March 26, 2020 51
Beethoven’s Empire of the Mind
Lewis Lockwood
Beethoven’s Conversation Books,
Volume 1: Nos. 1 to 8 (February
1818 to March 1820)
translated from the German and
edited by Theodore Albrecht.
Boydell, 384 pp., $80.00
Beethoven’s Conversation Books,
Volume 2 : Nos. 9 to 16 (March 1820
to September 1820)
translated from the German and
edited by Theodore Albrecht.
Boydell, 411 pp., $80.00
“Live only in your art, for you are so
limited in your senses. This is neverthe-
less the only existence for you.” When
Beethoven wrote this diary entry in
1816, he had been growing increasingly
deaf for about eighteen years. This
means that roughly from the time of his
early string quartets and piano sonatas,
through the major works of his middle
years and into the opening stages of
his last period, he had been struggling
with hearing loss. His basic reaction, as
he put it in the diary, was “Endurance.
Resignation. Resignation.”^1 What sus-
tained him over the years despite his
isolation, his bouts of depression, and
his suicidal impulses was his profound
sense of stature and purpose as a com-
poser, his bedrock faith in his ability to
write great works. As long ago as 1802,
in the Heiligenstadt Testament, the
confessional document he kept hidden
until the end of his life, he had written,
“It seemed to me impossible to leave
the world until I had brought forth all
that I felt was within me.”^2
These were the circumstances in
which Beethoven began to use conver-
sation books to communicate, begin-
ning in 1818 and continuing until his
death in Vienna in 1827. They were
small blank booklets that he could
use at home or carry with him out of
doors, in which friends, acquaintances,
and visitors could write down whatever
they wanted to say; he then replied
orally. Sometimes he would enter brief
remarks in them or jot down musical
ideas, but essentially these are docu-
ments in which Beethoven’s comments
have to be inferred. They are nonethe-
less a rich source of evidence for his life
and milieu in his last decade, during
which he completed the Missa Solem-
nis, the Ninth Symphony, the last piano
sonatas, the “Diabelli” Variations, and,
finally, the last quartets, from Opus 127
to Opus 135.
The conversations are mainly about
personal matters, including Beetho-
ven’s long and painful legal campaign to
get custody of his nephew, Karl (he dis-
approved of his brother’s widow, who
had been convicted of embezzlement in
1811), and many other current topics.
They testify to his visitors’ literary in-
terests, their opinions on current com-
posers, performers and performances
of his works and works by others, plus
references to Austrian and European
politics in these post- Napoleonic years.
There is also local gossip, comments on
people and contemporary events, and
much else. They give us an unmistak-
able feeling of close contact with the
world in which Beethoven lived in his
last years; it is not surprising that ex-
cerpts have been quoted since the ear-
liest biographies of him, and there is at
least one modern novel based on them,
Conversations with Beethoven by the
late Sanford Friedman.^3
That these booklets were preserved,
all 139 of them, we owe in the first place
to Beethoven himself and then to Anton
Schindler, his sometime secretary and
early biographer. Schindler took pos-
session of them when Beethoven died
in 1827, along with other memora-
bilia. In 1846 he sold them and other
Beethoven documents to the Prussian
Royal Library in Berlin, where from
then on they could be examined by
others, including Alexander Wheelock
Thayer, by far the most trustworthy
of early Beethoven biographers. As
Beethoven’s letters began to be pub-
lished in the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, a complete edition of
the conversation books looked like the
next step. Partial editions came out in
Germany in the 1920s and in the early
1940s during the war, but the difficul-
ties of transcribing, annotating, and
publishing this vast material prevented
any further efforts until the 1960s. It
was then that a team of scholars in East
Berlin led by Karl- Heinz Köhler, withGrita Herre and Dagmar Beck, began
to produce what became the first com-
plete and annotated German edition
in eleven volumes, published between
1968 and 2001.
