symphony is really an exception from all previous ones and–you yourself must admit–it is the grandest and most difficult one.”

Beethoven, still cranky, brings up Schindler’s accusations last night about Schuppanzigh not helping out, and perhaps touches on his obese friend’s weight interfering with his ability to serve as concertmaster. Schindler responds, “If I had told you this earlier, wouldn’t you have considered me to be an enemy of his? … He has become so many years older and heavier.”

Theater manager Louis Antoine Duport has already had some discussions about the repeat concert, but thinks it should be held in the Redoutensaal. It remains to be seen what kinds of conditions Duport will have for that. Schindler doesn’t think Beethoven should pay; otherwise it’s only a matter of whether he can provide the orchestra and chorus. Beethoven asks why he wouldn’t provide them. Duport will do so, but he can only make the Chorus sing gratis in the Kärntnertor Theater, so they will need to be paid. That is the stumbling block.

Beethoven brings up the idea of changing some of the pieces for the second concert; Brother Johann had suggested the other movements of the Missa Solemnis could be performed then. Schindler says that if the second concert is held next week, it would be best that the same pieces be performed. Time is too short to prepare new works, both copying and rehearsing. The other movements of the Missa Solemnis will have to wait for another time.

Schindler must run; he still has to deliver tickets to attorney Johann Baptist Bach, Dr. Staudenheim, and Franz Kirchhoffer. He expects to be back in an hour.

Schindler probably returns around 5 p.m. and helps Beethoven get shaved, dressed, and presentable for the concert. They take the carriage for the Akademie concert at about 6.

Backstage at the theater, Beethoven asks conductor Michael Umlauf where Nephew Karl is. He’s sitting in the parterre section. Ignaz Schuppanzigh acts as concertmaster for the event. Composer Joseph Mayseder was in the orchestra, along with all of the foremost musicians of Vienna. From accounts by Karl and others, we know the audience includes Count Moritz Lichnowsky, the Giannatasio family, and cloth merchant Johann Wolfmayer. But because the Emperor and Empress had departed for Linz and Prague two days earlier, the Imperial box is empty.

According to Prof. Theodore Albrecht, Beethoven probably walks onto the stage along with conductor Umlauf. The conductor stands before the orchestra, while Beethoven stands in front of him, giving the beginning tempos for each movement to Umlauf, which justifies the advertising of Beethoven’s personal participation. But the orchestra and chorus are not following the deaf composer. The vocal soloists walk onstage after the Overture.

The concert is comprised of the following:

Consecration of the House Overture, op.124

Three Hymns [movements from the Missa Solemnis]
I. Kyrie
II. Credo
III. Agnus Dei

Symphony Nr. 9 in D minor, op.125.

We have prepared a YouTube playlist that recreates the concert, all conducted by Leonard Bernstein, with the New York Philharmonic:

The performance ends at about 9:30 p.m. Beethoven no doubt received congratulations from the participants and the audience for quite a while. Karl stays behind in the City since he has classes at the University tomorrow. Schindler and Joseph Hüttenbrenner, an official at the Chancellery and a tenor in the Musikverein chorus though not a participant in the chorus, accompany Beethoven home in the carriage. Beethoven’s housekeeper is not working today, so there is no food, and the restaurant below is probably closed by now.

Schindler says, “Never in my life have I heard such stormy and yet sincere applause as today. At one point, the second movement of the Symphony was completely interrupted by applause. And should have been repeated.” In a later recollection, Karl Holz [who was probably in the violin section] wrote that it was precisely in the Ritmo di tre battute of the Scherzo, in bar 194-195 where the first oboe plays G-sharp-A-B, and the timpani interjects its Fs: “Too bad that this passage was lost at the concert; people were applauding so much that a person couldn’t hear anything.” Conversation Book 114, 16r. This interruption of the Scherzo by applause is contemporarily confirmed by Beethoven’s former pupil Carl Czerny, who wrote in a letter to Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig on May 9, “The Scherzo moved the whole house to stormy, involuntary interruptions of applause.” Friedrich Wieck und seine beiden Töchter (Leipzig 1875) at 27-30.

This moment may be, Prof. Albrecht theorizes, where the famous incident occurred with Caroline Unger. Beethoven, absorbed in his score, was unaware of the furious applause, and she had to turn him around to see the crowd’s reaction. Schindler’s unreliable biography says that this incident happened at the end of the performance, which was repeated by Unger herself in an account to Sir George Grove in 1869, saying that, “at the end of this great work he continued standing with his back to the audience, and beating the time, until I turned him, or induced him to turn around and face the people who were clapping their hands.” Grove, Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies (1898) pp.334-335.

But there are other contradictory accounts. Thayer interviewed virtuoso pianist Sigismund Thalberg (1812-1871) in 1860. Thalberg as a 12-year-old had been present at the concert. Thayer’s notes say, “November 28, 1860. I saw Thalberg in Paris. He told me he was present at Beethoven’s concert…1824. Beethoven was dressed in black dress-coat, white neckerchief and waistcoat, black satin small-clothes, black silk stockings, shoes with buckles. After the Scherzo of the 9th Symphony, he saw how B. stood turning over the leaves of his score, utterly deaf to the immense applause, and Unger pulled him by the sleeve, and then pointed to the audience when he turned and bowed. Umlauf told the choir and orchestra to pay no attention whatsoever to Beethoven’s beating of the time, but all to watch him. Conradin Kreutzer was at the Pianoforte.”

