were certainly onerous enough without adding musical composition. The records of the electoral court which have been described and in part reproduced in the preceding chapter, exhibit him conducting the music of chapel, theatre and “Toxal,” examining candidates for admission into the electoral musical service, reporting upon questions referred to him by the privy council and the like, and all this in addition to his services as bass singer, a position which gave him the principal bass parts and solos to sing both in chapel and theatre. Wegeler records a tradition that in Gassmann’s operetta “L’Amore Artigiano” and Monsigny’s “Déserteur” he was “admirable and received the highest applause.” If this be true it proves no small degree of enterprise on his part as chapelmaster and of well-conserved powers as a singer; for these two operas were first produced, the one in Vienna, the other in Paris, in 1769, when Beethoven had already entered his fifty-eighth year. The words of Demmer in his petition of January 23, 1773, “the bass singer van Beethoven is incapacitated and can no longer serve as such,” naturally suggest the thought that the old gentleman’s appearance as _Brunoro_ in Lucchesi’s “L’Inganno scoperto” in May, 1773, was a final compliment to his master, the Elector, upon his birthday. He did not live to celebrate another; the death of “Ludwig van Beethoven, Hoffkapellmeister,” is recorded at Bonn under date of December 24, 1773--one day after the sixty-first anniversary of his baptism in Antwerp. CHAPELMASTER VAN BEETHOVEN’S TRIALS At home the good man had his cross to bear. His wife, Josepha, who with one exception had buried all her children, and possibly on that very account, became addicted to the indulgence of an appetite for strong drink, was at the date of her husband’s death living as a boarder in a cloister at Cologne. How long she had been there does not appear, but doubtless for a considerable period. The son, too, was married, but though near was not in his father’s house. The separation was brought about by his marriage, with which the father was not agreed. The house in which the chapelmaster died, and which he occupied certainly as early as 1765, was that next north of the so-called Gudenauer Hof, later the post-office in the neighboring Bonngasse, and bore the number 386. The chapelmaster appears, upon pretty good evidence, to have removed hither from the Fischer house in the Rheingasse, where he is said to have lived many years and even to have carried on a trade in wine, which change of dwelling may have taken place in 1767. When one recalls the imposing style of dress at the era the short, muscular man, with dark complexion and very bright eyes, as Wegeler describes him[8] and as a painting by Courtpainter Radoux, still in possession of his descendants in Vienna, depicts him, presents quite an imposing picture to the imagination.