BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Thursday, July 28, 1825 (very approximately)

Sometime around now (but most likely a few days before August 2, 1825, Beethoven writes a short note to Nephew Karl “If you could only remember, my dear son, whether you wrote the letter to Galitzin back in May, on the Saturday before the two Whitsun holidays on June 21st, or when I last wrote on June 1st.”

Brandenburg Letter 2019. The actual letter does not survive, but only this short undated draft. Letter 2023, written on August 2, is the followup to Karl, so this letter must precede that one. The words “in May” are a later addition. The Saturday before Pentecost was May 21. The letter that Beethoven refers to was written on June 4, 1825. The draft is held at the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Krakow, (Mus. ep. autogr. Beethoven 39).

Also roughly about now, Beethoven begins using the pocket sketchbook Egerton 2795. This handmade sketchbook of only 16 leaves is held by the British Library in London. It appears to be intact, and Gustav Nottebohm, who thoroughly examined most of the sketchbooks, never seems to have seen it. Nearly all of the sketches are in pencil. There are a few notations at 11r and 12r related to the preparation of the parts for the quartet op.132, which Karl Holz and Joseph Linke are working on in this time period. These specifically include the words “poco adagio – Allegro appassionato,” relating to the recitative bridging the fourth and fifth movements, and the Finale of that quartet. The remainder of the book is devoted to work on the first three movements of op.130, and the fifth movement. The sketches for the op.130 quartet are more advanced than the work found in the Moscow pocket sketchbook, so it is used later, and to a great extent is parallel with the latter half of the De Roda desk sketchbook, which is used from May through September of 1825. There are 12 staves to the page, so the paper that forms this sketchbook may be what Holz was looking at when he mentioned seeing some 12-staff paper at Beethoven’s apartment on Sunday, July 24th.

At 10r-10v of this pocket sketchbook, Beethoven writes an intriguing fragment of text from a German version of Homer’s Odyssey, Book XIV 83-84, apparently intended to be sung as a canon in the key of F, 2/4 time, “All violent deeds displease the gods. [They] only honor virtue, and justice benefits mankind.”