Along the way, it was discovered in
the 1970s—first by Peter Stadlen, a Brit-
ish music critic, then confirmed by the
Berlin editors—that while Schindler
had the books, he made about 150 false
entries in them, finding room on blank
pages or unused spaces, and trying to
fashion them to fit in with what had
been under discussion in the original
situations.^4 These entries cover a wide
span of topics, and Schindler artfully
designed them to make it look as if he
had taken part in the original conversa-
tions. In fact, he had been in direct con-
tact with Beethoven for a much shorter
time than he publicly claimed, and until
his death in 1864 he worked incessantly
to shore up his reputation as an “ami de
Beethoven” (words he had inscribed on
his visiting card).The Berlin editorial team identified
and labeled Schindler’s forgeries in
their later volumes in the series, begin-
ning in 1978. Inevitably, the discovery
of them did wholesale damage to hisreputation as a Beethoven authority.
At the same time, Theodore Albrecht,
the editor of the new English edition
of the conversation books, reminds
us that, here and there, Schindler’s
entries “may contain elements of fac-
tual material and opinions current in
Beethoven’s circle” and that they can’t
be discounted entirely.^5
The volumes under review here are
the first two of a projected edition of
the complete conversation books in
English, edited, translated, and anno-
t at e d a n ew by A lb re c ht. W h e n it i s c o m -
pleted, it should rank as one of the most
important contributions to Beethoven
scholarship in the English language.
Albrecht’s earlier publications include
the three- volume Letters to Beethoven
and Other Correspondence (1996),
and in his general introduction to his
translation of the conversation books
he generously acknowledges all earlier
efforts to make even some of this mate-
rial available in English. Those efforts
include a project that I began many
years ago in collaboration with the late
Piero Weiss, a singularly gifted pianist
and scholar, to make a selection of the
conversations, which did not come to
fruition, and Albrecht kindly notes that
I gave our limited materials to him. Al-
brecht’s achievement goes far beyond
what Weiss and I had thought of doing,
and it brings this complex source mate-
rial to readers with authority and clar-
ity, thanks to his painstaking research
over many years.^6 Along with the full
texts of the conversation books, he con-
veys an immense amount of informa-
tion that both incorporates the copious
documentation provided by the Ger-
man edition and goes well beyond it.
For this kind of material, editorial an-
notations are essential, since the hun-
dreds of situations we encounter in just
these first two volumes bring us into con-
tact with a large number of Beethoven’s
conversational partners. Prominent
among them in these years were Carl
Bernard, a Viennese literary man and
newspaper editor who took a strong in-
terest in the custody problem and much
else^7 ; Franz Oliva, a government of-
ficial who was in Beethoven’s circle at
this time; Karl Peters, a tutor and estate
manager, for a time a co- guardian of
the nephew; and Joseph Czerny, a piano
teacher, composer, and music publisher,
evidently not related to the more famous
Carl Czerny, who had been a pupil of
Beethoven’s around 1800 –1802. Oth-
ers included Friedrich August Kanne, a
composer and writer, and nephew Karl.
Along with Albrecht’s extensive
footnotes explaining obscure details(^1) Maynard Solomon published the com-
plete diary from 1812 to 1818 twice:
first in Beethoven Studies 3, edited by
Alan Tyson (Cambridge University
Press, 1982), in German and English;
and in Solomon’s Beethoven Essays
(Harvard University Press, 1988).
(^2) For a recent and valuable study of
Beethoven’s deafness and how he
adapted to it, see Robin Wallace, Hear-
ing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss
and Discovery (University of Chicago
Press, 2018).^3 New York Review Books, 2014.
(^4) The exact number of falsified entries
varies, depending on how one counts
the many laconic items on a single
page, sometimes consisting of only a
few words. Some commentators reckon
a total of about 120, others 150. For
the full texts of the falsified entries,
see Dagmar Beck and Grita Herre,
“Anton Schindlers fingierte Eintra-
gungen in den Konversationsheften,”
in Zu Beethoven: Aufsätze und Anno-
tationen, edited by Harry Goldschmidt
(Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1979).
(^5) Theodore Albrecht, “Anton Schindler
as Destroyer and Forger of Beethoven’s
Conversation Books: A Case for De-
criminalization,” in Music’s Intellectual
History, edited by Zdravko Blažekovic
and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (Réper-
toire International de Littérature Musi-
cale, 2009).
(^6) Albrecht has dedicated volume 2 to
me, a gesture for which I am grateful.
(^7) On Bernard’s interest in the guardian-
ship struggle, see the entry on him in
Peter Clive, Beethoven and His World:
A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 29.