BEETHOVEN’S INNER AND OUTER WORLDS
Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness. As his hearing deteriorated he could no longer understand what people were saying without an ear trumpet, and even then sometimes badly. The need arose for others to write down their end of conversations with him. So, beginning in 1818, Beethoven kept tablets of paper and pencils ready at hand for visitors and friends to write down statements, messages, and questions instead of shouting them out. Beethoven would read what they wrote and would usually reply verbally, not in writing, unless he wanted a remark to be confidential, as once in a while he did. But by and large the Conversation Books, as they came to be called, consisted of one-way communications. Beethoven or those around him managed to collect many of these Conversation Books over the years from 1818 to 1827, and even in their one-sided form they provide a vivid reflection of his private life and of the topics of interest to him and his circle. They deal with matters personal and general, from music to politics, from wine prices to publishers’ plans, from gossip to serious opinions voiced by the composer and those around him. As an example, in February 1820 Carl Bernard, a journalist who frequented Beethoven’s circle, wrote that “The opera by Meyerbeer [Emma von Leicester] failed badly—it is a pure imitation of Rossini.” A few months later the same Bernard gave Beethoven his opinion that Lord Byron “certainly has the greatest imagination and the deepest feeling of any living poet. The Corsair above all would make a good opera.”1 In 1826 a remarkable exchange—that is, one side of it—is recorded between Beethoven and Karl Holz on “character” in instrumental music:
That is what I always miss in Mozart’s instrumental music.
[———]
Especially the instrumental music.
[———]
A specific character in an instrumental work, that is, one does not find in his works a representation analogous to a state of mind, as one does in yours.
[———]
I always ask myself, when I listen to something, what does it mean?
[———]
Your works have, throughout, a really exclusive character.
[———]
I would explain the difference between Mozart’s and your instrumental works in this way: for one of your works a poet could only write one poem; while to a Mozart work he could write three or four analogous ones.2
Sometimes Beethoven used the sheets as memoranda or to enter items he found in current newspapers. At other times he jotted down lists of articles he needed to purchase or wrote short memos to himself of things to remember. For example, in 1820, “ask Schlemmer [his long-time music copyist] where he gets his knives sharpened,” followed by “inquire what the monthly cost of a room is at Oliva’s” and even “what they wear nowadays instead of an undershirt.”3
The fate of the Conversation Books has become entangled with the posthumous reputation of Beethoven’s self-promoting secretary and early biographer, Anton Schindler, who came to possess them after Beethoven’s death in March 1827 and then kept them for many years before selling them to the Berlin Royal Library in 1846. In the 1970s the British music critic and scholar Peter Stadlen established that a fair number of entries in the Conversation Books had been forged by Schindler after Beethoven’s death. The full extent of the Schindler forgeries was later documented by the team of scholars working on a complete edition of the German texts of the Conversation Books. The forged items were then identified and listed retroactively beginning with volume 7 of the ten-volume standard edition of the texts in German.4
Beethoven walking, seen from the back, in a drawing by Joseph Daniel Böhm. (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn)
Though Beethoven’s deafness for conversation was becoming worse, he could still improvise, he could try to conduct when an orchestral work of his was being mounted, and he could even follow, in some attenuated sense, the sound of a string quartet—perhaps only when they played a work of his own, though we cannot be sure of this. A remarkable anecdote is reported about his Quartet Opus 127, when, after an unsuccessful first performance led by Schuppanzigh in March 1825 it was tried out again in Beethoven’s presence. The new first violinist, Joseph Böhm, later wrote:
[T]he unhappy man was so deaf that he could no longer hear the heavenly sound of his compositions. And yet rehearsing in his presence was not easy. With close attention his eyes followed the bows and therefore he was able to judge the smallest fluctuations in tempo or rhythm and correct them at once. At the close of the last movement of this quartet there was a meno vivace, which seemed to me to weaken the general effect. At the rehearsal, therefore, I advised that the original tempo be maintained, which was done, to the betterment of the effect. Beethoven, crouched in a corner, heard nothing, but watched with strained attention. After the last bow-stroke he said, laconically, “Let it remain so,” went to the desks and crossed out the meno vivace in the four parts.5
