BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Monday, February 18, 1822 (approximately)

Beethoven delivers the professionally copied manuscript of the final piano sonata, Sonata #32, op.111, to Tendler & Manstein, the Viennese book dealers who are acting as Schlesinger’s agents. Again, Beethoven is annoyed to find that they deduct 2% from Beethoven’s payment of 30 gold ducats as a commission. Unlike the situation for sonata #31 in January, the receipt for payment from Tendler & Manstein does not appear to have survived.

However, Beethoven has already rethought the second movement of the sonata op.111 (which he will later describe as “incomplete,”) and he will set Wenzel Rampl to copying a new version of the sonata, with a different finale, as soon as that is finished. While it is possible that Beethoven used the copying of the unfinished sonata as a subterfuge for getting payment faster, that plan would have involved paying Rampl for making two copies rather than just one, and thus seems unlikely.

Today’s Wiener Zeitung contains a large ad from the T. Mollo firm, advertising “the new Rossini opera, Das Fräulein vom See” [La donna del lago, based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.] This opera had actually premiered over two years earlier, in September of 1819 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, but it seems that popular home editions for piano and voice were only just now becoming available in Vienna.