BEETHOVEN INSISTS ON SOLE GUARDIANSHIP

9

to the Archbishopric, be obliged to spend the greater part of his time in Olmütz, and had renewed her attacks upon his moral character. "His Imperial Highness, Eminence and Cardinal" would unhesitatingly bear witness to his morality, and, as to the twaddle about Olmütz, the Archduke would probably spend not more than six weeks of the year there.

.....

The chief points are that I be recognized at once as sole guardian, I will accept no co-guardian, that the mother be excluded from intercourse with her son in the Institute because in view of her immorality there cannot be enough watchmen there and she confuses the teacher by her false statements and lies. She also has led her son to tell shameful lies and make charges against me, and accuses me herself of having given him too much or too little; but that the claims of humanity may not be overlooked, she may see her son occasionally at my home in the presence of his teachers and other excellent men... It is my opinion that you should insist stoutly and irrevocably that I be sole guardian and that this unnatural mother shall see her son only at my house; my well known humanity and culture are a guarantee that my treatment of her will be no less generous than that given to her son. Moreover, I think that all this should be done quickly and that if possible we ought to get the Appellate Court to assume the superior guardianship, as I want my nephew to be placed in a higher category; neither he nor I belong to the Magistracy under whose guardianship are only innkeepers, shoemakers and tailors. As regards his present maintenance, it shall be cared for as long as I live. For the future he has 7,000 florins W.W. of which his mother has the usufruct during life; also 2,000 fl. (or a little more since I have reinvested it), the interest on which belongs to him, and 4,000 florins in silver of mine are lying in the bank; as he is to inherit all my property this belongs to his capital. You will observe that while because of his great talent (to which the Honorable Magistracy is indifferent) he will not be able at once to support himself, there is already a superfluity in case of my death.

In a postscript he accuses the mother of wishing to gain possession of her son in order to enjoy all of her pension. In view of this he had taken counsel as to whether or not he should let her keep the money and make it good from his own pocket. He had been advised not to do so, however, because she would make bad use of the money. "I have decided, therefore, to set aside the sum in time. You see again how foolishly the Magistracy is acting in trying to tear my son wholly from me, since when she dies the boy will lose this share of the pension and would get along very poorly without my aid." A few days later Beethoven wrote to Dr. Bach again, this time to suggest that legal steps be taken to attach the widow's pension, he having a suspicion that she was trying to evade payment of her son's share because she had permitted

nine months to pass without drawing the pension from the exchequer.

The Magistracy disposed of Beethoven's protest and application on November 4, by curtly referring him to the disposition made of his petition of September 17. Beethoven asked for a reconsideration of the matter, but without avail, and the only recourse remaining to him was the appeal to the higher court which had already been suggested to Dr. Bach. The story of that appeal belongs to the year 1820. Meanwhile the association of Councillor Peters with him in the guardianship had been broached and was the subject of discussion with his friends. In December Bernard writes in a Conversation Book:

The Magistracy has till now only made a minute of the proceedings and will now hold a session to arrive at a decision. It is already decided that you shall have the chief guardianship, but a 2d is to be associated with you. As no objection can be made to Peters, there will be no difficulty. The matter will be ordered according to your wishes and I will take care of Mr. Blöchlinger. The mother will not be admitted to the institute unless you are present, 4 times a year is enough-nor the guardian either?—The Magistracy has compromised itself nicely.

Bach seems to have advised that the mother be accepted as co-guardian. He writes: "As co-guardian she will have no authority, only the honor of being associated in the guardianship. She will be a mere figurehead." Whether the conversations noted at the time referred to the case on appeal or to the application still pending before the Magistracy, or some to the one, some to the other, it is impossible to determine. The record of the refusal of the Magistracy has not been procured, but the decree of the Appellate Court gives December 20 as its date.

