the times | Saturday December 4 2021 17
News
A hastily composed draft of a sympho-
ny scribbled in a notebook by the young
Ludwig van Beethoven while out
walking languished in the British
Library’s basement for 145 years.
Now the music will be heard for the
first time in an exhibition at the library
exploring his creative legacy.
The handwritten note, composed
while he was working as a viola player,
will be on display as the composition is
played to visitors via speakers.
Written in either 1788 or 1789, Sinfo-
nia in C Minor is Beethoven’s earliest
draft of a symphonic movement, a form
he would later master. It has been real-
ised for a string quartet by Annette
Isserlis, a founder member of the
Orchestra of the Age of Enlighten-
ment.
The note has been in the British
Library’s collection since 1875 when it
was bought from the collector Johann
Nepomuk Kafka. Inside the same bun-
dle of sketches is a part of the melody of
God save te King, as Beethoven wrote it,
on which he later composed a set of
Everyday objects
from Beethoven’s
life will be on showjack blackburnTMS
[email protected] | @timesdiarySher’s stage
snub fright
Antony Sher, who died yesterday,
couldn’t shake insecurity, despite
his acting success. While
performing in Uncle Vanya at the
National Theatre, a colleague in
the wings said their director, Sean
Mathias, had been nominated for
an Olivier. Sher immediately told
co-star Ian McKellen. “Yes,” said
McKellen. “So have I.” Sher then
told Janet McTeer, who revealed
her nomination. Then to Lesley
Sharp: also nominated. Numbed
by his omission, Sher
congratulated the director on the
four accolades. “Five,” Mathias
corrected. Sher asked hopefully:
“What’s the fifth for?” The answer
came: “Best revival.” That was the
night Sher’s therapist saw the play.
“I’ve got bad news,” Sher told him
afterwards. “You’re on duty.”on the fringe
The comedian Bill Bailey, below,
has always had notable hair. He
tells LBC’s Full Disclosure podcast
that he raised eyebrows at school
when he styled his barnet for a
play. The problem was he’d been
cast as Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht’s
allegory for Hitler. Bailey asked his
barber for the Adolf, even dying it
black, and when his mother saw
him she was shocked. “What have
you done?” she said. Bailey was
about to explain that he looked
like Hitler for artistic reasons,
before Mrs Bailey exclaimed:
“It looks lovely!”up the social ladder
Stephen Fry is a
member of nine
London clubs but he
still finds that the
baize is always
greener elsewhere.
He was eyeing up
a tenth, Pratt’s,
where the Duke
of Devonshire
can pick themembers. Fry told an event for The
Heart of St James’ church appeal
that he gained the duke’s affection
while interviewing his wife. “We’ll
put you down for when someone
dies,” he declared. Alas, Fry’s
schmoozing was in vain. “I was
waiting for an old aristocrat to die,”
Fry said. “Then the duke died, and
I don’t really know the son.”Speaking of aristos, yesterday’s item
about Grey Gowrie’s father getting
arrested rang a bell with Mark
Mason, the diary’s trivia elf. He says
William Douglas Home, son of the
13th Earl of Home, was also sent to
chokey in 1944. Before he was jailed,
his mother gave gentle advice. “Be
sure to pack your evening clothes,”
she told him. “The governor is
bound to ask you to dine.”heaney’s poetic licence
The writer Douglas Murray has
been reminiscing about his mentor
Tony Smith, the former president
of Magdalen College, Oxford, who
died last week. Despite having an
impressive array of friends, Smith
didn’t drop names but once shared
an anecdote about his chum, the
poet Seamus Heaney, who often
stayed with him. During one visit,
Smith noticed that a bird was
stuck in his chimney and assumed
that the rustic poet could help. He
was hopeless. “I may be a nature
poet,” Heaney told him, “but I
never touch the stuff.”We really are not doing a series
about shy Finns, but I couldn’t
resist one last joke from
Finland resident Hamish
McGrady. “What’s the
difference between a
Finnish introvert and a
Finnish extrovert? The
introvert looks at
their shoes when they
speak to you, while
the extrovert looks at
your shoes.” And
that’s it: no more
Finnish jokes. That’s
all folks! Fin(n).Early notes of Beethoven’s genius to be heard at last
Peter Chappell variations. Richard Chesser, head of
music collections at the library, said:
“Clearly influenced by Joseph Haydn,
whose music circulated widely at that
time, the music also offers a glimpse of
Beethoven’s later style. In particular, it
foreshadows some of the other turbu-
lent pieces he was to write in C minor,
such as the Fifth Symphony.
“It is incomplete and lasts about a
couple of minutes and consists of treble
and bass lines on two staves with no
indication of instrumentation.
“By the time of its composition Beet-
hoven had been a member of the court
orchestra in Bonn for five years or more
so would have had the opportunity to
learn from the current orchestral
repertory at first hand.”
Other highlights of the exhibition
include a Ninth Symphony manuscript
Beethoven sent to the Philharmonic
Society in London in 1824 and an
audio-visual installation that uses bone
conduction technology to simulate
how he might have heard music.
Beethoven began to lose his hearing
in his late twenties, when he com-
plained of buzzing sounds in his ears.
The cause is not known for certain, but
by his late 40s he was almost complete-
ly deaf. Beethoven sought various
treatments and hearing aids. He often
used an ear trumpet, and worked with a
piano maker to design a hood to try to
focus the instrument’s sound around
his ears, and to sense the vibrations.
The exhibition also includes a tuning
fork he presented to the British violinist
George Bridgetower in 1803, and hand-
written kitchen accounts of Beetho-
ven’s diet, living standards and house-
hold management.
Chesser said: “This exhibition is an
opportunity to explore the man and his
music through the lens of his own man-uscripts and objects from
his daily life. His manu-
scripts often appear
chaotic but they
offer powerful tes-
timony to his cre-
ative imagina-
tion and deter-
mined spirit in
the face of
progressive hear-
ing loss.”
A recording ofthe movement will also be
available on the
library’s online and
on-site sound
archive.
The exhibition,
which runs until
April 24, pro-
mises to show
“the mind of this
creative genius at
work through
items belonging to
the composer him-
self and manuscripts
scrawled in his own
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