BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, April 12, 1826
Beethoven goes with unpaid assistant Karl Holz to visit Mathias Artaria at his shop. Artaria tells Beethoven that there are already a lot of inquiries for the four-hand piano arrangement of the Grosse Fuge. He asks whether Beethoven will allow him to publish it. He’d like to print it both in score and in parts [presumably in a version for two pianos.] “The fuge á 4 mains by you arranged to be published at once.” They agree that pianist and composer Anton Halm would be suitable for making the arrangement. Artaria says he will send Halm to Beethoven so he can advise the best way to approach it.
Artaria then shows Beethoven some of his publishing handiwork. He also trades in engravings, and shows Beethoven a deluxe 4-volume set of the Musée français and its treasures, at massive folio size, which sold for 6000 florins C.M. [The set was published in Paris, not by Artaria.] It includes 720 copper engravings of the original paintings that were in the Museum in Paris under Napoleon. He shows Beethoven the engraving of Laocoön and his sons by Charles Clément Bervic (1786-1822). Artaria says it looks just like marble; the engraver lost his eyesight over it. “One sees Beethoven in his compositions.”
Then Artaria shows them an engraving of a view from the highest mountains in the world, starting in the Himalayas. Holz imagines Beethoven on top of those mountain peaks, composing. Beethoven mentions Chimborazo, the volcano in Ecuador on the Cordillera range of the Andes [the tallest peak in Ecuador, displaying the surprising breadth of Beethoven’s knowledge.] Artaria says Cimborasso is high, but the Himalayas are higher. The mountain in the engraving is “somewhat taller” than the Kahlenberg [the hill in the Vienna Woods nearby], Artaria jokes.
Beethoven and Holz have to go. Artaria invites them back; it would take 2 years to see everything he has. “You must come often and very soon again.”
Conversation Book 108, 11r-12av.
Today’s Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Nr.15, at 254, a correspondent recounts the concerts in Magdeburg during the first half of the winter. Among the symphonic works given was Beethoven’s Symphony Nr.1 in C major. The Symphony in E-flat of Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries was also performed during that period, and is described as “a very beautiful piece, solid throughout, far from any kind of search for effects, and clear. The orchestra was good, but the fact that Herr Mühling did not play the violin solo himself, as he usually does, did the audience no favors.”
The Intelligenz-Blatt supplement to today’s AMZ (Nr.VI) offers Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, in full score, from Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, for a price of 5 thalers each.
Today’s Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Nr.15) at 118-119 contains a fanciful review of an arrangement of the March (Nr.8) from The Creatures of Prometheus, op.43, “Musique de Ballet en forme d’un Marche,” for piano 4 hands, by Louis van Beethoven, published in Leipzig by Hofmeister. [The uncredited arranger is Carl Friedrich Ebers (1770-1836).] “The writer [probably editor Adolph Bernhard Marx] does not know of a more amusing piece of music by Beethoven. It is a ballet for tightrope walkers, the Kolter family [a reference to tightrope walker Wilhelm Kolter (1795-1888), which also serves as a play on the arrangement’s dedication to the Kobler family]. Why not? Bajaderen [Indian temple dancers], Bacchantes or tightrope walkers!”
As Goethe writes in Faust, if you just get something right about the fullness of the human condition, it is interesting. “And Beethoven succeeded in doing that here; he lets his tightrope walkers march past so cheerfully and legendary that we find ourselves in the circus among the cheering crowd, and we want to cheer along with them for the colorful jugglers and charmingly floating people of the air. And everything happens in the best, most faithful order. The drums and trumpets call out cheerfully and with increasing emphasis, preparing for something important, God knows. What follows? A little march that one might almost call ordinary, if it weren’t so funny. Now the rope has been climbed, but it goes with difficulty and fear. Of course the beginners start, and the trumpet blows quite foolishly and clumsily in between. Is there any homemade sausage there too? Well, the scene is soon over; the march entertains us in the interlude and soon we are delighted by very dainty, airy jumps…. That ends in a more noisy way! But now, after a repetition of the march, comes the tour de force. Or is it a battle scene, soldiers and robbers, or something like that? An unconscious parody of our theater spectacles? It’s wild and efficient, but still funny, and so it moves from the key of D major to end in F-sharp major, not without enough noise. Now it comes to a happy end with graceful, pleasant turns, and a rustling encore from the march sends us home satisfied and in high spirits. It’s nothing but an evening of tightrope walking that we’ve just experienced, but the enjoyment was pure and true.”
The piece is also available for large orchestra. “Incidentally, the incorrectness of even the title (un marche, cette piece se trouvent, daus) and many passages of the arrangement before us raises discontent.”
Beethoven had done his own arrangement for piano solo of the entire ballet, the seldom-heard Hess 90, which had been published by Artaria in 1801 as Beethoven’s op.24.
In London this evening, Carl Maria von Weber’s new opera Oberon is given its first performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. As the composer arrives to conduct the premiere, he receives a standing ovation with cheering and waving. The overture and each number are encored, some of them twice. Notwithstanding this success, Weber had difficulties with the libretto by James Planché. It did not help that he received each act as it was written, so he could not gain a firm conception of the entire work until it was well along. He also was unhappy with the extremely large number of characters, and in particular the omission of music during important moments of dramatic action. Weber wrote to Planché on February 19, 1825, “I must repeat that the cut of the whole is very foreign to all my ideas and maxims. The intermixing of so many principal actors who do not sing, the omission of the music in the most important moments,—all these things deprive our Oberon the title of an opera, and will make him unfit for all other Theaters in Europe; which is a very bad thing for me.”
Bernard Haitink here conducts the Overture to Oberon, performed by the orchestra of Covent Garden:
Sauer & Leidesdorf in today’s Wiener Zeitung (Nr.83) at 364 announces the 22nd volume of their Complete Operas of Rossini for piano solo, Il matrimonio per Cambiale, at the subscriber price of 6 florins W.W.