Septet, op. 20 arranged for Military Band, Hess 21

Septet op. 20 arranged for 11-piece Military Band (Fragments), Hess 21 (1802?).

Picture by courtesy of Donna Dralle. More of her work can be found at http://www.graphixnow.com

This mysterious manuscript of sixteen pages, which arranges the Andante con Variazioni and the Finale of the popular Septet op. 20, was once owned successively by Metternich, Napoleon III and Henry Ford; it now resides in the Bonn Beethovenhaus. Hess in his catalog believed this to be two separate arrangements, one for nine and one for ten instruments. However, apparently he only counted the staves and not the voices. The two horn parts are on a single staff in both movements, and in the Andante the bassoons appear on a single staff but are on separate staves in the Finale.

It is not entirely clear whether Beethoven was involved in this arrangement, or to what extent. As pointed out by Myron Schwager in an article in Musical Quarterly October 1970, the arrangement does not appear to be in Beethoven's hand; the dynamic indications lack Beethoven's characteristic use of a colon after them (e.g., "p:" "cresc:", etc.), and the middle C's are written as a straight line, an oddity does not appear in any known Beethoven autographs. Schwager also notes, however, that the arrangement here has characteristics of both the original Septet and of variants which appear only in the arrangement of the septet by Beethoven for piano trio, op. 38. Thus the arranger either had access to both of these versions (and likely had them in front of him), or Beethoven himself did the arrangement.

Only the first two pages of the fourth movement Andante are known to survive; these give the very beginning, including the theme and the start of the first variation.

The first 101 measures of the sixth movement Finale (including the introduction) are missing as well. There is also a chunk of 20 measures of the recapitulation after the clarinet cadenza which were never written on these pages. After the cadenza, the first measure of the recapitulation is given for the clarinet (without any acccompaniment noted), and then the piece resumes 19 measures later slightly farther to the right on the same page. Since there are sufficient clues to know how the missing 20 measures should read, and the beginning of the exposition can be extrapolated from that, we have provided a MIDI containing a completion of the Finale, as well as the original score in two discrete parts. We also provide a hypothetical completion of the first variation from the fourth movement as well as the original fragment.

Opus: 20
Hess: 21

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