A recent medical scholar has found evidence that Beethoven’s deafness even in the last years was not absolute but fluctuated considerably.6 Beethoven’s use of a resonance plate on the piano along with his ear trumpet when playing and improvising is attested to by Friedrich Wieck, who visited him in 1826. The “resonance plate” was a sound-conduction device that amplified individual sounds when placed on the piano, though it may well have caused a jumbling effect when chords were struck.7
A famous public revelation of Beethoven’s deafness took place at the first performance of the Ninth Symphony on May 7, 1824, in the Kärntnerthortheater. In the presence of a large audience that included the royal family, Beethoven tried to conduct the symphony, while the musicians quietly agreed not to follow his beat but to follow Ignaz Umlauf, who was standing by where the performers could see him. Either at the end of the Scherzo or at the end of the symphony (we are not sure which), amid tumultuous applause, Beethoven stood poring over his score while the contralto singer Caroline Unger plucked at his sleeve and pointed to the cheering audience—whereupon he turned and bowed to them all.8
The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. His retreat into himself and into the inner world of his music arose partly from the intellectual and emotional demands that he continued to make on himself in order to compose the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa solemnis, and the last quartets. But it was also an act of self-defense against the outer world, which now pursued him more eagerly than ever as his fame continued to spread and his reclusiveness became a part of the growing Beethoven legend. Visitors sought him out in Vienna or at the spas where he went for refuge, anxious to be among those who saw and talked with the great master while he was still alive. The “pilgrimage to Beethoven,” as the young Wagner later called it, became a sought-after experience in Vienna, a highly prized adventure for musicians, for cultivated and knowledgeable people, and for limelight seekers who saw the potential of writing up their visit to Beethoven for one or another cultural journal. Wagner denounced this practice in his 1840 pamphlet, “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven,” in which he vilified an imaginary Englishman who wanted the glory of visiting Beethoven although he understood nothing of what was important about Beethoven as an artist.9 The regular members of Beethoven’s circle from 1820 on included at various times Beethoven’s brother Johann, his nephew Karl, the ubiquitous Schindler, the violinist Karl Holz (who managed to dislodge Schindler as close confidante), and various writers, musicians, and editors whose names appear in the Conversation Books. Visitors, to mention only those recorded in memoirs, included the composers Ludwig Spohr, Carl Maria von Weber, and Gioacchino Rossini; among those who were not so recorded, perhaps the young Schubert, who had lived and worked in awe of Beethoven for years while living nearby in Vienna.10 Visitors from England included Sir George Smart, Sir John Russell, Cipriani Potter, and Richard Ford, and from the literary ranks Ludwig Rellstab and Franz Grillparzer, whose funeral oration for Beethoven defended the composer from the charge of misanthropy that must have been familiar gossip in Vienna.
In 1817 Beethoven wrote to Wilhelm Girard, an amateur poet, that his chronic ailments had been getting worse for the past four years.11 He fell prey to various illnesses for periods of time: for four months in late 1816–early 1817, again in 1819, and for many weeks in 1821 and 1822.12 Beginning in 1823 his eyes began to give him trouble, he suffered from colds and rheumatic symptoms, and signs of jaundice, most prominently a yellowing of his skin, began to appear. His letters speak more and more of physical distress and convey an atmosphere of growing infirmity during the time, in 1825 and 1826, when he was working with intense concentration on the last quartets, the summa of his artistic life.
In the three years prior to his death in March 1827 the intervals between illnesses became shorter. As Edward Larkin put it in his balanced account of Beethoven’s medical history, “during 1825 he suddenly looked much older and his complexion became permanently sallow.”13 In December 1826 he began to suffer from severe symptoms of liver disease and intestinal bleeding. The physicians could find no remedies, and he died on March 26, 1827, after a final illness of four months.
