BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Monday, November 29, 1824 (very approximately)

Unfortunately, Beethoven, never a model tenant, gets in trouble with his new landlady at 969 Johannesgasse, Frau Kletschka, almost immediately. According to family traditions related by her great-grandson, a well-known Viennese doctor, Julié v. Lavandal, “Beethoven came forward as the tenant for the apartment on the fourth floor, which had some windows facing Johannesgasse, and he moved into the apartment with his nephew and his housekeeper. This brought unrest into the house. Not only the nephew, but also the housekeeper, were treated badly, even roughly, by the master. Not to mention that the deaf master sometimes banged on the (presumably out-of-tune) piano in a completely inhumane manner.” His grandmother, Nanette, was a young girl at the time. Certain details had stuck in her mind, “such as the large horn that Beethoven had placed over his piano, and the fact that the other residents of the house complained about the new tenants.”

Theodor v. Frimmel, Beethoven’s Wohnungen in Wien, Berichte und Mittheilungen des Alterthums-Vereines zu Wien, Vol. XXIX (1893) at 76. Beethoven will already be looking for new apartments by December 11, suggesting this incident happens before that.

The December, 1824 issue of the London music journal The Harmonicon, Nr. XXIV, includes at 228 a brief review of the two piano duets op.108 by Beethoven’s former pupil Ferdinand Ries. “The first of these duets, though composed upon a very sweet melody, will never be ranked amongst the best productions of Mr. Ries; the eight variations of which it mainly consists, are ordered in the common way,–there is no attempt at novelty in their fashion, and they have too much of the staccato, and alla marcia, for the character of the air [Flow on, thou Shining River, by Moore], which is tranquilly flowing, and requires a sort of pensive harmony.”

“The second, ‘Those evening Bells‘ [also by Moore] is, in every particular, far superior to the first: the principal feature of the melody is kept strictly in view throughout, and nothing unanalogous to it in expression is introduced. There is a most laudable simplicity preserved in almost every variation, which is only interrupted by a very few passages of a contrary description. This duet is likely to be much used and generally admired, as it is easy for the hearers to comprehend, and for the performers to execute.”