Beethoven, journeying into Silesia after his visit to Brunswick, took the manuscript and had it also with him on his return to Vienna per extra post from Troppau after the explosion at Lichnowsky’s. “During his journey,” wrote M. Bigot half a century afterwards on a printed copy belonging to the pianist Mortier de Fontaine, he encountered a storm and pouring rain which penetrated the trunk into which he had put the Sonata in F minor which he had just composed. After reaching Vienna he came to see us and laughingly showed the work, which was still wet, to my wife, who at once began to look carefully at it. Impelled by the striking beginning she sat down at the pianoforte and began playing it. Beethoven had not expected this and was surprised to note that Madame Bigot did not hesitate at all because of the many erasures and alterations which he had made. It was the original manuscript which he was carrying to his publisher for printing. When Mme. Bigot had finished playing she begged him to give it to her; he consented, and faithfully brought it to her after it had been printed. Czerny says, very justly, of the unauthorized change afterwards made in the title: “In a new edition of the Sonata in F minor, Op. 57, which Beethoven himself considered his greatest, the title ‘Appassionata,’ for which it is too great, was added to it. This title would be more fitly applied to the E-flat Sonata, Op. 7, which he composed in a very impassioned mood.” The Pf. Concerto in G, Op. 58, is dated by Schindler 1804, “according to information given by F. Ries”; the new edition of Breitkopf and Härtel’s thematic catalogue says (p. 197): “The Concerto was finished in the year 1805,” without mentioning its authority. If it had nothing better than Ries’s anecdote to offer in proof, the opinion may still be entertained confidently, that this work remained still unfinished until the approach of the concert season, towards the end of the year 1806.[38] [Sidenote: THE RASOUMOWSKY QUARTETS]