Beethoven’s increasing waywardness became grotesque in these years. Sometime in the early 1820s, out for a long walk, he followed a canal towpath and eventually, without knowing where he was going and with nothing to eat, made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. Confused and tired, he began to look in through the windows of some of the houses, and as he was dressed so shabbily some alarmed residents called in the local police. The more he complained that he was Beethoven the less they believed him: “You’re a tramp; Beethoven doesn’t look like this,” said a policeman, and locked him up. Finally they called in the music director of the nearby town of Wiener Neustadt, a certain Herzog, who identified him, whereupon in pity and chagrin they gave him some decent clothes and sent him home.14 Similarly, when Beethoven went to visit his nephew Karl in the hospital in 1826, he was mistaken for an “old peasant” in his seedy clothing and decrepit appearance.15
His obsessiveness also rose to higher levels. By far the most painful and tormenting was his long-range campaign to take on the legal guardianship of his nephew Karl, the only child of his brother Caspar Carl, who died of tuberculosis in November 1815. Carl’s will first appointed Ludwig van Beethoven as sole guardian of Karl, then nine years old, but a codicil written on the same day as the will canceled the exclusivity of this provision and made the boy’s mother, Johanna Reiss van Beethoven, co-guardian. The codicil bluntly states that “the best of harmony does not exist between my brother and my wife.”16 That was putting it mildly, for now began a tortured emotional and legal struggle between Beethoven and his sister-in-law for the custody of the boy that lasted for more than four years and entailed perpetual rancor, court appearances, seeming successes, reversals, and appeals. He had taken on the role of family head and virtual father to his two brothers when his mother died in 1787, and he continued to play it through the years, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes in reality, often in overbearing and presumptuous terms. The family role now emerged again in his fierce determination to become a quasi-father to his nephew, if necessary demolishing the rights and reputation of the boy’s mother as being unfit to be his guardian. As it happened, Johanna Reiss, whom Beethoven liked to call the “Queen of the Night,” lived a life that made character assassination fairly easy, as she had been accused of theft from her parents in 1804 and had been convicted of embezzlement of jewelry in 1811.17 Moreover, after Caspar Carl’s death she took a lover and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1820.
After finally gaining full guardianship of Karl in 1820, Beethoven continued to struggle for the remaining six years of his life to oversee and manage the boy’s education and development. At the same time, since he was deeply immersed in his work and had to cope with publishers, his physical and emotional debilitation, and his deafness, he could hardly provide an atmosphere in which the boy could thrive. As the day-to-day difficulties increased over these years, Karl’s life with his uncle became increasingly intolerable. His education continued in private schools until 1823, when, aged seventeen, he went on to the university to attend lectures in philology, having apparently found ways to adjust somehow to the domestic upheavals of the previous eight years. Witnessing and taking part in the scene around Beethoven, often acting as messenger, lad-of-all-work, or music copyist, Karl, whom Beethoven called his “adopted son,”18 still had to deal with Beethoven’s unbearable demands and recriminations. Beethoven blamed Karl if he failed to provide his “adopted father” with sufficient love and attention or if Karl pursued women, gambled, or saw certain male friends whom Beethoven regarded as bad company—not to mention Karl’s “disloyalty” when he paid clandestine visits to his mother.
Beethoven’s nephew Karl, shown as a cadet in a military regiment. (Historisches Museum, Vienna)
By the summer of 1826 these conflicts reached a climax. Karl showed clear preliminary signs of potential suicide—such as leaving home with hints that he intended to take his life, and keeping a loaded pistol among his personal belongings—signs that Beethoven and those around him apparently saw but could not or did not take steps to prevent.19 Karl then pawned his watch, bought two pistols, and in frantic desperation went to the Helenenthal, one of Beethoven’s favorite places for walking in the country, to try to kill himself. The attempt failed: the bullets grazed his skull but did not deeply wound him, and he recovered in a Vienna hospital. But the psychic wounds went deep. Nothing is more telling than that the first passersby to find him took him, at his request, not to Beethoven’s house but to his mother’s.20 Now Beethoven let himself be persuaded to give up the guardianship. Karl sought a way out by enlisting in the army, and, although Beethoven insisted that the youth would do better to first enroll in a military academy, he finally consented to let Karl become a cadet in a well-regarded regiment under the leadership of Lieutenant Field Marshal Baron von Stutterheim, a lifelong military officer.21 The enlistment led to the dedication to von Stutterheim of Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor Quartet, Opus 131.22 We gain a very partial glimpse of what Karl’s suicide attempt meant to Beethoven from a letter to his close associate, Karl Holz, written a month later.
