University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters University of Nebraska Press 2001 The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, volume 2 Wayne M. Senner Arizona State University Robin Wallace William Meredith Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/unpresssamples Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Senner, Wayne M.; Wallace, Robin; and Meredith, William, "The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, volume 2" (2001). University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters. 5. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/unpresssamples/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Nebraska Press at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, volume 2 Number 3 in the series North American Beethoven Studies Edited by William Meredith The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s by His German Contemporaries, volume 2 Wayne M. Senner, general editor and compiler Robin Wallace, translator and musicological editor William Meredith, musicological editor Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, in association with the American Beethoven Society and the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San José State University © 2001 by the University of Nebraska Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The critical reception of Beethoven’s compositions by his German contemporaries / Wayne M. Senner, general editor and compiler; Robin Wallace, translator and musicological editor; William Meredith, musicological editor. p. cm. — (North American Beethoven Studies; no. 3) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. isbn 0-8032-1250-x (cl. : alk paper, v. 1); 0-8032-1251-8 (cl. : alk paper, v. 2) 1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Criticism and interpretation. I. Senner, Wayne M. II. Wallace, Robin. III. Meredith, William Rhea. IV. Series: North American Beethoven studies; v. 3. ml410.b42c75 1999 780'.92—dc21 98-55462 CIP MN Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix List of Abbreviations xiii Viennese and European Currencies, 1792–1827 xv Beethoven’s Critics: An Appreciation 1 Ops. 55–72 15 Index of Names 269 Index of Periodicals 275 Index of Subjects 279 Index of Beethoven’s Works 287 Acknowledgments Again, Wayne Senner would like to express his gratitude for the kind sup- port and help rendered by the following libraries and archives during the compilation of the documents published in this volume: Bayerische Staats- bibliothek Munich, Beethoven Haus Bonn (in particular, Sieghard Bran- denburg), Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Vienna, Hessische Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek Darmstadt, Kreisarchiv und Wissenschaftliche Biblio- thek Bonn, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Vienna, Stadtarchiv Aachen, Stadtarchiv Trier, Stadtarchiv und Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek Bonn, Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, The- aterbibliothek Porzheim, Universitätsbibliothek Bonn, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Cologne, Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg, Universitätsbib- liothek, Hamburg, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, and the University of California (Berkeley) Library. He would also like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service and the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies (in particular, Ira F. Brilliant and the late Charles Burdick) for their financial support of this project. Special thanks to Arizona State University for the sabbatical leave to undertake the research and compiling in Germany and Austria. William Meredith and the Beethoven Center would like to thank Ira F. Brilliant and Charles Burdick (former dean of the College of Social Sciences, San José State University) for their financial and moral support of this project. Patricia Stroh, the center’s curator, has lent her expertise and research skills to the project on many occasions. Special thanks are due to Ray White, Library of Congress, for his assistance with the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and to James Sealey for his fastidious work on the music examples. Finally, many musicologists assisted with answers to queries; special thanks are due to Bartlett Butler, Clemens Brenneis, Susan Jackson, Dorothea Link, Michael Lorenz, Sandra Rosenblum, Rita Steblin, Larry Synder, and James Webster. Robin Wallace would like to thank the staff of the Mickel Library at Converse College for their assistance: Darlene Fawver, Miriam Cody, Wendi Arms, Patsy Copeland, Trudy Cox, Becky Poole, Becky Dalton, Camille McCutcheon, and Wade Woodward. A faculty research grant from Converse in 1996 also helped speed the progress of this edition. Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provided valuable comments on a draft of the introductory essay. He would also like to thank the staff of the music library at Chapel Hill, who have been quite helpful during his research trips there. viii acknowledgments Preface The project of compiling documents for The Critical Reception of Beetho- ven’s Compositions by His Contemporaries began in 1985 under the auspices of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies (San José State University) and at the urging of Ira Brilliant, the founder of the center. The focus of my search was based on the names of Beethoven’s contemporaries provided in MacArdle, Thayer, and Solomon sources and in Kirchner, Die Zeitschriften des deutschen Sprachgebietes von den Anfängen bis 1830 (Stuttgart, 1969)as well as Imogen Fellinger, Verzeichnis der Musikzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhun- derts (Regensburg, 1968). For the next several years I visited archives, state, city, and university libraries; and newspaper collections in Aachen; Berkeley, California; Berlin; Bonn; Cologne; Darmstadt; Frankfurt; Munich; Nürnberg; Regensburg; and Vienna, searching through many hundreds of periodicals and monographic sources. All materials were collected on micro- film, transferred to xerox copies, and then retyped. During the final stage of my search I checked the documents I had gathered against another German collection, which, unknown to me, a team of German musicologists had been undertaking at the same time and which appeared in 1987 under the title Ludwig van Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, ed. Stefan Kunze (Laaber). The Kunze collection was useful in double-checking my own results. A few documents were also provided by William Meredith (director, Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies) and Robin Wallace (associate professor of music history, Converse College), the musicological editors of this project. My original intention had been to provide as comprehensive a spectrum of early-nineteenth-century perceptions of Beethoven’s works as possible by including letters, memoirs, notes, essays, sections of larger critical and biographical works, in addition to concert reports and reviews in periodical literature (including a large number of newspapers). By proceeding from a broader base, I hoped to provide a collection that would be useful to literary historians and scholars in reception aesthetics as well as musicologists. Nevertheless, the materials collected soon became overwhelming, and it was obvious that the principle of selection had to be narrowed. Without footnotes, commentary, and annotations, the introductory essays, the name and work indexes, the final German-language manuscript still amounted to more than 1,000 single-spaced pages and contained 520 documents. It was then decided to limit the collection to periodical documents, including newspaper sources. It was also decided that because of the large number of sources of biographical materials (Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, H. C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: A Documentary Study, Maynard Solomon, Beethoven, etc.) biographical accounts and anecdotes should be limited as much as the texts allowed. The focus was to be on contemporary perceptions of Beethoven’s music, including matters such as audience, setting, facilities, orchestra, instruments, and performers as well as the relationship of Beethoven’s music to theoretical and critical ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This principle of selection was not always easy to carry out, given the frequent preoccu- pation with Beethoven the man and composer, and in some passages the biographical information is so closely intertwined with musical analysis that excision would have distorted the document. Even with the more restrictive selection process, the collection will appear in no less than four volumes of approximately 250 pages each. The translation procedure for volume 2 was as follows. After the transla- tion and the musicological annotations were completed by Professor Wallace, the manuscript was given to Professor Senner, the general editor, who edited the translations and added historical and literary annotations. Then the manuscript was sent to Professor Meredith, who added musicological anno- tations and offered some useful suggestions for improving the translations. The format of all four volumes is the same, with slight exceptions: the first three volumes have an introductory