Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven's Sketches

Author(s): Douglas Johnson

Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jul., 1978), pp. 3-17
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746188
Accessed: 21/06/2010 16:44
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19thCentury Music.

http://www.jstor.org

Beethoven

Scholars

and

Beethoven's

Sketches

DOUGLAS JOHNSON

Serious study of Beethoven's sketches, now

more than a century old, has never been more
robust than in the past decade. Signs of life
have appearedin unexpected places. The Bonn
Beethovenhaus has responded to criticism
with radical changes in the editorial policies
of its ongoing sketch edition. The British
Museum has independently issued a large and
lavish edition of one of its own sketchbooks.
Two volumes of Beethoven Studies, a new -occasional publication with a special sensitivity
to source studies, have reinforced material in
the regular musicological journals-which
have found themselves, if anything, overstocked with Beethoven articles. And no fewer

$0.25 @ 1978 by The Regents

0148-2076178/0700-0003
of the University of California.

than eight American dissertations involving

first-hand study of the manuscript sources
have been written or are now in progress.
This activity has been generated in part by
the demands of the anniversaryyears 1970 and
1977; the special Beethoven issues, the congresses, and the British Museum's edition are
the serum injected every fifty years to keep an
aging discipline healthy. The rash of dissertations can be seen as one reaction. A proliferation of doctoral candidates in search of challenging topics emerged just as the extent and
the accessibility of Beethoven's sketches
began to be publicized. Beyond this quantitative response to favorable circumstances,
however, are some complex qualitative questions. At issue is the relationship of recent to
past scholarship: do the new contributions fill
old scholarly needs? or do they subvert traditional assumptions about the sketches? A lack
3

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC

of general agreement may be conceded in advance. But it seems certain that interest will
not be sustained at present levels unless some
sort of consensus is reached about basic goals
and acceptable results. The alternatives will
emerge more clearly if we consider the historical context.
In the beginning was Gustav Nottebohm-or
so it seems. Nottebohm's virtual identification with the Beethoven sketches has spread
obscurity as well as light. Lost in that obscurity, for example, are those scholars of his own
generation and the next whose work was
superseded by his. Thayer, better remembered
for other things, wanted his own biography to
note that he was "the first person ever to use
Beethoven's Sketch Books for chronology,"1i
and Ludwig Nohl's later writings on Beethoven are filled with references to the
sketches, many of them formulated to establish his independence of (and superiority to)
both Thayer and Nottebohm.2 It was the fate
of these two men, and of the following generation, to be eclipsed (at any rate in this area)by
Nottebohm's thoroughness and expertise. And
by the extent of his published transcriptions:
Thayer and Nohl, concerned with biographical
narrative, made use of the sketches but did
not attempt to publish them. Ironically, the
obscurity did not spare Nottebohm himself; in
the eyes of posterity, his avocation has all but
eclipsed his vocational activities as composer,
pianist, theorist, and editor. And perhaps more
important, his very authority in all matters
involving the sketches has led us often to expect more of his work than he ever intended
to convey.
1From a letter to his translator Deiters of 1 August 1878;
quoted by Elliot Forbes in his preface to Thayer's Life of
Beethoven (Princeton, 1970), p. viii.
2Ludwig Nohl, Beethovens Leben (3 vols.: Vienna, 1864,
Leipzig, 1867 and 1877) and Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner
(Vienna, 1874). In the first two volumes of the biography
there are only a few references to sketches, but the third
volume and Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner contain extensive
descriptions of sketchbooks, usually in long footnotes or
appendices. By the 1870s Nohl was clearly competing
with the recent work of Thayer and Nottebohm.

