Haptic Beethoven

On 10 december 1849, the Viennese War Department official and dedicated collector of manuscripts Aloys Fuchs (1799–1853) wrote in high dudgeon to his Berlin contemporary and fellow collector Friedrich August Grasnick (1798–1877). Grasnick had borrowed from him two of his most important manuscripts, of works by Handel and Bach, and had failed to return them punctually, so that Fuchs now did not have them available to show to others. He blamed himself as much as Grasnick (clearly this was not the first occasion of its kind), and vowed never to let such treasures out of his possession again: 'It is quite simply inexcusable for me to allow such a valuable and utterly irreplaceable jewel as my Handel item [Stük] ever to leave the house.'

Few of us, being in Fuchs's happy position, would disagree. But Fuchs did not leave it at that: 'Incidentally, I must honestly confess that I do not entirely understand your exact purpose in pursuing this Handel item [Stük] so avidly; for it is of very inferior significance as a musical composition, whereas it is priceless simply as a manuscript.' Such was the innumerable number of published 'great works' by Handel that a human lifetime was not enough to make them one's own; thus, 'there is no reason to hunt down such youthful and occasional works of this master. Moreover, one would have needed only to find the time to compare my copy [Kopie] with the autograph to render the latter superfluous!'¹

In all likelihood the manuscript in question was Fuch's handwritten copy (Abschrift) of the autograph of Handel's cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (HWV 72), from which his later Acis and Galatea (HWV 49) derives.² Rather than the precise details of the case, however, what is of interest here is the distinction that Fuchs draws between early, ephemeral, and 'great' works, and more so his distinguishing between the quality of the musical work itself and that of its particular notated form. Not all details are clear, though it would seem that the importance to Fuchs of his copy was its (textual) superiority to Handel's own autograph; nevertheless, Fuchs's description of it as an 'irreplaceable jewel' also suggests that the sheer aesthetic allure of the physical object held for him a value separate from what we might now term its musicological significance.

Despite the very high prices which they now command at auction, Beethoven's manuscripts might be said not to be objects of intrinsic aesthetic allure in the conventional sense; on the contrary, the very absence of such qualities typically goes hand in hand with their witness to greatness, their characteristic chaotic untidiness bearing the trace of the intractable struggle with the daimon of creativity. This is no less true of autograph scores, which rarely if ever catch the composition in a fixed, even provisionally terminal state, untouched by the continuing work of composition, than it is of the sketchbooks and sketchleaves to which we look primarily for the evidence of that work itself. That there is a continuity between sketch and autograph—that Beethoven's autograph scores not infrequently become the site of yet further sketch activity—was pointed out nearly half a century ago by Lewis Lockwood, has been frequently noted since, and is increasingly observable in situ thanks to the increased accessibility to these documents in the form of facsimiles and online digital images.³

Continuities abound, too, among the sketch sources themselves: not least between the contents of the large-format desk sketchbooks that Beethoven used indoors and the smaller, often homemade, pocket books, designed perhaps primarily for outside use, which even in his lifetime were remarked upon by his contemporaries and captured in illustrations. The pocket books, their largely pencil entries sometimes all but obliterated by time and wear, their pages often distressed from folding and other handling, remain among the most intractable of the documents that make up the vast corpus of Beethoven's sketching legacy. These features, too, make them perhaps the least aesthetically alluring records of Beethoven's working processes, which eventually extended also to the production of...