Frequent citations from the so-called "Conversation Books" made in the course of the narrative touching the later phases of the controversy over the guardianship call for some remarks upon this new source of information opened in this year. In the "Niederrheinische Musikzeitung," No. 28 of 1854, Schindler wrote:

Beethoven's hearing had already become too weak for oral conversation, even with the help of an ear-trumpet, in 1818, and recourse had now to be had to writing. Only in the case of intercourse with Archduke Rudolph, and here because of his gentle voice, the smallest of the ear-trumpets remained of service for several years more.

That he was able, partly by the ear and partly by the eye, to judge of the correctness of the performance of his music, Schindler states in the same article—a fact also known from many other sources; this was the case even to his last year. When, after the

SCHINDLER AND THE CONVERSATION BOOKS

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death of Beethoven, such of his manuscripts and papers as were thought to be salable were set apart, there remained in the hands of von Breuning a lot of letters, documents and Conversation Books. The estimated value in the inventory of the manuscripts and the price obtained for them at the auction sale, indicate how utterly worthless from a pecuniary point of view that other collection was thought to be; as, however, they might be of use to some future biographer, it was well to have them preserved, and doubtless a small gratification to Schindler for his great sacrifices and very valuable services to Beethoven in these last months, the only one which he as guardian to the absent nephew could make; so Breuning gave them to him. The Conversation Books, counting in as such those which were really nothing but a sheet or two of paper loosely folded, were only about 400 in number, or less than fifty per annum for the last eight and a half years of Beethoven's lifethat being the period which they cover. Schindler, who spoke on this as on so many other topics frankly and without reserve, said that he long preserved the books and papers intact, but not finding any person but himself who placed any value upon them, their weight and bulk had led him in the course of his long unsettled life by degrees to destroy those which he deemed to be of little or no importance. The remainder were, in 1845, transferred to the Royal Library in Berlin, and, in 1855, when they were examined for this work, numbered 138. It was but natural that those preserved are such as place Schindler's relation to the master in the strongest light and those deemed by him essential to the full understanding of the more important events of Beethoven's last years. Most of them bear evidence of the deep interest with which Schindler, while they remained in his possession, lived over the past in them. In many cases he appended the names of the principal writers; so that one soon learns to distinguish their hands without difficulty; and occasionally he enriched them with valuable annotations. The larger of them-ordinary blank note-booksare only of a size and thickness fitted to be carried in the coatpocket. It is obvious, therefore, on a moment's reflection, that at a single sitting with a few friends in an inn or coffee-house, the pages must have filled rapidly as the book passed from hand to hand and one or another wrote question or reply, remark or statement, a bit of news or a piece of advice. A few such conversations, one sees, would fill a book, all the sooner as there is no thought of

"That he was not always scrupulous in preserving their integrity when they offered evidence in contradiction of his printed statements is the conviction of this editor for reasons which will appear later.

economizing space and each new sentence is usually also a new paragraph. It strikes one, therefore, that the whole 400 could have contained but a small portion of the conversations of the period they covered. This was so. At home a slate or any loose scraps of paper were commonly used, thus saving a heavy item of expense; moreover, many who conversed with Beethoven would only write upon the slate in order to obliterate it immediately, that nothing should remain exposed to the eyes of others. The books, therefore, were for the most part for use when the composer was away from home, although there were occasions when, it being desirable to preserve what was written, they were also used there. Hence, the collection in Berlin can be viewed as little more than scattered specimens of the conversations of the master's friends and companions, most unequally distributed as to time. For months together there is nothing or hardly anything; and then again a few days will fill many scores of leaves. In a few instances Beethoven has himself written-that is, when in some public place he did not trust his voice; and memoranda of divers kinds, even of musical ideas from his pen, are not infrequent. One is surprised to find so few distinguished names in literature, science and art-Grillparzer's forms an exception and he appears only in the later years; as for the rest, they are for the most part of local Vienna celebrities.