Nottebohm's published work on the

sketches is too well known to require detailed
description. The two longer monographs on
the Kessler sketchbook (1865) and the
"Eroica" sketchbook (1880) frame loosely the
extensive series of articles for the Allgemeine
Musikalische Zeitung and the Musikalisches
Wochenblatt which were collected in edited
form in Beethoveniana (1872) and Zweite
Beethoveniana (1887).3 As the survey gradually grew to encompass all the sketches then
accessible, his treatment of them changed little. Nottebohm sought two things in the
sketches. He used them first of all to establish
the chronology of Beethoven's works and to
supplement the known canon with projects
that were planned but not completed. Since
this involved only the broadest sort of musical
distinctions, there was nothing much to be
gained by actual illustration; hence the typical
article mentions the location of the sources,
makes its chronological point, and escapes
with a few examples to satisfy the reader's
curiosity and earn his trust. Nottebohm's
other concern was with the musical content of
the sketches. He was at some loss to explain
this concern, but it found expression in the
two monographs and even in certain of the
shorter articles where we find more extensive
transcriptions than the context required. He
was fond of pointing out that Beethoven's
thought could not be followed where the
source was incomplete (completeness was one
of the attractions of the Kessler and "Eroica"
sketchbooks). But the glosses he supplied for
even the thorough transcriptions of the monographs now seem curiously devoid of musical
insights.
It is tempting to suggest that Nottebohm
lacked the technical vocabulary with which to
provide an analytical commentary on the
sketches. He himself saw the problem differently: the sketches, while offering us a glimpse
of the way Beethoven worked, reveal little of
the organic genesis of the work:

3See Lewis Lockwood, "Nottebohm Revisited," Current

Thought in Musicology, ed. John W. Grubbs (Austin,
1976), pp. 139-91.

If we perceive it [the work] as an organic structure,

then we must also assume that it came into being
in an organic manner and developed from within
into a unified whole. Now it is no doubt true that
the sketchbooks, in which everything fixed and unalterable in the finished work appearshesitant and
more or less labile, do reveal certain proceduresrelevant to origins, invention, organization, and the
like. But in this regard we must accept that they
also conceal a great deal, and that we learn least of
all from them about those things we call organic.
The impulse missing in them can be grasped only
by abstraction. We seek it in the artist Beethoven
himself-in the unity of his entire characterand intellect, in the harmony of his spiritual powers.4

itself; they reveal to us not the entire creative process, but only single isolated incidents from it.
What we term the organic development of a work
of art is far removed from the sketches.
This means that the sketches do not contribute
to the understanding and actual enjoyment of a
work. They are superfluous to the understandingof
a work of art, certainly-but not to the understanding of the artist, if this is to be complete and comprehensive. For they assert something that the
finished work, where every trace of the past has
been shed, suppresses. And this extra something
that the sketches offer belongs to the biography of
Beethoven the artist, to the history of his artistic
development.5

Hence the sketches belong exclusively in the

realm of biography and are irrelevant to analy-

Two points need to be emphasized concerning Nottebohm's work with the sketches.
First we must remember the scholarly atmosphere in which it was done. This was a prodigious time for German musicology, when
the basic tools of modern scholarship were
collected
thematic
forged-the
editions,
catalogues, and critical biographies of the
major German composers from Bach to Mendelssohn. In Beethoven's case, one incredible

sis.

Sleight of hand? Perhaps. But Nottebohm

clung tenaciously to the distinction, and his
classic formulation of it, reprinted in the introduction to the posthumous Zweite Beethoveniana, is still accepted uncritically by a
great many scholars, especially in Germany:
Without betraying the secret of genius, Beethoven's
sketches provide some idea of his method. They illustrate the fragmentary conception and slow
growth of a composition-a manner of composing
that seems somewhat enigmatic to us. The enigma
lies first and last in Beethoven's struggle with his
demon, the wrestling with his own genius. The
demon has dwelt in these sketchbooks. But the
demon has vanished; the spirit that dictated a work
does not appear in the sketches. The sketches do
not reveal the law by which Beethoven was governed while creating. They can provide no conception of the idea that emerges only in the work of art

4"tFassen wir es als eine organische Bildung auf, so miissen

wir auch vorraussetzen, dass es auf organischem Wege
entstanden sei und sich von innen heraus zu einem
einheitsvollen Ganzen entwickelt habe. Es ist nun wohl
wahr, dass die Skizzenbiicher, wo alles schwankend und
gleichsam beweglich erscheint, was im Tonstiick fest und
unveriinderlich dasteht, manchen Vorgang in Bezug auf
Entstehung, Erfindung, Gestaltung u. dgl. enthiillen. Aber
dariiber muss man klar sein, dass sie auch manches verschweigen und dass wir von allem, was organisch heisst,
aus ihnen am allerwenigsten erfahren. Das ihnen fehlende
Moment l~isst sich nur durch Abstraction gewinnen. Wir
suchen es in Beethoven, dem Kiinstler, selbst; in der
Einheit seines ganzen Wesens und Geistes; in der Harmonie seiner Seelenkriifte." Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven [Kessler] (Leipzig, 1865), pp. 7-8.