Had it been at the end of a movement, or even moreso, the end of the concert, Beethoven probably would not have been so unconscious of his surroundings. As Albrecht notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (2024) at 126-128, “The final choral Maestoso (‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken! Götterfunken!‘) and orchestral Prestissimo in the Coda cannot be confused, and even the functionally deaf composer would have been able to perceive (through sound and vibrations) when the music stopped and when the general visual environment changed with it. At the conclusion of such a grueling concert, there was probably as much uproar on the stage as there was in the audience. Beethoven would never have continued to turn pages and Unger would never have had to turn him around under these circumstances.”

“Unexpected applause at the end of the Scherzo seems more possible. The Scherzo itself contains multiple passages that are soft with potentially confusing repeats for the half-hearing Beethoven. Even the Coda contains eight bars of softness or silence before the final two bars of bumptious force. This might have been when the incident involving Unger took place.” But mid-movement in the Scherzo seems the most likely possibility, as Holz noted, where the bar groupings change from four bars to three bars, punctuated by the timpani. Beethoven would then have been looking closely at his score and been oblivious to the applause. His very limited hearing tended to only let the higher sounds through at best, so the applause would have been inaudible to him, especially if the orchestra around him was still playing.

The Viennese Theater Ordinance of 1800 had forbidden encores, extensive applause, repeated curtain calls, whistling, pounding the floor with canes, stomping with feet, etc., so it was risky for the audience to conduct themselves thusly in a Court theater. This ordinance had been enforced at the Kärntnertor as recently as May 3, 1824 at a farewell concert, when the performers were not allowed to encore a popular aria.

Schindler continues, “The reception was more than imperial–for the people broke out [in applause] four times. At the end, they shouted ‘Vivat!’:

Czerny, in the letter to Wieck cited above, wrote, “The large orchestra covered itself with glory and sweat, and Umlauf conducted alongside Beethoven with a fire and dedication that makes him worthy of respect both as a man and as an artist.” Anton Dietrich, in a June 24, 1824 letter to Leopold Kupelweiser in Rome write, “Beethoven himself conducted; it was divine to see how he animated everything with expression and feeling; in the orchestra the best artists of Vienna participated with the utmost engagement and intensity.” Quoted in Kopitz and Cadenbach, Beethoven aus der Sicht seiner Zeitgenossen, vol. I, pp.252-253.

Schindler also notes that the winds, some of which had just been hired yesterday, acquitted themselves admirably. “The winds performed very valiantly–not the slightest mistake could be heard.”

“As the Parterre began their fifth round of applause, the police commissioner shouted, ‘Quiet!’ The Court [was applauded] only three times in succession, but Beethoven five times.”

The egotistical Schindler cannot help but praise himself. “My triumph is fulfilled, because now I can speak from my heart. As late as yesterday, I secretly feared that the Mass would be forbidden because one heard that the Archbishop protested against it! I was right, though, in not saying anything about it to the police commissioner at the beginning….Now, Pax tecum [Peace be with you.]”

“People are saying that you used quadruple instead of double counterpoint in these works.” [Beethoven had in fact been studying counterpoint, especially Handel’s, closely in recent years, as seen in the fugue in the Credo and the massive fugue after the March in the Finale of the Ninth, and as will also be reflected in the late quartets yet to come.]

Brother Johann inserts himself into the event, talking loudly to anyone who will listen about Ludwig being his brother. Nephew Karl saw Beethoven’s longtime friend Nikolaus Zmeskall (1759-1833) brought into the theater and into his seat via sedan chair. [Zmeskall suffered terribly from gout and seldom left his home at this point.]

The flighty girls were too troublesome, Beethoven thinks. “Better to cope with 10 male singers than one female singer,” answers Schindler. He observes that “it’s raining terribly hard,” perhaps as an excuse to remain in the reflected glory.

Schindler tells another anecdote about the run-up to the concert: Count Palffy, who owns the Theater an der Wien where the Akademie was at one time going to be held, called on Joseph Seipelt, the fill-in bass, and yesterday forbade him to sing. Palffy was under the impression he had been invited to do that by the Kärntnertor management. Then, however, Seipelt explained that Schindler had asked him in Beethoven’s name to sing, and would produce a letter confirming this. Palffy eventually relented. But Schindler thinks such a letter would not be a bad idea, as it would make an impression on Palffy and others.

The rain finally subsides, and Schindler and Hüttenbrenner depart very late this night, leaving behind a for once very happy and triumphant Beethoven.

Conversation Book 66, 4r-12r. The next few pages of Conversation Book 66 are bound out of order, but we will resume with them tomorrow in chronological order. Because this entry is already so long, and the many reviews of the Akademie also tend to be of significant length, we will depart from our usual practice and cover the reviews of this concert as they are published, rather than today.

S.A. Steiner & Co. in today’s Wiener Zeitung (Nr.105) at 448 announces the new publication of Beethoven’s Adagio, Variations and Rondo for piano, violin and cello, op.121 [now catalogued as op.121a, since Beethoven assigned the number 121 twice by accident], for 4 florins. This is the first announcement of the publication of the variations on Wenzel Müller’s “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” in G, the so-called “Kakadu Variations.”

Although the last of Beethoven’s works for piano trio to be published during his lifetime, this set of variations actually dates from about 1803. It was substantially revised in 1816, with the lengthy introduction and final variation being significantly changed and more in accordance with the composer’s style of that period. Lewis Lockwood suggests that Beethoven may have made further changes before the work’s publication, especially in the counterpoint of the double fugue in G minor that serves as the transition between the tenth variation and the finale. The work appears to be one of those Beethoven gave to Steiner in partial payment of the substantial debts owed by the composer.

This set of variations for piano trio is here played by Isabelle Faust, Jean-Guihen Queyras, and Alexander Melnikov, live on March 27, 2021 in Basel.

Sauer & Leidesdorf also repeats its advertisement for Beethoven’s New Bagatelles for piano, again under the specious opus number 112.