BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Tuesday, March 23, 1824

Nephew Karl is at his uncle’s apartment and notes that dinner will be macaroni, one of Ludwig’s favorite dishes. The washerwoman from yesterday comes to get her payment of 1 florin 30 kreutzers for doing the laundry.

The relative quiet of yesterday disappears, as the concert planners finally take a serious look at the calendar. Violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh comes in the late morning or early afternoon to visit Beethoven, and sees that the copying of parts is far behind schedule. “We will probably not be finished by April 8 [the projected date of the Akademie concert.]” Schuppanzigh tells Beethoven he should send unpaid assistant Anton Schindler to see him, so Schuppanzigh can speak with him about this matter. Schuppanzigh will be home until 3:30.

Beethoven sends word to Schindler to visit Schuppanzigh, perhaps using Karl as his courier. Schuppanzigh tells Schindler of the impending disaster with the uncopied parts, and has him round up more copyists. While Beethoven has his macaroni with Karl, Schindler goes to the Theater in the Josephstadt where he is concertmaster. He gets the theater’s copyist, Peter Gläser, and brings him to meet with Beethoven. Gläser will take the necessary work on, and he’ll be responsible for getting it done promptly. [Beethoven’s or Schindler’s instructions appear to put Gläser in charge of extracting and duplicating the parts for the concert, and Maschek and his assistants are left to finish the fair copy of the Ninth.]

Copyist Peter Gläser asks whether he can take part of the music with him to work on it at his home. Beethoven doesn’t like that idea, again fearing that the composition will be pirated before he can sell it. Gläser gives his assurances that he will not make any improper use of it, and notes that he is with Schindler daily. He’ll first copy the parts for the four string voices [unlikely the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, and more probably the string parts for the Missa Solemnis that have finally been proofread by Beethoven.]. Beethoven appears to mention that Schindler had suggested Gläser take over as copyist after Wenzel Schlemmer’s death, but he wanted to take care of Schlemmer’s widow, who had continued her husband’s music copying business. Gläser assures Beethoven that he understands, and he did not want to offend the widow woman, otherwise he would have applied to take on Wenzel Schlemmer’s position as Court copyist.

Gläser leaves to start his copying work in the late afternoon or early evening. Schindler remains with Beethoven. Schindler says Gläser had never been here before, so he asked Schindler to accompany him. Postponing the concert from April 8 for four or five days to get the copying done would be fine, except Holy Week falls in between, and they can’t hold the Akademie concert during that week. So, it would have to be after Easter (April 18.)

Schindler starts inventorying what work has been accomplished by copyist Paul Maschek and his team. All of the choral parts are there, but there is still much to do on the Mass. He’ll talk to Gläser again today, and see if he will take on the orchestral parts of the Mass that are still missing. The Finale of the Ninth Symphony needs to be copied before anything else, though, because of the vocal parts. [The choral parts will need to be lithographed or copied, and both the chorus and the soloists will need time to prepare.] Schindler says he will advise Maschek that Gläser has taken on this work, “and then he can remain restfully at home.” But Schindler can’t visit Maschek today, because he has no time. He still needs to proofread the quartet of the Kyrie [it is unclear whether he means the solo voices, or the basic set of strings.] Schindler says he will call on Maschek tomorrow, and leaves.

Conversation Book 60, 17r-18v.

Editor Theodore Albrecht concludes from the discussion that Paul Maschek was dismissed as a copyist today. We don’t think that’s necessarily the case, as the need for copyists is dire and Beethoven can ill afford to lose someone as fast as Maschek at this point. Furthermore, he was warning Beethoven ten days ago that the copying work could not be completed in time unless Beethoven started to proofread more quickly. He had suggested that they make all of the copies, and then correct them based on a proofread exemplar, but Beethoven rejected that idea, and here they are. Although as seen by Beethoven’s letter to Maschek discussed yesterday, Maschek appears to have disregarded that instruction, which certainly does not help Beethoven’s temper.

As Beethoven pointed out in his letter to Maschek, there are also serious problems other than speed. While Gläser handles the copying of parts, Maschek and his most reliable assistant (who remains nameless) will continue to work as rapidly as they can to finish the fair copy of the Ninth Symphony, and they will deliver it within a matter of days. The third movement is delivered at least by the 26th, when Schindler asks whether he can give it to Gläser; at that point Beethoven seems to be in the middle of proofreading the string parts. Gläser is to extract the remaining parts from this “fair copy.”

That copy is called source C by Jonathan del Mar in his critical commentary to his edition of the symphony, and is now housed at Juilliard. As Del Mar observes at 16, “it will be abundantly clear that there is a mass of corrections in Beethoven’s hand. These are almost all in ink, occasionally in a blunt, somewhat hard pencil.”

Del Mar continues, “On several pages even the majority of the slurs, staccato and dynamics were entered by Beethoven himself (e.g. IV 777-812), so that a first glance at the original copy must have thrown him in despair; that it sometimes actually did so is evident from remarks furiously entered into the margin: “wieder nicht gut” [again not good] (III 55 4.Cor); “du verfluchter Kerl” [you damned knave] (IV 291 Trs, Pk); and “asinoccio” [donkey, in Italian] (IV 389 Perc on a page later replaced by another copyist prior to publication), usually in places where the wretched – or ‘cursed‘ – copyist had yet again saved himself, and cost Beethoven, a valuable minute by marking a bar [slash with two dots, signifying the same as the previous bar] which was not, in fact, quite the same as the previous one.”

Attached is page 165 of the fair copy of the Finale, showing bars 783-787, with Beethoven’s corrections of added slurs, dynamic markings “cresc. poco a poco“, “8va” in the flute, staccato markings, etc., courtesy of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.