BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thursday, December 2, 1824 (approximately)

In the early morning, Beethoven works on the quartet in E-flat, op.127. Later in the day, Beethoven continues his proofreading work on the scores and parts for the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis for the B. Schott’s Sons publishing firm, which has been asking for these manuscripts for months. Much of the copying work is being done by Josepha Schlemmer’s subcontractors. The copyist’s score for the Ninth Symphony, today held by the Juilliard School (catalogue b1138425), had to be partially recopied because of the many errors and corrections in the conductor’s score. That conductor’s score makes up the bulk of this engraver’s copy, and Michael Umlauf’s conducting markings can still be seen on it.

The entire thing probably should have been recopied from scratch for the printer, but Beethoven either did not want to incur the extra expense, or the extra delays, or both. But the worst offending pages are being fully recopied. Four other copyists are doing this work, and while these replacement pages have far fewer corrections by Beethoven, they also manage to introduce new errors of their own. About a dozen of the pages that have been replaced with these newly copied pages are held by the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. The old pages, full of Beethoven’s corrections from early 1824, demonstrate a number of changes were still ongoing in the score while it was being copied. This proofreading work will take Beethoven over a month, which prevents him from finishing the string quartet op.127 as quickly as he would have liked.

At the same time, a new full copy of the Ninth Symphony score is being made for the London Philharmonic Society, which commissioned the work, and it too requires careful proofreading by Beethoven. As Jonathan del Mar notes, Beethoven initially makes meticulous corrections to this score in pencil, and sometimes he inks over them. As he progresses, the corrections become less frequent, and often are inked directly onto the page. The trombone parts are contained in an appendix, which also bears Beethoven’s corrections.