I am exhausted, and joy will be over for me for a long time to come. My terrible current and future expenses are bound to worry me and all my hopes have vanished, my hopes of having near me someone who would resemble me, at least in my better qualities!23
“Someone who would resemble me, at least in my better qualities”—the phrase unwittingly sums up Beethoven’s anguished loss of judgment and perspective in dealing with his nephew, whom he could never imagine as an independent boy trying to grope his way toward manhood in the wake of severe deprivations. Karl, after all, had lost his father, was then immediately cut off from his mother’s nurturing through the willful actions of his uncle; and was further deprived of a warm environment and the personal freedom in which to find his way to maturity—all of this through the manipulative, overpowering, and suffocating embrace of that same uncle who longed to shape Karl in the image of an ideal male family member that neither Ludwig nor either of his brothers had ever been able to realize. Old Johann van Beethoven had been an absent father to his three sons; Ludwig, adopting his nephew as his son, could do no better. That this erratic uncle Ludwig also happened to be one of the greatest and most famous of living artists and thus a perpetual but unreachable model for an insecure young man only made matters worse. As it turned out later, Karl managed to become reconciled with his uncle during the latter’s last illness, and when Beethoven wrote a will in early January 1827, Karl became the sole beneficiary of his estate.24 Karl remained in military service until 1832, then obtained a job in an Austrian government office and lived quietly until his death in 1858.25
“The human brain . . . is not a salable commodity”
If we move from Beethoven’s deeply troubled personal life to the circumstances of his career during these years, the picture is not less complicated but is certainly less depressing. In these last ten years his dealings with publishers became ever more arcane and complex. In the early years he had been making his way as virtuoso pianist and path-breaking composer, writing for the immediate public and publishing many of his works with local publishers in Vienna—Artaria, Hoffmeister, Mollo, Cappi, Traeg, and the so-called Bureau des Arts et d’Industrie. During his middle years the net widened to include publishers outside Vienna, above all Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig.
In the last period, his works were becoming much more difficult of immediate acceptance by even the knowledgeable public. But it was also the time in which Beethoven had become a celebrity whose fame reached abroad not only to all of Europe but also to America. Now a new group of publishers appeared, anxious to be the first to print his latest works and hoping to capitalize on his name. An early representative of the new breed was Clementi, the famous pianist and composer who was also active as a music publisher in England; he not only agreed to take on some finished works but commissioned some new ones—the Piano Sonatas Opp. 78 and 79. Less successful but interested British publishers were Birchall, which published the “Kreutzer” and Opus 96 Sonatas and the “Archduke” Trio; (Opp. 47, 96, 97), Chappell (the “Kakadu” Variations), and the curiously named “Regent’s Harmonic Institution,” whose address in London was “Lower Saloon, Argyll Rooms.” This last publisher, at the prodding of Ferdinand Ries, brought out the British first edition of the Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, in a curious two-part format. Part 1 comprises the first three movements, but with the second and third reversed; Part 2 consists of the finale, labeled “Introduction and Fugue,” as if it were a separate composition. Beethoven’s acquiescence in this strange edition gives us a partial glimpse of his legitimate uncertainty as to how the public might react to this long and unfathomably difficult sonata.
