BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY: Wednesday, September 7, 1825

The Schuppanzigh Quartet has a private run-through of the op.132 quartet in A minor today, in Maurice Schlesinger’s rooms at the Zum wilden Mann inn. Although Beethoven does not attend, Nephew Karl is present, as are Beethoven supporters Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer and Tobias Haslinger.

This afternoon, Beethoven copies an advertisement from the Intelligenzblatt supplement to yesterday’s Wiener Zeitung for good slow-combustion stoves in two varieties.

Conversation Book 94, 31r.

B. Schott’s Sons in Mainz writes to Beethoven today. The letter is now lost, but from external evidence it is clear that Schott’s declines to print Bethoven’s statement about the “romantic biography” of Haslinger that was published in their Cäcilia magazine. Brandenburg Letter 2056.

Sir George Smart, visiting Vienna from London, pays a call on violinist Joseph Mayseder at nine in the morning. Mayseder shows him the catalogue of his 49 works. “We conversed about Beethoven’s Choral Symphony [of which Smart had conducted the English premiere several months ago], our opinion agrees about it. When it was performed here [Michael] Umlauf conducted it and [Jean] Kletrinski and Schuppanzigh were the leaders. All the basses played in the recitative but they had the story that it was written for [Domenico] Dragonetti only.” Afterwards, Smart goes to see Prince Liechenstein’s garden. “M. Dembsher told me that Spohr had written a double quartette for eight, which young [Joseph] Ries has heard, and that Beethoven has nearly finished three separate quartettes, of these compositions the first will be printed at Mayence [Mainz] and the other two at Schlesinger’s at Paris. Cox and Cox, Leaves from the Journal of Sir George Smart (London, 1907), pp.104-106.