Who knew Beethoven was so well read or had so many tablecloths?
Beethoven British Library, London NW1
TThe exhibition makes the achievements of the composer seem even more incredible
his small but telling British Library exhibition was one of the many events planned for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, which fell victim to the pandemic. It should have taken place last March and had to be postponed twice.
But Beethoven really doesn’t need anniversaries, and this exhibition is hardly less welcome for being late. It’s drawn almost entirely from the library’s own holdings of Beethoveniana, the largest outside Germany and Austria, thanks to a number of ardent 19th-century collectors who bought various manuscripts, letters and other memorabilia, which eventually passed into the hands of the library. The holdings are especially rich in sketchbooks, some of which have hundreds of pages.
Only a few of these have made their way into this exhibition, which is housed in a modest single room. It’s arranged chronologically, beginning with Beethoven’s early teens, when he was living in the cultivated city of Bonn, and ending with the London premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1825 and death a few years later.
The early exhibits are among the most touching. There’s a piano sonata published when Beethoven was 13, with annotations in the composer’s hand, and his copy of the first edition of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (his teenage ambition to set it to music didn’t bear fruit until almost 40 years later, in the Ninth Symphony). The range of Beethoven’s reading really comes across in this exhibition. There’s an extraordinary loose leaf containing Beethoven’s copied-out version of a poem by Herder about the wonders of nature. Another has a passage from Homer. Beethoven is often thought of as an uncouth genius, but he was actually widely read.
Also surprising is the range of Beethoven’s handwriting. One imagines such a hugely self-willed man would have one instantly recognisable ‘hand’, but in fact his writing style seems to vary according to the kind of sketchbook he was using, and also the kind of music. The manuscript of the cadenza he composed for his own performance of Mozart’s D minor piano concerto has a vigorous flowing quality, almost as if he wanted it to look improvised. Other pages seem a chaotic jumble, and are extraordinarily difficult to read. Sometimes he mixes up ideas for different pieces on a single page – such as the one that contains a scrap of the 3rd Piano Concerto, “God Save the King” and fragments of an unfinished symphony.
Alongside the purely musical items are things that give a glimpse into his life, such as a laundry list (it is surprising to see that such a supposedly slovenly man washed so many tablecloths), kitchen accounts, a lock of his hair, a pen-and-ink sketch of Beethoven in the street, and letters showing his dealings with the recently formed Philharmonic Society in London, which commissioned the Ninth Symphony.
Towards the end there’s a notably empty space, waiting for two prize exhibits that have been delayed en route from Berlin; the autograph copy of the Ninth Symphony, written in the composer’s own hand, and one of Beethoven’s “conversation books”, where visitors wrote down things they wanted to say to the composer who could hear wonderful music in his head, but not their words. But even without these it’s a rich exhibition, which makes the achievement of the fallible and suffering human being that was Beethoven seem all the more moving and extraordinary.
Beethoven runs from tomorrow until April 24. Tickets: bl.uk/events