BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, May 14, 1825

Nephew Karl comes out to Baden today via carriage to visit his uncle today and tomorrow. Uncle Ludwig, at a coffee house reading the Vienna newspapers, writes in the conversation book, possibly as part of a draft of a letter, “I see Karl has become very pale; perhaps his blood lineage may be due to the cool mountain air.”

Ludwig also copies several advertisements out of the Intelligenzblatt supplement to the Wiener Zeitung of Friday, May 13. The first is for patented writing pens made of goose quills, sold in packets of 5 or 25. He also makes note of a housekeeper seeking a position: “Woman from a solid home, well trained in the art of cooking.”

Conversation Book 89, 7r-7v.

Things may be chilly between uncle and nephew, because Karl does not write in the conversation book today. However, he has plenty of things to say tomorrow.

B.Schott’s Sons places a notice in today’s Leipzig Abendzeitung about the pirated four-hand piano arrangement of the Consecration of the House Overture, op.124, published by Trautwein in Berlin. “Herr van Beethoven has publicly reprimanded the illegal and incorrect edition of a four-hand piano reduction of his Festival Overture by Trautwein in Berlin, prepared by Herr Henning.”

“Without proving, as should be obvious, that such a preprint is even more reprehensible than a reprinting, we inform the esteemed public that we long ago acquired the exclusive publishing rights to this work from the famous composer, and that the reduction for four hands prepared by the well-known piano virtuoso Herr Czrini [Czerny] under the composer’s very eyes is already in print, and we are therefore in a position, as the legitimate publishers, to deliver an arrangement more worthy of the brilliant original than the one smuggled out by Herr Henning.”

Our gratitude to Birthe Kibsgaard for pointing this notice out to us.