Other new firms that took hold in these later years included, most prominently, the local Viennese shop of Sigmund Anton Steiner, who came on the scene in 1813 and improved his chances by lending Beethoven money to support his sick brother, then in 1815–16 published a raft of important works. Still later Beethoven opened up connections with Adolph Martin Schlesinger, who had founded an important publishing house in Berlin in 1810 and was the major publisher of Berlin composers including Weber. Beethoven also had extensive dealings with Adolph’s son, Maurice Schlesinger, who set up shop in Paris in 1821. The two Schlesingers, whom Beethoven occasionally castigated to others, in letters containing anti-Semitic remarks all too typical of the German and Austrian mentality of his time, brought out the last three piano sonatas and two of the late quartets, Opp. 132 and 135.26 Opus 131 was published by B. Schott’s Söhne at Mainz, who had also brought out the Missa solemnis (the publication history of which could fill a separate chapter), the Ninth Symphony, and other late works. Nearby in Vienna, Matthias Artaria, a son of Domenico Artaria, published the Quartets Opus 130 and the Grand Fugue, Opus 133, as well as the four-hand arrangement of the Fugue issued as Opus 134.
The facts and issues regarding the maze of Beethoven’s later dealings with publishers can be summarized in a few words.27 So much of Beethoven’s correspondence is with publishers and about publications of his music because his career ambitions, financial worries, and obsessive mentality gave him no alternative. Rejecting or failing to obtain any permanent court position, and having as his only source of steady income the annuity bestowed on him by Kinsky, Lobkowitz, and Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven really needed to sell his works for his livelihood. Supporting himself was not easy, even if he was not badly off, but when he took on the guardianship of nephew Karl in 1816 his costs rose accordingly.
Beethoven had been very successful with publishers in his most productive early years, when he claimed that “six or seven publishers or even more” were clamoring for his works. He tried incessantly to negotiate a high fee for each work, often announcing that works were ready before they really were, in order to promote a publication contract and collect his money in hard cash. To keep up the flow of publications he wrote a fair number of accessible minor works even in his later years, or fixed up some unpublished minor early works and brought them out—all of which made it easier for publishers to do business with him and accept the increasingly difficult, at times incomprehensible major works of the last years. Plenty of later editions of his early works also remained on the market for years along with his new ones, not to mention endless arrangements for piano solo, for piano, four hands, and for small chamber ensembles, designed for the music rooms and salons of the bourgeoisie in the oncoming Biedermeier age.28
Since at least some chance existed of controlling the rights to a composition in other countries, Beethoven realized that he would increase his profits if he could somehow sell the rights to a given work to several publishers, each in a different country, supposedly with the understanding that they would all issue the work on the same date. On a sketch leaf in 1816 he wrote himself a memo to this effect:
For all works, as now with the cello sonata, you must reserve for yourself the right to fix for the publisher the day of publication, without the publishers in London and Germany knowing about each other, so to speak, because otherwise they will give less, and in any case it is unnecessary that they should know. You can give the excuse that someone else has ordered this composition from you.29
Needless to say, this scheme could not be brought about in many cases, but it did more or less work out that way for several compositions that came out at about the same time in Vienna or Leipzig and in London. The Napoleonic blockade of Continental commerce severely hindered such a plan for many years, but after 1815 it seemed more nearly possible than before. Thus the Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, was issued by Artaria in September 1819 with a title page in French that also listed twelve other publishers in cities across the Continent, including Leipzig, Berlin, Bonn, Offenbach, Augsburg, Mainz (two different publishers), Zurich, Munich, Hamburg, Milan, “and the other art and book dealers of Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Russia, and Poland.” At the same time Artaria issued the same work with a German title page that mentioned no other publisher, obviously intending to maintain the Austrian market for themselves.