There is no source of information for the biography of Beethoven which at first sight appears so rich and productive and yet, to the conscientious writer, proves so provokingly defective and requires such extreme caution in its use as these Conversation Books. The oldest of them belongs to the time before us (1819) and was evidently preserved by Schindler on account of the protracted conversations on the topic of the nephew. We have already made several citations from it and shall have frequent occasion to have recourse to it in the progress of this narrative. The period in which it was used is approximately fixed by a reference to a concert given by the violinist Franz Clement, at which he played an introduction and variations on a theme by Beethoven. This concert took place on April 4, 1819. The last conversations

1Apparently in reply to a question put by Beethoven an unidentified hand writes: "Poor stuff,-empty-totally ineffective your theme was in bad hands; with much monotony he made 15 or 20 variations and put a cadenza (fermate) in every one, you may imagine what we had to endure he has fallen off greatly and looks too old to entertain with his acrobatics on the violin."

Thayer's industry in the gathering and ordering of material for this biography, let it be remarked here in grateful tribute, is illustrated in the fact that he made practically a complete transcript of the Conversation Books, laboriously deciphering the frequently hieroglyphic scrawls, and compiled a mass of supplementary material for the

MUSICAL SURPRISE AT A WEDDING

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in the book took place about the time of Beethoven's removal to Mödling-shortly before and after.

This explanatory digression may serve as a modulation to more cheerful themes than that which has occupied us of late.

Though Karl was no longer a member of the Giannatasio household or pupil of the institute, and though there were, in consequence, fewer meetings between Beethoven and his self-sacrificing friends, their relations remained pleasant, and early in 1819 Beethoven found occasion to supplement his verbal protestations of gratitude with a deed. Nanni, the younger daughter of Giannatasio, was married on February 6, 1819, to Leopold Schmerling. When the young couple returned to the house after the ceremony they were greeted by a wedding hymn for tenor solo, men's voices and pianoforte accompaniment. The performers were hidden in a corner of the room. When they had finished they stepped forth from their place of concealment. Beethoven was among them and he handed the manuscript of the music which he had written to words of Prof. Stein, who occupied a chair of philosophy at the University and was also tutor in the imperial household, to the bride. purpose of fixing the chronological order of the conversations. The dates of all concerts and other public events alluded to were established by the examination of newspapers and other contemporaneous records and the utility of the biographical material greatly enhanced.

'Madame Pessiak-Schmerling, a daughter of Nanni, recounted this incident twice in the letters to Thayer. Madame Pessiak possessed a copy of the song. Her mother had jealously preserved the original, but, together with Beethoven's letters to Giannatasio, it was stolen. In 1861 Thayer found song and letters among the autographs owned by William Witt of the firm of Ewer and Co. in London, and obtained copies of them, but Thayer's copy of the song was not found by this Editor among the posthumous papers of the author when he examined them in order to set aside the needful material for the completion of this biography. The music of Miss Nanni's hymeneal ode was forty years later put to a right royal use. Transposed from C to A major it was published for the first time by Ewer and Co. as a setting to English words on the occasion of the marriage of Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, to Frederick William of Prussia (afterwards Emperor Frederick III) on January 25, 1858. The title of this publication, which is now out of print, was "The Wedding Song, written and by gracious permission dedicated to Her Royal Highness Victoria, Princess Royal, on her Wedding Day, by John Oxenford. The music composed by L. van Beethoven. Posthumous Work." The inscription on the original manuscript, according to Thayer, was "Am 14ten Jenner 1819-für F. v. Giannatasio de Rio von L. v. Beethoven."

At the Editor's request Mr. J. S. Shedlock, in 1912, kindly made an investigation and reported that so far as could be learned from the public records the song had no place in the wedding ceremonies in 1858. Messrs. Novello and Co. most courteously brought forth the old plates from their vaults and had a "pull" of them made for this Editor's use. The music can not be said to have any other than a curious interest. A single stanza will suffice to disclose the quality of Mr. Oxenford's hymeneal ode:

"Hail, Royal Pair, by love united;

With ev'ry earthly blessing crown'd;

A people lifts its voice delighted,

And distant nations hear the sound.

All hearts are now with gladness swelling,
All tongues are now of rapture telling,

A day of heartfelt joy is found!"