BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, May 3, 1826 (very approximately)

Sometime about now, Beethoven begins using Pocket Sketchbook aut.9/4. This bundle of 21 leaves is held by the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. This was another homemade sketchbook assembled by Beethoven himself, and he stitched six of the leaves in backwards. The sketchbook is entirely devoted to the String Quartet op.131, mostly the fourth movement, but there is work on all seven movements at once in this book, which is rather unusual for Beethoven’s practice. The last ten pages include significant sketches for the fifth movement and finale. There are also some sketches for the Scherzo he worked on in bundle 3, but he abandons it after the first five leaves of this sketchbook. It parallels the work in folios 33 through 39 of the Kullak desk sketchbook, and Johnson, Tyson & Winter tentatively assign a date of “late spring” to this bundle.