In 1818 he received a grand pianoforte from the
Broadwoods, and there was vain talk of his going to England.
His friend and pupil, the Archduke Rudolph, was appointed Archbishop of
Olmütz in 1818, and Beethoven began in the autumn a grand Mass for the
Installation. The ceremony was in March, 1820; the Mass was not finished
until 1822; it was published in 1827, and there were seven subscribers
at about $115 a copy; among them were the Emperor of Russia, the King of
Prussia, and the King of France. The summer and autumn of 1818 and '19
were spent at Mödling in the composition of the Mass, relieved only by
anxious thoughts about his nephew. Sketches for the 9th symphony date back
to 1817, and the theme of the scherzo is found in 1815. This colossal
work was in his mind together with a tenth, which should be choral in
the adagio and the finale, even when he wrote the overture in C for the
opening of the Josephstadt Theatre in Vienna and watched with fiery eyes
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, the Leonora of the revival in 1822. In this
same year Rossini, sweeping all before him, visited Vienna, and tried
to call on Beethoven. According to Azevedo the interview was painful
between the young man flushed with success and the deaf and "almost blind"
composer of the Heroic Symphony. But Schindler affirms that Beethoven
succeeded in escaping the visits. The operatic triumphs of Rossini and
the thought of the Schröder-Devrient again led him to meditate opera.
There were discussions concerning music to Goethe's "Faust," not in
set operatic form, but incidental airs, choruses, symphonic pieces and
melodrama. In June, 1823, he was hard at work on the Ninth Symphony. He
passed whole days in the open air at Hetzendorf, but his host, a baron,
was too obsequiously civil, and he moved to Baden, where in the fall he
received a visit from Weber. The Philharmonic Society of London in 1822
passed a resolution offering Beethoven £50 for a MS. symphony; the money
was advanced, and the work was to be delivered in the March following.
Ries was in London in the fall of 1823, and in September he heard from
Beethoven that the manuscript was finished, nevertheless there was
additional work on it after the return to Vienna; and according to Wilder,
who quotes Schindler, the finale was not written until Beethoven was in
his new lodgings in town, and the use of the voices in Schiller's Ode was
then first definitely determined, although the intention was of earlier
date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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