BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thursday, February 24, 1825
Brother Johann today writes to Johann Andreas Stumpff in London. [Stumpff had visited Ludwig in Baden last fall, and greatly ingratiated himself with Beethoven.] He is sending Stumpff seven of Ludwig’s works [the seven that had just been sent to Schott: Opferlied op.121b (with both piano and orchestral accompaniment); Bundeslied op.122 (with accompaniment by piano or by winds); Consecration of the House Overture op.124; Six Bagatelles op.126, Der Kuss op.128; and the piano solo and piano duet arrangements of the Overture that had been made by Carl Czerny.] The goal is to sell them immediately to an art dealer in London. The rights are only for London, Scotland, Ireland, America and India. Johann then directly lies to Stumpff, telling him, “However, these works will not be sold to an art dealer in Germany until they have been bought by an art dealer in London, who will then have sole legal ownership for the whole of England.” [These same works had already been sold to Schott’s in Mainz.] He correctly notes that the London Philharmonic Society has a copy of the Overture, but does not have the publishing rights.
These works are available for the sum of forty pounds, on condition that they be engraved within six months. Johann asks that he be informed of the result of this transaction through Leidesdorf’s music shop as soon as possible.
Johann assigns the opus numbers as follows:
Overture, op.124
Piano solo arrangement of the Overture, op.125
Piano duet arrangement of the Overture, op.126
Bagatelles for piano, op.127
Song with Chorus for piano [Bundeslied], op.128
Song with piano or full orchestra [Opferlied], op.129
Song performed with piano alone [Der Kuss], op.130.
[Other than the Overture, these opus numbers do not stick, and may not have been approved by Ludwig.]
Brandenburg Letter 1937; Albrecht Letter 396. The original letter is held in London by the Royal College of Music (Ms. 2171). According to Sieghard Brandenburg, the requested 40 pounds would be equivalent to 80 ducats; the same works had already been sold to Schott in Mainz for 130 ducats. However, Stumpff was unable to find a buyer in London for these works, and he died years later with the manuscripts still in his possession.
Today the first Concert spirituel of the season is held in the Landständischen Hall. The concert opens with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, op.67 in C minor. Also of note on the ambitious and highly dramatic program is the Dies irae from Cherubini’s Seelenmesse [Requiem in C minor, with German text used, so as to not run afoul of the Censor.] Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Nr.12) of March 23, 1825, at 194. “The execution of all the pieces, other than small, unimportant incidentals, was entirely praiseworthy.” Of this series of concerts, the Wiener Zeitschrift wrote in its May 24, 1825 issue (Nr.62) at 259, “The courage to undertake something like this for our music-saturated public, where only effort and expenses paid out of one’s own pocket can be balanced in the final accounting, testifies to the pure, limitless zeal to work for the best of art. Such music can have no other purpose than to help connoisseurs and art lovers enjoy great pieces of music that they otherwise do not hear, or rarely hear. There are indeed very many such friends and connoisseurs in Vienna, but they are not the ones able to support such an institution, so the burden falls entirely on the society, especially on the directors. This year, these were again Herr Pieringer, Baron Lanoy, Schmidt and Geißler. Through their efforts, an excellent orchestra, a perfect choir and select soloists were brought together.”
The Dies irae from Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor is here played by the Orchestra and Choir of the Concentus Musicus Patavinus, directed by Fabrizio Cunial:
In today’s Wiener Zeitung (Nr.44) at 199, Sauer & Leidesdorf advertises an interesting collection, lithographed by Joseph Franz Kaiser in Graz. This is the poem Der Jüngling in der Fremde [The Youth in Foreign Lands] from Christian Ludwig von Reissig’s volume of poetry Blümchen der Einsamkeit [Little Flowers of Loneliness], set for solo voice and piano by “L. van Beethoven,” guitarist Mauro Giuliani, pianist Ignaz Moscheles, and composers Philipp Jakob Riotte (1776-1856), Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814) [the advertisement gives the name as Jos. Fr. Reichart; the actual volume calls him J.F. Reichart], and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, with none of the artists knowing about the others. The price is 30 kreutzers. Each of the six composers is given one of the six stanzas of the poem; none of them sets the complete poem. The result unsurprisingly is quite odd and disjointed, with wildly varying key and time signatures sprinkled throughout. It must have proven a challenge to the listeners.
Beethoven’s entry, catalogued today as WoO 138, was written in 1809 and published in 1810 with a dedication to Archduke Rudolph. Whether the other composers were actually unaware of Beethoven’s version is certainly open to question, considering it had been publicly available for years. The same collection had originally been published by Artaria in Vienna in 1816, except with the fourth verse set by Friedrich August Kanne in B-flat minor, replaced with the version by Riotte in G major here.