[58] Röckel in his letter to Thayer says: “That Beethoven did not abandon the idea of composing another opera was shown by the impatience with which he could scarcely wait for his friend Collin to make an opera book for him of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth.’ At Beethoven’s request, I read the first act and found that it followed the great original closely; unfortunately Collin’s death prevented the completion of the work.” [59] Schindler here is mistaken. The “walk toward the Kahlenberg” took them northerly into the valley between Heiligenstadt and Nussdorf, where an excessively idealized bust of the composer now marks the “Scene by the Brook.” After thirty years of absence from Vienna, Schindler’s memory had lost the exact topography of these scenes; and a friend to whom he wrote for information upon it mistook the Grinzing brook and valley for the true ones. This explanation of his error was made by Schindler to the present writer very soon after the third edition of his (Schindler’s) book appeared. [60] “But the note of the yellowhammer, both in England and in Austria, is not an ~arpeggio~--cannot in any way be twisted into one, or represented by one. It is a quick succession of the same note, ending with a longer one, sometimes rising above the preceding note, but more frequently falling. In fact, Schindler himself tells us that it was the origin of the mighty theme which opened the C minor Symphony!”--Grove, “Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies,” p. 211. [61] Carl Holz related a story to Jahn, which he may very well have heard from Beethoven himself. Jahn’s memorandum of it is in the following words: “Scherzo of the Pastorale. In Heiligenstadt a drunken bassoonist thrown out of the tavern, who then blows the bass notes.”