Throughout these tortuous dealings, Beethoven and some of the more ambitious publishers thought about the idea of an authorized collected edition of his works, especially those for keyboard. The idea first surfaced as early as 1803 in correspondence with Breitkopf & Härtel (publishers of attempted “complete works” editions of Mozart and Haydn). The idea was indeed appealing to both composer and publisher, for many good reasons, but it inevitably ran aground because so many different publishers had the original publishing rights to so many of his works. One company, Zulehner in Mainz, even put out a pirated “collected edition” of his works for piano and strings, and all Beethoven could do was to register a public objection in a Vienna newspaper; he could neither prevent the edition nor stop it after it appeared.30
As for Beethoven’s feelings about the world of music publishing, his dependence on it, and his maddening lack of control over the versions of his works that were flooding the music shops and bookstores, he put it all in a nutshell in an unpublished “Draft Statement about a Complete Edition of His Works” that he wrote in 1822 and left among his private papers. Though his actual dealings with publishers show him as a canny and wary practitioner, skilled in the unsavory practices that burnished his career but that trouble his biographers, this private document reveals the anger that he had to hide when doing actual business:
The law-books begin without much ado with a discussion of human rights, which nevertheless the executors trample underfoot; thus the author begins his statement: An author has the right to arrange for a revised edition of his works. But since there are so many greedy brain-pickers and lovers of that noble dish, since all kinds of preserves, ragouts, and fricassees are made from it which go to fill the pockets of the pastry-cooks, and since the author would be glad to have as many groschen as are sometimes paid out for his work, the author is determined to show that the human brain [Beethoven’s underlining] cannot be sold either like coffee beans or like any form of cheese, which, as everyone knows, must first be produced from milk, urine, and so forth—
The human brain in itself is not a salable commodity—.31
The last ten words could have changed the world if only the conditions of life had been ideal. They still could in our time, if the commercialization of art were not a thousand times greater than in Beethoven’s era. But since, for him and for other artists through the ages, conditions have never been ideal, this noble statement remains a utopian article of faith. In his dealings with publishers, as in so many other aspects of his practical life, Beethoven felt himself completely unable to reach the higher plateau of ideal behavior, the “virtue” to which he aspired. In the same vein is another draft statement, written as early as 1807, to the directors of the Imperial Theater in Vienna, when he toyed with the idea of contracting to write an opera and an operetta “every year”—which, of course, did not happen. He writes:
[The undersigned] has not been fortunate enough to establish himself here in a position compatible with his desire to live entirely for art, to develop his talents to an even higher degree of perfection, which must be the aim of every true artist. . . . [T]he aim that he has ever pursued in his career has been much less to earn his daily bread than to raise the taste of the public and to let his genius soar to greater heights. . . . [T]he inevitable result has been that the undersigned has sacrificed to the Muse both material profit and his own advantage.32
The personal complications of these years, from 1818 to 1827, contributed to slowing Beethoven’s creative work, but his drastically changing artistic outlook contributed even more. In the so-called fallow period, from about 1812 to 1817, he was working alternately on truly important and path-breaking works and on potboilers. The handful of major works from this time were sketched in phases between the spring of 1814, when the new version of Fidelio was staged, and the spring of 1816, when he completed the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte.
Throughout 1817 Beethoven produced only a fugue for string quintet and a few songs, besides continuing his work on arrangements of Scottish songs for Thomson. But in the fall of 1817 a new grand project began to take hold. This was to be a new piano sonata in B-flat major, on the largest scale, apparently begun with the archduke in mind as recipient. Since the first two movements were ready in fair copy by April 1818 and presented to the royal pupil, who also received the eventual dedication, the work could just as easily have come to be known as the “Archduke” Sonata, like the “Archduke” Trio Opus 97, rather than as the Hammerklavier. The whole work was finally completed in the fall of 1818, and now began another phase of Beethoven’s career, in which he labored primarily on single works, one at a time with some overlapping, sometimes having to shift course but fundamentally aiming to create individual compositions of transcendental character, working with undiminished concentration all the way to the end of his composing career.
