BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Saturday, September 16, 1820 (approximately)
Conversation Book 16, leaves 82v through 83v
Beethoven comes to Vienna for the postponed lesson of Archduke Rudolph, and we are near the end of this conversation book. Before paying a call on the Archduke, Beethoven visits Blöchlinger’s Institute in the early morning and visits with nephew Karl. Karl talks about a woman (possibly his mother) quarreling with an old woman. Karl notes that Franz Oliva says he is going to the Chamber of Commerce office at 9 a.m., then will come home at 10 and wait till Beethoven arrives. [However, there are no entries on this date from Oliva in the pages for this day.]
Remembering that his apartment last winter had serious issues with heating, Beethoven makes a note of a large brick oven manufactured by Pankratz that he thought might serve. He also notes down sister-in-law Johanna van Beethoven’s current address, perhaps to make yet another attempt to get an affidavit from the parish priest that she is still alive so he can collect on the annuity.
As usual, the Archduke does not write in the conversation books during his lesson.
[Here the conversation books come to a halt for an extended period. It’s likely that later this morning Oliva started the next (now-lost) book that would follow thereafter, even though there were still a couple pages left blank at the end of this book. Since Karl advises that Oliva will be waiting for Beethoven, it would be uncharacteristic for Beethoven not to go to see him. Oliva usually writes at length, supporting the hypothesis that a new book was used for conversations on this day, after the visit to the Archduke.]
[Biographer Anton Schindler forged several entries on the last few empty pages of this book to make it seem as if he knew Beethoven well, long before he really did, thereby inflating his own importance. In the fall of 1820, Schindler is a 23-year-old clerk in Attorney Johann Baptist Bach’s office, who also plays the violin. Beethoven most likely was barely aware of who he was. For some reason Schindler wrote these false entries in the book upside-down (not sideways, as editor Ted Albrecht states in his edition of the conversation books).]
[The next surviving book, number 17, dates from May, 1822, so there is a hiatus of about 20 months with no surviving conversation books. There is another five-month gap after that book through the start of November, 1822. Given that Beethoven typically filled a book every 2-3 weeks, we may be missing as many as between 33 and 50 conversation books from this time period.]
[What happened to all these missing conversation books? While Beethoven scholars have long taken the position that Anton Schindler destroyed hundreds of books, editor Ted Albrecht disputes that. He suggests that when Thayer interviewed Schindler, he misheard “viel über hundert” (many more than a hundred) as “vier hundert” (four hundred) conversation books as having come into his possession. Although that theory seems dubious, Albrecht is convincing that there is no possible way that Schindler ever had four hundred conversation books in the first place. Due to Beethoven’s extensive periods of serious illness in 1821, there are probably fewer than one hundred missing or unaccounted-for books in all.]
[Albrecht suggests an alternative: Beethoven seems to have set aside the conversation books that had significant references to Karl’s guardianship in one pile, and all the others in another, together with Beethoven’s correspondence. Since the litigation was concluded during the course of conversation book 15, and there was some discussion of the pension for Karl’s support in book 16, the content is consistent with this notion. Albrecht presumes that around November 1, 1822, as Beethoven was moving from his summer residence in Baden back to Vienna, the box with the correspondence and the balance of the conversation books up to that time “probably fell off of the wagon transporting his possessions and was lost.” Consistent with this notion, Beethoven in Anderson letter 1207 on July 12, 1823 writes that “an unfortunate accident robbed me of a considerable portion of my papers.” So Schindler is probably innocent of mass destruction of the missing conversation books.]
[However, Schindler goes to great lengths to write phony conversations with Beethoven after the composer’s death in the early books that do survive. I think it is conceivable that he also may have destroyed some of the then-still-surviving books that contained conversations that were obviously inconsistent with his desired impression for posterity. It may be significant that Conversation Book 18 begins with Schindler already in a good relationship with Beethoven. But we have no direct evidence of such a destructive action by Schindler, only suspicions. ]
[In any event, we are left with a large hole in Beethoven’s detailed daily doings that will last for most of over two years. Let me assure you, however, that the Beethoven 200 Years Ago Today feature will nevertheless continue, just on a more sporadic and generally shorter basis. For example, there are seven entries yet to come for September, and sixteen for October 1820.]