BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Monday, June 14, 1824 (very approximately)

With the nuisances of the unprofitable and highly time-consuming Akademie concerts behind him, and moved out to the country for the summer, Beethoven probably is able to finally begin in earnest on the three quartets that had been commissioned by Prince Nikolai Galitzin in St. Petersburg. He had worked on the Quartet op.127 at the very end of the Landsberg 8/2 desk sketchbook. That consists only of the first part of the first movement, going only a little ways past the introduction.

For much of the work on op.127, Beethoven does not use sketchbooks (even homemade ones), but instead uses loose papers. These are today found primarily in two groups: Artaria 206, held by the Bibliotheka Jagiellonska in Krakow, and the accumulation A 51 held by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It seems likely that these two groupings were originally all together as one, since they both have sketches for the first movement of the quartet, and progress into the second and third movements. Pages 81-91 of Artaria 206 are devoted to a complete draft of the first movement. Some of the paper used for these sketches is left over from the score of the Ninth Symphony, of a special type that Beethoven used for writing the choral portions of the Finale.

Unfortunately, there are few clues in the manuscripts that would allow a very confident dating of how far Beethoven was progressing. The op.127 quartet is not finished until about February of 1825, but he may also have been simultaneously working on the other quartets. Beethoven had already begun work on the quartet in A minor, op.132 before embarking on op.127.

The sketchbooks pick up again with the last three movements of op.127, suggesting that the use of these loose papers was approximately concurrent with Beethoven’s summer stays in Penzing and later in Baden bei Wien, and that the use of the sketchbooks may have resumed with his return to Vienna in the autumn.