The late works of gigantic scope and great technical difficulty begin with the Hammerklavier Sonata. They continue with the “Diabelli” Variations, which were begun in 1819, put aside for work on the Missa solemnis, then finished in 1821–23. The Missa solemnis was also started in 1819 for intended completion in March of 1820, when the archduke was to be installed as bishop of Olmütz in Moravia, but Beethoven could not finish it until 1823. In 1822 he began work on the Ninth Symphony, his central preoccupation until its first performance in May 1824. Sandwiched in and around these works of enormous size were the last three piano sonatas, Opp. 109, 110, and 111—which had been commissioned by Adolph Martin Schlesinger in Berlin. Along with the overture The Consecration of the House, they occupied Beethoven between 1820 and late in 1822, when he returned to work on the Mass.
Beethoven’s last phase was marked by his return to the string quartet, a genre about which he had said many years earlier that he wished to devote himself “exclusively” to it. Of course, he had never been able to concentrate on one genre, but now he did so. As early as May 1822 the Leipzig publisher Carl Friedrich Peters asked Beethoven for, among other things, “piano quartets and piano trios,” to which Beethoven promptly replied, offering Peters some older compositions, along with a price for each, that were “all ready.”33 Some of these were old Bonn works he had never published, a few others he may have thought he could supply with a little work. Ten days later he informed Peters that “the quartet is not fully finished, because I have had other things to do.” In reality the quartet, which was to be Opus 127, was only in the earliest planning stage. Peters lost headway with Beethoven when, in July 1822, he refused to meet Beethoven’s price for a new quartet and tactlessly added that at present he didn’t need new quartets since he had in production new ones by Spohr, Romberg, and Rode, “all of which are excellent, beautiful works.” That ended the negotiation with Peters.
But on November 9, 1822, Prince Nicolas Galitzin, an amateur cellist and chamber music lover, wrote from St. Petersburg to ask Beethoven for “one, two, or three new quartets,” offering to pay “what you judge appropriate” and asking for the dedication.34 Even amidst his current grand projects, Beethoven accepted the commission. The first new quartet, in E-flat major, later Opus 127, was another momentous turning point: it is the portal to his late quartet style. After various false starts and consideration of possibilities for its material, the heavy work of composing the quartet began in earnest in 1823, but the sketches lay in gestation while he finished the Ninth and saw it performed in May 1824. It was February 1825 before the quartet was ready for a tryout. By this time Beethoven was also planning the two later quartets that would complete the Galitzin commission—namely an A-minor quartet (later Opus 132) that he promised the cellist Linke would be a “concertante for the cello,” and a quartet in B-flat major, with “heavy-going introduction” and with “a fugue at the end,” as he noted in a sketch.35 It is the first hint of what would become Opus 130 in its original form. As it turned out, Opus 132 needed a full six months for its completion, from February to July 1825, and the whole of the second half of 1825 was given over to work on Opus 130 with its gigantic fugal finale. From this point on, the pattern of 1825 became the norm for each massive new quartet: Opus 131 followed as the basic focus of the six months from January to June 1826, followed by four months of concentration on completing Opus 135.
All this musical activity was taking place amid the growing crisis with nephew Karl, whose suicide attempt in early August 1826 occurred while Beethoven was immersed in Opus 135. Although we cannot date his sketches with absolute precision, Beethoven apparently found ways to protect his inner working life from even the most catastrophic problems and crises, except perhaps for short periods when he had no choice. During the fall of 1826, while staying in Gneixendorf, he put the finishing touches on Opus 131 and sent it to Schott for publication, then worked on Opus 135 and on an improved four-hand version of the final movement of Opus 130, the Grand Fugue, which would be published separately as Opus 133. Even then, suffering more than ever from his physical and psychological infirmities and thinking nostalgically of his youth (as he acknowledges in his December 7 letter to Wegeler), he spent the autumn months writing the last complete movement that he was to compose—namely the genial “little” or “second” finale for Opus 130, to replace the Grand Fugue. He began a string quintet in C major but it failed to get beyond an opening of the first movement and a few jottings for the other movements. Diabelli seized the first movement and published it in 1838 as “Beethoven’s Last Musical Thought,” a misstep that unfortunately precipitated a long series of attempts to finish works that Beethoven left incomplete and offer them to an eager musical world.