5"Ohne das Geheimniss des Genius zu verrathen, geben

die Skizzen Beethoven's eine Vorstellung von seinem Produciren. Sie veranschaulichen das bruchstiickweise Entstehen und langsame Heranwachsen einer Composition.
Fir uns nun hat diese Art des Schaffens etwas
Riithselhaftes. Das Rithselhafte liegt in erster und letzter
Instanz in dem Kampf Beethoven's mit seinem Damon, in
dem Ringen mit seinem Genius. In diesen Skizzenbuchern hat der Damon gehaust. Der Damon aber ist
entwichen. Der Geist, der ein Werk dictirte, erscheint
nicht in den Skizzen. Die Skizzen offenbaren nicht das
Gesetz, von dem sich Beethoven beim Schaffen leiten
liess. Von der Idee, die nur im Kunstwerk selbst zur Erscheinung kommt, k6nnen sie keine Vorstellung geben.
Nicht den ganzen Process des Schaffens, sondern nur einzelne, unzusammenhiingende Vorgange daraus k6nnen sie
vor Augen legen. Was man organische Entwicklung eines
Kunstwerkes nennt, liegt den Skizzen fern. Damit ist
gesagt, dass sie zum Verstindniss und rechten Genuss
eines Kunstwerkes nicht beitragen. Gewiss, zum Verstiindniss eines Kunstwerkes sind sie iiberfliissig, aber
nicht zum Verstiindniss des Ktinstlers, wenn dieses ein
vollstiindiges, umfassendes sein soll; denn sie sagen etwas
aus, was das fertige Kunstwerk, in dem jede an die Vergangenheit erinnernde Spur abgestreift ist, verschweigt.
Und dieses Etwas, dieser Ueberschuss, den die Skizzen
bieten, fillt der Biographie des Kiinstlers Beethoven, der
Geschichte seines kiinstlerischen
Entwicklungsganges
anheim." Zweite Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1887), pp. viiiix.

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

decade saw the appearanceof the Breitkopf &

Hirtel Gesamtausgabe (1866-68), Thayer's
Chronologisches Verzeichnis (1865), Nottebohm's Thematisches Verzeichnis (1868), and
the first two volumes of Thayer's biography
(1866 and 1872), not to mention two volumes
of the Nohl biography (1864 and 1867) and
Nottebohm's Beethovens Studien (1872).
There was lively competition-not always
good-natured-among Thayer, Nohl, and
Nottebohm to establish authority on certain
fine points of Beethoven research. And beyond
Nottebohm's critical scrutiny of the work of
his contemporaries, his own revision of the
Breitkopf & Hirtel thematic catalogue gave
him good cause for precision in his approach
to matters of chronology. The pursuit of precision emerges clearly in the articles of Beethoveniana and Zweite Beethoveniana.
A more elusive point, but one with special
relevance to the sketches, concerns the image
of Beethoven in the nineteenth century. Eccentricity and artistic conscience, the two
qualities that transformedthe Romantic artist
into a high priest, were possessed by Beethoven in superabundance. And the sketches
provided impressive testimony to both. On
the one hand they were a sign of great eccentricity; even Beethoven's contemporaries were
perplexed by the way his inspiration translated into chaos on the page, the more so because it was apt to happen at any moment. At
the same time the sketches preserve a record
of the artist's heroic struggle with intractable
material. It was especially the Wagnerians
who insisted on the moral nature of this
struggle and who established Beethoven's role
as prophet and guardian of the "die heil'ge
deutsche Kunst." Nohl, an ardent champion
of this view, used it shamelessly to exclude
foreigners such as Thayer from the ranks of
the initiated.6 Nottebohm's own experience
with the sketches (and his general temperament) made him more objective, but he too al-

