BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Monday, August 8, 1825

Beethoven is in Vienna today, probably doing errands with housekeeper Barbara Holzmann. He writes a letter dated “August 8” to Karl Friedrich Müller (1796-after 1846), a well-known piano instructor and composer in Berlin. Müller had apparently written to make some kind of request of Beethoven, the nature of which is unknown. “Your excellency! I am ready to serve you with pleasure, as I would for any true artist. I will do everything possible to justify your trust, if only you do not deceive yourselves in what you believe you will find in me.”

“With cordial willingness, your most devoted Beethoven.”

Brandenburg Letter 2027; Anderson Letter 1227. Beethoven misspelled Müller’s first name as “Carl,” and another hand changed it to “Karl.” This Müller is not to be confused with Carl Friedrich Müller, the invalid actor for whom Beethoven wrote the two waltzes and ecossaise for piano, WoO 84-86. The letter is on a paper type used by Beethoven in 1825 and 1826, but 1826 can be ruled out because Beethoven would have been highly unlikely to have written such a letter on August 8, 1826, given what will be happening then in his personal life. The original is held by the Bonn Beethovenhaus, and can be seen here:

https://www.beethoven.de/de/media/view/4571564154552320/scan/0

Roughly about now, Beethoven begins filling Pocket Sketchbook Autograph 9, Bundle 5, and he uses it for the next five or six weeks. This is another homemade sketchbook, and is the earliest of the five bundles that makes up Autograph 9. It is roughly parallel with the work in the DeRoda desk sketchbook, folios 30 through 37, which contain a sketch for the canon WoO 35 written for de Boer on August 3, and likely starts being used a few days after that. The sketches in this pocket sketchbook include primarily work on the third and fifth movements of the quartet op.130, with a little work on the fourth movement. Very few sketches for the fourth movement Alla danza tedesca survive, at least in the sketchbooks. The movement had originally been considered in A major for inclusion in op.132. Additional work must have been done on it on pages that are now lost. Sketches for the Grosse Fuge Finale for op.130 are scattered throughout the volume, beginning on the 8th folio, directly after the material for the third movement, so we can be fairly confident that serious work on that movement began in mid-August. The next pocket sketchbook will be almost entirely devoted to the fugue.