Beethoven's Conversation Books. Volume 1. Nos. 1 to 8 (February 1818 to March 1820) ed. Theodore Albrecht (review)

Despite the continuous flow of books on all aspects on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and his music—soon to be accelerated by the composer's 250th birthday in 2020—scholars have overlooked a remarkable, even unique, primary source: the so-called Konversationshefte, or conversation notebooks, which span the last decade of the composer's life, from February 1818 until his death in March 1827.

Relatively early into his musical career, already celebrated for his virtuosity at the piano and his inventive compositions, Beethoven, at just twenty-seven years old, realized that his precious sensory organ, his auditory instrument, was beginning to falter. This impending loss not only shook Beethoven as a private person but also destabilized his well-craft ed public persona. By 1818 Beethoven's hearing was so poor that even prostheses such as Mälzel's ear trumpet were no longer of much help to him in communicating with others.

And so, writing became imperative when communicating with the composer, and the only option for Beethoven's circle of family and friends to verbally express themselves to him. As for the Aufschreibesysteme (F. Kittler), or writing tools, those used in conversation with Beethoven included a "slate and a slate pencil," and "a conversation book made by folding and stitching a large sheet of writing paper into octavo format, along with a pencil for conversing with the deaf invalid," as Gerhard von Breuning wrote in his memoirs. While both of these sets of utensils sufficed for basic daily communication, they differed categorically in their ability to preserve the written notes. Whereas the slate allowed for easy erasing of any jotted messages, the small books have retained their inscriptions up through the present. It is these penciled conversations that are of greatest value as cultural documentation of the first part of the nineteenth century, not despite their transience and quotidian prosaicness but precisely because of these traits. I am aware of no other source that allows us to eavesdrop on day-to-day conversations that are as unfiltered and as unedited as these random notes, unintended for any purpose beyond that of the immediate needs of the parties involved. The value of this premodern recording of daily discourse is only partly diminished by the fact that the disabled composer most oft en responded verbally and not in writing. As Jan Swafford, one Beethoven's latest biographers, correctly summarizes: "Of the entries he wrote in the books, most were items for himself: musical sketches [very few], marketing schemes, shopping lists, addresses, book recommendations."

Anton Schindler, Beethoven's somewhat dubious late secretary (1822– 1824 and 1826–1827), sold 137 (out of a total of 139) of these notebooks to the Royal Archive in Berlin, today's Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, in 1846; among other things, the event marked the start of the composer's re-naturalization to Germany and of making him a German composer. Even though all major biographers since the late nineteenth century have quoted from or published parts of the notebooks, only in 1963 did Beethoven scholars undertake a full publication of the notebooks utilizing the latest forensic innovations and according to the highest standards of editing possible at the time. Previous attempts had been hampered by the Cold War, but in 1968, the first volume reached publication. The strenuous and tedious nature of this work is evident in the fact that the last volume was published thirty-three years later in 2001.

This German edition forms the core of Theodore Albrecht's monumental endeavor for providing an updated and translated English edition of which the first two volumes of a projected twelve volumes has been released. This licensed edition by Breitkopf & Härtel has a number of advantages compared to its original German version. Chief among them is that all explanatory end-notes in the German edition are now to be found as footnotes on...