BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, August 26, 1826
Today, the examining magistrate questions Nephew Karl at the hospital regarding his attempted suicide about three weeks ago. Uncle Ludwig does not attend, but unpaid assistant Karl Holz does, and will report to Beethoven tomorrow about the inquest.
Beethoven makes a shopping list but cannot keep his morbid thoughts out of it:
- for Karl robe
Death - sand
- robe
+
Violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh visits Beethoven and inquires as to how Karl is doing. [As usual, Schuppanzigh addresses Beethoven in the third person, which is disregarded here for clarity.] Beethoven complains that Karl’s mother Johanna with her corrupting influence is seeing too much of him. Schuppanzigh notes that her own uncle [Jakob Hotschevar, who mas married to a step-sister of Johanna’s mother] speaks the worst of her. “Recently, she pretended to be your wife. She is also cheeky. [This, like naming her illegitimate daughter Ludovica, was surely calculated to annoy Ludwig.] My idea would be to let him join the military when he is recovered, but away from her here.” Schuppanzigh adds a further gratuitous insult to Johanna’s reputation, “She procures.”
Turning to music, Schuppanzigh mentions that publisher Anton Diabelli asked him to inquire with Beethoven whether he remembers Diabelli in connection with the quintet. Beethoven says yes, he recalls that, but he needs to finish the quartet in F major [op.135] first, and find someone to make an arrangement of the Grosse Fuge for four-hands piano. Schuppanzigh suggests, “But is it not your duty to arrange it yourself?” [This discussion may be what triggers Beethoven to do the piano duet arrangement of the Fugue that is today catalogued as op.134 over the coming weeks.] Schuppanzigh regrets that doing it will use a lot of Beethoven’s time.
Beethoven asks whether Schuppanzigh has received the 50 florins from Ignaz Dembscher. Schuppanzigh tells him, “Not a kreutzer up till now.”
Schuppanzigh asks whether the new quartet will be copied soon. [Op.135 must already be well along.] “It would be nice if we can hear it some time.” Beethoven tells him that copies will need to be made for the parts. Schuppanzigh thinks that is unnecessary: “We will write out our own parts, just give each of us some sheets and it will soon be finished.”
Beethoven needs to decide what to do about Karl’s guardianship. Schuppanzigh advises, “Now you must also separate yourself from him as you can expect nothing from him but ingratitude.”
Schuppanzigh asks how Dorothea von Ertmann is doing. Her husband, Generalmajor Stephan von Ertmann, was quite wealthy, and she also has a big fortune of her own. Schuppanzigh notes that her father Georg Carl Graumann (1747-1810) had been one of the richest men in Frankfurt. “Franck the miser would not have married her sister [Anna Graumann (c.1786-1838)] if she had not had a fortune.” Plus as a general he gets a free apartment, so much forage, on top of a good salary.
Schuppanzigh takes his leave of Beethoven.
Conversation Book 118, 33v-36r.
Today’s Wiener Zeitung (Nr.195) at 819 includes another advertisement for a Rondeau brilliant arranged for piano duet from the last movement of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto arranged by Friedrich Mockwitz [listed as op.75, as appears on the cover of the publication by Heinrich Probst in Leipzig.]
Hector Berlioz today enrolls in the composition course of Jean-François Le Sueur at the Paris Conservatoire. The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (New York: Cambridge University Press 2000).