BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Sunday, October 17, 1824 (very approximately)

Roughly about now, Beethoven begins using the pocket sketchbook Grasnick 4, which is currently located in the Biblioteka Jagielloňska in Krakow, Poland. The sketchbook today contains 41 leaves, and the stubs of three pages torn out are visible, though there is no indication that these pages had writing on them and they may have been torn out by Beethoven himself. Douglas Johnson suggests that an entire gathering may be missing from the end of the book.

The paper is identical with that used for the three preceding pocket sketchbooks, Autographs 8/1 and 8/2 and Artaria 205/4. Like them, the book was assembled by Beethoven or Nephew Karl stitching the pages of music paper together; four sets of stitch holes are still visible in the book, which has since been bound together. The modern binding of the pages was unfortunately not done in the correct order, suggesting that when the binding work was done in the 1930s the stitching had fallen apart completely and the pages had become jumbled. Douglas Johnson suggests that folios 23-41 were used earlier than folios 1-22 since the content in folios 23-41 comes earlier in the composition process than that on folios 1-22. In addition, Folio 1 was completely separated from the rest, so its placement is uncertain.

Gustav Nottebohm did not discuss this sketchbook, as he had done with many of the others. Most of the book is devoted to the last three movements of the Quartet, op.127, and to Opferlied, op.121b. These sketches from the middle of the book are thus contemporaneous with those that begin desk sketchbook Autograph 11/2, covering the same ground. Although Beethoven had been trying to sell Opferlied for some time, he continued to work on it in November and December of 1824. According to Johnson, “a considerable gap exists between Grasnick 4 and the next surviving pocket sketchbook.” Thus there is probably an entire pocket sketchbook dating from the early months of 1825 missing.

Other than the pages of Grasnick 4 used to sketch movements II-IV of op.127, four pages contain sketches for Opferlied, and one page, f.20r, contains sketches for the proposed BACH Overture. Folios 26r, 37v, 38r, and 40r were not used. There is to date no published edition, and the Jagiellonian Library has not as of yet placed the sketchbook online in digital form.