BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, October 11, 1823 (very approximately)

Sometime about now, Beethoven fills the Rolland pocket sketchbook and shifts to the aut. 8/1 pocket sketchbook. Today, it is bound together with the pocket sketchbook 8/2, which follows in succession. The volume today is in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Krakow, Poland. Beethoven used this pocket sketchbook to jot down ideas in pencil for the last two movements of the Ninth Symphony, typically while he was out walking.

Bundle 1 is comprised of 30 leaves, paginated from 1 to 60 by Anton Schindler, almost certainly after Beethoven’s death. Like many of the other pocket sketchbooks of this time period, it was assembled out of music paper by Beethoven himself (or perhaps Nephew Karl) and sewn together crudely. Since Beethoven’s time, the edges of the pages have been trimmed in an effort to create a uniform bound volume, which while aesthetically pleasing, also cropped off part of the text, which is now lost forever. However, the pages from all indications are in the order that they were in when Beethoven used the book in the fall of 1823.

The first 21 pages include late sketches for the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony; the last of them Douglas Johnson suggests may have been worked out as Beethoven was preparing the autograph. The balance of the sketchbook is devoted to various aspects of the Finale of the symphony, so it is clear that Beethoven was devoting his entire attention to completing this epic work.

This pocket sketchbook was used probably until the late November or early December of 1823, when aut. 8/2 began to be used until circa February, 1824. That volume is entirely devoted to the Finale. Beethoven’s main work on the Symphony continued to be in the desk sketchbook Landsberg 8/2 and on the leaves that have since been removed from that book. Landsberg 8/2 had been in use since about May of 1823 and would continue as his main work area for about a year, with sketches for all four movements and part of continuity drafts for the symphony.