Beethoven in the Diaries of Johann Nepomuk Chotek by Rita Steblin (review)

As Rita Steblin has demonstrated time and again over the past twenty years, there is a wealth of information about the lives and careers of composers who worked in Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that remains to be discovered. Much of her work has concerned the documentary minutiae of life: births, marriages and deaths, the sale and purchase of property, and the distribution of estates. In these apparently dry and unpromising records, Steblin has frequently uncovered hitherto unsuspected links between individuals and many other valuable nuggets of information. These, when added to the sum total of knowledge we possess about a composer or a signifi-cant musical event, can sometimes lead to quite startling re-evaluations of well-established positions or firm chronologies.

In spite of its close political, cultural, and economic ties with Beethoven’s Vienna, Prague is perhaps an unlikely location to look for startling new biographical details of the composer’s life. The preservation there of the private diaries of the Bohemian nobleman, Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek, however, have proved to be a rich source of information about Beethoven’s life and career during one of his most productive periods (1807–1812) as well as the reception of his music in Vienna and Prague.

Chotek (1773–1824), the oldest child of Count Johann Nepomuk Rudolph Chotek (1748–1824) and Countess Maria Sidonia Chotek née Clary-Aldringen (1748–1824), was a highly cultivated individual who took a broad interest in artistic matters but was most closely involved in music. He began his diary on 24 May 1804 and kept it religiously until a week before his death. Although born in Vienna, Chotek lived most of his life in Prague, where he not only attended the theatre most evenings but also became involved in organising concerts. He visited his parents in Vienna regularly and was posted to Vienna in November 1807 as Councillor to the Government of Lower Austria [K.K. wirkl. n.ö. Regierungsrath] where he remained until the end of June 1812. Chotek was very unenthusiastic at the prospect of having to move to Vienna but he found considerable solace there in the richness of its musical life. He and his family returned to Prague in the middle of 1812 but he returned to Vienna briefly in 1814 and again in 1818 when he stayed for several weeks.

The more than 1,000 pages of closely written text that comprise Chotek’s diaries, bound in twenty-five books of varying length, contain numerous entries about musical events. He also carefully preserved as unbound “Beylagen” the concert programmes and other ephemera which are an additional invaluable resource to scholars. His diaries and Beylagen provide details of many hitherto-unknown concert programmes. But more impressively, the diarist reveals himself to be an intelligent and discerning critic of performers and performances as well as being capable of commenting perceptively on the musical works he heard, which included new compositions by Beethoven and a number of other composers. Chotek’s diaries also paint an engaging picture of the social milieu in which he moved and to read them is to be transported into his world of family, friends, colleagues and fellow connoisseurs of the arts.

The focus of Steblin’s book, as its title implies, is Beethoven. To the cultivated and knowledgeable Chotek, Beethoven was one of the great figures of Viennese musical life and he rarely missed performances of his works, whether these took place in public concerts or in those that were rather more socially exclusive. Of particular interest are the sixteen “Adelige Liebhaber-Concerte” that Chotek attended, out of the twenty held in 1807–1808 at the University Aula, from which he kept several of the printed handbills. He was also present at Beethoven’s famous Academy on 22 December 1808 and records in his diary that a...