... I approached him (Beethoven) without embarrassment when my aunt of blessed memory, my teacher and benefactress, called me to her room and presented me to him. To his question: “Can you sing?” I replied without embarrassment with a decided “No!” Beethoven regarded me with amazement and said laughingly: “No? But I am to compose the songs in ‘Egmont’ for you.” I answered very simply that I had sung only four months and had then ceased because of hoarseness and the fear that continued exertion in the practice of declamation might injure my voice. Then he said jovially with an adoption of the Viennese dialect: “That will be a pretty how do you do!”--but on his part it turned out to be something glorious. We went to the pianoforte and rummaging around in my music ... he found on top of the pile the well-known rondo with recitative from Zingarelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.” “Do you sing ~that~?” he asked with a laugh which shook him as he sat down hesitatingly to play the accompaniment. Just as innocently and unsuspiciously as I had chatted with him and laughed, I now reeled off the air. Then a kind look came into his eye, he stroked my forehead with his hand and said: “Very well, now I know”--came back in three days and sang the songs for me a few times. After I had memorized them in a few days he left me with the words: “There, that’s right. So, so that’s the way, now sing thus, don’t let anybody persuade you to do differently and see that you do not put a ~mortant~ in it.” He went; I never saw him again in my room. Only at the rehearsal when conducting he frequently nodded to me pleasantly and benevolently. One of the old gentlemen expressed the opinion that the songs which the master, counting on certain effects, had set for orchestra, ought to be accompanied on a guitar. Then he turned his head most comically and, with his eyes flaming, said, “He knows!”... Long afterwards, in a Conversation Book, an unknown hand writes: “I remember still the torment you had with the kettledrums at the rehearsal of ‘Egmont’.” Nothing more is known of the history of this work. Beethoven’s name appears on both this year’s concerts for the Theatrical Poor Fund--March 25, with the first movements of the Fourth Symphony; April 17, with the “Coriolan” Overture; but it does not appear that he conducted on either occasion; it is, however, probable that he did conduct the rehearsals and performance of a symphony in Schuppanzigh’s first Augarten concert in May.