The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume IIIThayer, Alexander Wheelock
History
The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume III
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827
The sketchbooks bear witness, though not voluminously, to two other
works of magnitude which were in Beethoven’s thoughts in this year but
never saw completion. These were a symphony and a string quintet. In
a book used towards the end of 1825, containing sketches for the last
movement of the Quartet in B-flat, there is a memorandum of a _Presto_
in C minor, 3-4 time, and of a short movement in A-flat, _Andante_,
which Schindler marked as belonging to “the tenth symphony.” There
are also some much longer sketches for an overture on B-a-c-h, in the
midst of which Beethoven has written: “This overture together with
the new symphony and we shall have a new concert (_Akademie_) in the
Kärnthnerthor.” Schindler published the sketches of the symphony in
Hirschbach’s “Musikalisch-kritisches Repertorium” of January, 1844,
and started the story of an uncompleted tenth symphony. Nottebohm, in
his “Zweite Beethoveniana” (p. 12), scouts the idea that Beethoven
occupied himself seriously with the composition of such a work. “It is
not necessary,” he says, “to turn over many leaves of the sketchbooks
to prove the untenableness of the view that if Beethoven had written
a Tenth Symphony it would have been on the basis of these sketches.
We see in them only such momentary conceits as came to Beethoven by
the thousand and which were as much destined to be left undeveloped
as the multitude of other abandoned sketches in the other books.
To be big with a symphony argues persevering application to it. Of
such application there can be no talk in this case. The sketches in
question were never continued; there is not a vestige of them in the
books which follow. If Beethoven had written as many symphonies as
he began we should have at least fifty.” Nottebohm’s argument does
not dispose of the matter, though we shall presently find occasion to
think well of it. Lenz says that Holz wrote to him that Beethoven had
played “the whole of the Tenth Symphony” for him on the pianoforte,
that it was finished in all of its movements in the sketches, but
that nobody but Beethoven could decipher them. Holz, however, made no
such broad statement to Otto Jahn, a much more conscientious reporter
than Lenz. To Jahn he said that there was an introduction in E-flat
major, a soft piece, and then a powerful Allegro in C minor, which were
complete in Beethoven’s head and which he had played to him (Holz) on
the pianoforte. This is very different from an entire symphony. But
in the letter to Moscheles which Schindler says Beethoven dictated to
him on March 18, 1827, bearing a message of thanks to the Philharmonic
Society of London, Beethoven says: “An entire sketched symphony lies
in my desk, also a new overture and other things”; and a few days
later Schindler writes to Moscheles: “Three days after receiving your
letter he was greatly excited and demanded the sketches of the Tenth
Symphony, concerning the plan of which he told me a great deal. He has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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