BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, August 27, 1825
Gerhard von Breuning, in his memoir of Beethoven, From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards, recounts first meeting Beethoven in August of 1825 in Vienna. Since today is one of the very few days of August that we do not have Beethoven placed firmly in Baden, this encounter may have taken place today (assuming that Gerhard remembered the date accurately nearly 50 years later, which is not an entirely safe assumption. But it must have occurred between July of 1825 when Beethoven decided to rent the apartment in the Schwarzspanierhaus, and October 15, when he actually moved in, so von Breuning cannot be far off.) Gerhard von Breuning was then twelve years old.
“In August 1825 I had the good fortune, during an afternoon walk with my parents, to make the acquaintance of Beethoven. —We were walking along the avenue that encircles the inner city of Vienna and cuts across its Glacis, and were between the Kärntner and Caroline gates. My father was about to turn off into the Caroline gate to go to his office when we saw a man walking alone, heading straight towards us. No sooner had we caught sight of one another, than there were the most joyful of greetings on both side.”
“He was powerful-looking, of medium height, vigorous in his gait and in his lively movements, his clothing far from elegant or conventional; and there was something about him overall that did not fit into any classification. He spoke almost without pause, asking how we were, what we were doing now, about relatives on the Rhine, and many other matters, and, without taking much time for my father to answer why he had not visited him for so long etc., he said that he had lived in the Kothgasse some time ago and more recently in the Krugerstrasse; he joyfully hastened to tell us that soon, at the end of September, he would be a close neighbor of ours, in the Schwarzspanier house (we lived diagonally opposite in Prince Esterházy’s Rothes Haus), a piece of information that aroused considerable interest; he then hoped we would see a great deal of one another; he asked my mother to take these occasions to put his very disorderly housekeeping arrangements in order once for all, and keep an eye on them thereafter; and so forth. My father seldom got a chance to put a word in, but when he did, always spoke astonishingly loudly and distinctly, gesticulating animatedly, and with heartfelt assurances that they could and would soon be able to get together, he took his leave for today.”
“My desire to meet Beethoven, which I had so often expressed to my father and mother, had been satisfied at last. Now, with youthful impatience, I counted the days until I came into the close contact that I longed for with the famous friend of my father’s youth, who had so often been mentioned to me.”
Gerhard von Breuning, Memories of Beethoven Cambridge Univ. Press 1995 at 19; translation by Henry Mins and Maynard Solomon.
The issue of Der Sammler for today (Nr.103) contains at 412 a notice of a new Musical Association at St. Carl’s Church in Vienna, formed in May of this year to raise church music in that parish church to a level appropriate to “this sublime Gothic building. At their head, alongside the Commander and Priest there, who gladly promotes all that is beautiful and satisfactory, stands the choir director Herr Franz Weber, who is so laudably renowned as a pianist. The tireless zeal of these two members has succeeded in bringing this federation, which was only in its infancy, close to perfection in this short time. The prompt and selective performance of masses by Beethoven [almost certainly the Mass in C, op.86], [Johann Nepomuk] Hummel, [Johann Gottlieb] Naumann, J. Haydn, [Wenzel Johann] Tomaschek, and Mozart stand as proof of this progress.”