BEETHOVEN (LUDWIG VAN)

Autograph letter signed twice ("Beethoven"), including a canon, [n.p. but Vienna], 3 May 1825

Footnotes

'BE SATISFIED WITH THIS LITTLE SIGN OF REMEMBRANCE OF YOUR FRIEND': A REDISCOVERED BEETHOVEN LETTER & CANON WRITTEN TO MUSIC CRITIC LUDWIG RELLSTAB.

Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) describes three visits to Beethoven in early 1825 in his extensive memoirs, Aus Meinem Leben, published posthumously in 1861, and recalls his joy at receiving our letter on 3 May 1825: '...Our departure had been fixed for the next afternoon. Almost by accident (a trifling errand) I went once more to the bookshop (Steiner's) almost opposite my lodgings. 'I'm glad you have come', the owner said. 'A letter for you has been handed in, from Beethoven'. 'From Beethoven!' I cried, greatly surprised, trembling with impatience until I had it in my hands. It had, on the outside, the letter N instead of R... but it was mine, all the same! And it sounded so friendly, good, and melancholic... Even this alone would have been an infinite joy, and invaluable treasure. But I turned over the page and found still more! Another greeting, and a little canon! So it was not just a polite note, not just a farewell message but a leaf for my autograph book! The great man had thought me worthy of that. My soul filled to overflowing with thanks, enthusiasm, aspirations good and noble... How could I ever forget this, even if this were not the last contact I had with him... In 1841 I visited Vienna again, and stood at the grave of the great man...' (translated by the owners' grandmother Annekäte Friedländer, published in Ludwig Rellstab: Beethoven, The Last Visit, 1991, pp.3-5).

In 1825, the year of our letter, Rellstab was young and full of confidence. For him Beethoven was the apogee of composers and in April 1825, he travelled to Vienna armed with a letter of introduction from C.F. Zelter, a friend of Goethe and teacher of Mendelssohn, with the intention of asking the composer if he could write an opera for him. Despite his deafness and failing health, Beethoven was at the height of his powers. The magnificent Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis had been completed and performed a year earlier and are currently enjoying renewed attention in their bicentenary year. At the time of Rellstab's visits he was working on what were to be his final major works, the 'Late Quartets', including three string quartets for Prince Galitzin, the first of which (E flat major, Op.127) had been premiered on 6 March 1825. Rellstab attended the performance and wrote of it in his memoirs as almost a quasi-religious experience ('...Reverence for the creator filled us all...'). Afterwards he spoke of it in glowing terms to Beethoven, despite finding the music rather difficult to understand. During their meetings Beethoven was polite and noncommittal but nevertheless took Rellstab's poems to read. Shortly after, however, he was struck by a sudden illness, necessitating a trip to Baden to recuperate and, as he explains in our letter, was absent from home making preparations for the journey when Rellstab called. They were not to meet again. After Beethoven's death, the poems are said to have been passed onto Franz Schubert by Beethoven's assistant Anton Schindler, and became Rellstab's most well-known work as the first seven songs of Schubert's Schwanengesang.

Ludwig Rellstab, a writer, musician and poet based in Berlin, was born into a musical family. His father J.C.F. Rellstab (1759-1813) was an accomplished pianist and prominent music publisher and the cousin of poet Wilhelm Häring (1798-1871). As a boy he had trained as a pianist and performed concertos by Mozart and Bach, '...the pupil of two distinguished composers, both pioneers of Lieder composition – Ludwig Berger... and Bernhard Klein...' (Graham Johnson, Hyperion website, 2000). After national service, Rellstab joined the staff of Vossische Zeitung and rapidly became an influential and well-connected music critic. He was outspoken in his opinion, and sometimes controversial, so much so that he spent three months in jail for libel and a further six weeks in 1837 for his campaign against the malign influence of Berlin's Generalmusikdirektor, Gaspare Spontini. He championed composers such as Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and is credited with giving Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27/2 the name 'Moonlight'. His appreciation of contemporary composers extended to Weber, Mendelssohn (whom he heard playing for Goethe in Weimar) and Meyerbeer, whose libretti he translated into German. Rellstab enjoyed a correspondence with Liszt, with whom he collaborated, and wrote a brief biographical sketch of the composer in Vossische Zeitung of 1842 (published in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher Gibbs & Dana Gooley, 2006). Whilst his wish to have his work taken up by Beethoven remained unfulfilled, he was a prolific writer and many of his poems (over 60 according to LiederNet online) were set to music by composers such as Liszt, Schubert (including the Schwanengesang mentioned above), Meyerbeer and Taubert. He also published several prose works including the novel 1812 and a collection of short stories entitled Sommerfrüchte.

The canon which Beethoven inscribes for Rellstab is inspired by the last line of Friedrich von Matthison's Opferleid (Song of Sacrifice), "...Das Schöne zu dem Guten..." ('The beautiful to the good' or in some translations 'Beauty allied to goodness'), in which a young man offers a sacrifice to Zeus in an oak grove and, in return for being good throughout his life, asks the god for beautiful things now and in his old age. The poem first appeared in 1790 in Voss' Musen Almanach and was greatly admired by Beethoven who returned to it several times throughout his life, from a first sketch in 1794, and going through several versions before reviving it again in 1823 – the variation inscribed for Marie Pachler-Koschak in the family autograph album on 27 September 1823, now held in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, A 15 (Alexander Wheelock Thayer. Chronologisches Verzeichniss der Werke Ludwig van Beethoven's, no.249, p.154). Our version of 1825 differs from the Pachler-Koschak setting but uses the same text: '...in the case of Opferlied, similar to the Ode to Joy, Beethoven seems to have felt compelled to conclude a number of unresolved matters from his life as a composer once and for all. Perhaps he felt that his time on earth was limited... Its lengthy and difficult birth is a good indication of just how important this poem was for Beethoven, perhaps because of its final lines proclaiming the unity of the Beautiful and the Good, which was Beethoven's personal artistic and philosophical credo...' (www.filharmonikusok.hu).

Our letter, including a reproduction of the canon and his account of the visits to Beethoven, was published by Rellstab in the second volume of his memoirs (Rellstab, pp.265-266) and in Ludwig Nohl Beethoven: Nach den Schilderungen seiner Zeitgenossen, 1877, no.XXXIII, p.255. It was translated by J.S. Shedlock and included in Beethoven's Letters, ed. Dr A.C. Kalischer, 1909, no. MLXIV, p.364, and in ed. O.G. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries, 1926, pp.176-191, who describes Rellstab as '...shallow, too florid and verbose...'.

The letter has remained in the Rellstab family until now. It was brought to England in November 1938 by Ludwig Rellstab's great granddaughter, Annekäte Friedländer, who fled Hitler's Germany with her Jewish husband Hans and her daughter Anne, the precious letter hidden behind the dust-jacket of a book to avoid detection by Nazi border guards. The Friedländers initially settled in the Midlands where Annekäte taught music. She was an accomplished pianist who, '...at once unobtrusive and tough... had phrase-by-phrase insight into the increasingly lonely, increasingly triumphant spiritual journey being made by the composer...' (Roland Weitzman, Annekäte Friedländer obituary, The Friend, 4 November 1994). She translated Ludwig Rellstab's memoirs describing his visits to Beethoven and the acquisition of our letter, and published her translation in a limited edition of 100 copies privately printed by The Cock Robin Press in 1991. A copy of each of the three pamphlets is included in the lot, together with notes for a lecture given by Professor Hans Friedländer on 21 February 1945 and other correspondence.

Provenance: Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860); his great-granddaughter Annekäte Friedländer (1903-1994); by descent to the present owners.