When news of this fact became known in Vienna, a number of Beethoven’s friends addressed him in the following memorial: [Sidenote: AN ADDRESS TO THE COMPOSER] To Herrn Ludwig van Beethoven. Out of the wide circle of reverent admirers surrounding your genius in this your second native city, there approach you to-day a small number of the disciples and lovers of art to give expression to long-felt wishes, timidly to prefer a long-suppressed request. But as the number of spokesmen bears but a small proportion to the many who joyfully acknowledge your worth and what you have grown to be to the present as well as the future, so the wishes and requests are by no means restricted to the number of those who are like-minded with themselves and who, in the name of all to whom art and the realization of their ideals are something more than means and objects of pastime, assert that their wish is also the wish of an unnumbered multitude, their request is echoed loudly or in silence by every one whose bosom is animated by a sense of the divine in music. It is the wish of those of our countrymen who reverence art to which we desire more especially to give expression; for though Beethoven’s name and creations belong to all contemporaneous humanity and every country which opens a susceptible bosom to art, it is Austria which is best entitled to claim him as her own. Among her inhabitants appreciation for the great and immortal works which Mozart and Haydn created for all time within the lap of their home still lives, and they are conscious with joyous pride that the sacred triad in which these names and yours glow as the symbol of the highest within the spiritual realm of tones, sprang from the soil of their fatherland. All the more painful must it have been for you to feel that a foreign power has invaded this royal citadel of the noblest, that above the mounds of the dead and around the dwelling-place of the only survivor of the band, phantoms are leading the dance who can boast of no kinship with the princely spirits of those royal houses; that shallowness is abusing the name and insignia of art, and unworthy dalliance with sacred things is beclouding and dissipating appreciation for the pure and eternally beautiful. For this reason they feel a greater and livelier sense than ever before that the great need of the present moment is a new impulse directed by a powerful hand, a new advent of the ruler in his domain. It is this need which leads them to you to-day, and following are the petitions which they lay before you in behalf of all to whom these wishes are dear, and in the name of native art.