BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, October 8, 1825

Today’s Zeitung für due Elegante Welt (Nr.197) at 1576, contains a notice that the 11th volume of the Cäcilia magazine published by B. Schott’s Sons in Mainz “contains a substantial article by Gottfr. Weber, from which it emerges almost irrefutably that the famous Requiem by Mozart, as it appeared in the Breitkopf-Härtel music shop, is hardly by Mozart, but on the contrary has been arranged by Süssmayr in Vienna from some highly imperfect sketches and drafts by the great master.” [Translation by Birthe Kibsgaard.] This article will cause a fiery debate and will be the topic of discussion later on in the conversation books.

Beethoven received a copy of this issue of the Cäcilia. Clearly he did not think much of Gottfried Weber’s theory. On the article, near a footnote suggesting that certain passages of Mozart’s sketches in bar 34 of the Kyrie of the Requiem were intended for instrumental interludes, or perhaps singing voices in quarter notes while the instruments rambled through chromatic serpentine passages, Beethoven wrote, “O doppelter Esel” [“O double donkey.”] Beethoven had previously written on another article by the same author, Gottfried Weber, “On Tone Painting” in volume 10 of Cäcilia, “Oh, you miserable scoundrel, what I shit is better than anything you have ever imagined.”