BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sunday, October 16, 1824

Today Beethoven gets angry with the housekeeper about the butter going rancid.

Uncle Ludwig and Nephew Karl, perhaps because of the butter incident, have mid-day dinner at a restaurant in Baden. Karl points out smoked tongue is available, with potatoes.

Karl says he has told the housekeeper over and over to be careful with the butter, but it’s no use. He told her that as recently as last night.

Beethoven’s foul mood cannot be improved by what Karl has to tell him. “I’ve told you that I am failing [at the University]; that I am already prepared for it. [Carl von] Enk, with whom I studied Latin and Greek, can provide testimony to that effect. To give lessons in the first year of Philosophy, where the subjects are so very concentrated anyway, would not be possible. Otherwise, I can’t tell you anything other than what I told you long ago and what you already know. I shall go to the discussion sessions, which will also be easier for me now, since I am better prepared in Mathematics.

Conversation Book 77, 23r-23v. We do not know where the conversation went from here, because this is the end of Conversation Book 77, and there is at least one succeeding conversation book, and probably several, missing. The next book picks up near the end of November, so there is a gap of around six weeks. Over the next month, there are also no surviving letters either to or from Beethoven, so our bicentennial updates will be more sketchy and infrequent than we would like over that period of time.

Today’s Vienna Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Nr.83) at 331 repeats last week’s announcement about the new subscription series of six concerts by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, held on Sundays at 4:30 p.m., beginning tomorrow, October 17. The plan is to include new works more diverse than the well-known works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. “We look forward to these long-missed pleasures all the more so since it is instrumental music in which the aesthetic creativity of a composer is most splendidly documented. For it is here that he has to invent all by himself, and provide all the material, and is limited solely to the language of sound; his thoughts are determined within themselves, without the support of poetry.” The editors recognize Schuppanzigh’s virtuosity and his dedication to the recognition and advancement of truly classical creations, especially in the performance of quartets, as an artist full of spirit and soul. Tickets are available at Steiner & Co.’s Art and Music Shop for 10 fl. W.W.