BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tuesday, June 7, 1825

Beethoven is in Baden and starts working on a shopping list. They need flour.

Someone unidentified (but who plainly knows Beethoven) comes to the door at the Schloss Gutenbrunn. He desires to introduce Professor Wenzel Wilhelm Würfel, the professor of music at the Warsaw Conservatory, and now living in Vienna as a pianist. [In 1826 Würfel will become the principal conductor at the Kärntnertor Theater. No mention is made of the fact here, but Würfel knows the Chopin family well, and will later encourage young Frédéric Chopin’s career when he comes to Vienna in a few years.]

Later this afternoon, Beethoven reads yesterday’s newspapers in a coffeehouse. He seems to still be having trouble with painful corns on his feet, since he makes note of a corn cutting instrument.

He also makes the following note related to the canon WoO 190 that he wrote for Dr. Braunhofer a few days earlier: “When I believed that my doctor could not be found, and then found [him] anyhow, I had, under this assumption, already begun this canon.” Sieghard Brandenburg considered this a draft letter, and catalogued it as Brandenburg Letter 1984. It seems likely to us that Beethoven was considering sending this canon to Schott’s to publish in their Cäcilia music journal, as he had done with two other canons, and that this entry in the conversation book is a proposed description of how it came to be. He does not, however, appear to have sent this canon to them.

Conversation Book 35r-35v.