"Damon" to personify the resistance of raw

musical material to the workings of Genius.
And it is implicit, I think, in his willingness
to confront the reader with lengthy transcriptions and little commentary. In essence he
was portraying the demonic opposition and
leaving us to marvel at the spiritual power
which eventually subdued it.'
At this distance, it may seem that Nottebohm failed to confront the basic musical
problem of the sketches, that this has slipped
from the page along with the demon. A passage like "Von der Idee, die nur im Kunstwerk
selbst zur Erscheinung kommt, k6nnen sie
keine Vorstellung geben" suggests a distinction between the sketches and the completed
work which on reflection seems rather slippery. Could Nottebohm have clarified the Idea
in the work itself? One suspects not. The distinction is really between abstract form and
matter-Schoenberg's Idee and Wort--and
this applies equally to the work and the
sketches. We shall have occasion to return to

lowed the ethical aspects of Beethoven's

method to color his treatment of them. This is
explicit in his metaphorical evocation of the

sketches

6See for example his review of the second volume of

Thayer's Ludwig van Beethovens Leben in the Neue Zeit-

schrift fiir Musik 67 (1871), 477-79, 489-93.

it again.

As long as the sketches remained symbols

of Beethoven's eccentricity and artistic conscience, there was little pressure to find purely
musical significance in them. Nottebohm's
easy control over the sources and his casual
disdain of the basic orthographic problems
quickly secured his reputation as the ultimate
authority. In very obvious ways he completely
dominated the scholarly use of the sketches
for fifty years. Respected scholars were content to use his transcriptions and his conclusions as a substitute for first-hand study.
Thus, for example, the later editions of
Thayer's biography were strongly influenced
(through Deiters and Riemann) by his findings; the young Paul Mies could write an
entire book on the sketches without looking
at any for himself; and even as self-conscious
a scholar as Schenker borrowed heavily from
Nottebohm's transcriptions when citing the
(although Schenker did manageto

7The metaphor has both a positive and a negative aspect

as Nottebohm uses it; although the "D~mon" as Genius
is something to be wrestled with, it ultimately dictates
the progress of a work. The sketches are artifacts of the
struggle.

find fault with his commentary). Those few

scholars who chose to challenge his authority
have fared badly with posterity.
It was safer to supplement Nottebohm's
work. He had not seen everything, despite his
most determined efforts, and his articles and
monographs provided convenient models for
the description of additional sources as they
emerged. In 1905, Cecilio de Roda described a
sketchbook in his own possession in a series
of installments in the Rivista Musicale
Italiana which together comprised a monograph on the scale of the two major sketchbook studies by Nottebohm, and a few years
later a more modest series by Georg Schiinemann appeared in Die Musik, this time on a
sketchbook that Nottebohm had treated only
briefly.8 This sort of monograph was a dying
species, soon to be supplanted by a more
radical approach-the publication of full
sketchbooks. The shorter article which aims
to present circumscribed items of "neue Beethoveniana" has continued to flourish up to the
present time, however. Facsimiles and a fuller descriptive apparatus have added a bit of
weight but not much substance to the model
created by Nottebohm.
The period dominated by Thayer, Nottebohm, and the Gesamtausgabe culminated
after World War I in the publication of the
third edition of Thayer's biography (1917-23)
by Riemann. The larger issues of Beethoven's
life and musical development having been settled temporarily, there was a shift of scholarly
attention toward refinement of detail. The
shift had been heralded before the war by the
activities of Theodor von Frimmel, who had
edited two volumes of Beethoven-Studien
(1904-6) and two more of a Beethovenjahrbuch (1908-9). It achieved a broader base in
the 1920s with the publication of a new series
of scholarly monographs (Verbffentlichungen
des Beethovenhauses in Bonn) under the general editorship of Ludwig Schiedermair, the

8Cecilio de Roda, "Un Quaderno di Autografi di Beethoven del 1825," Rivista Musicale Italiana 12 (1905),
and 734-67;
63-108, 592-622,
Georg Schiinemann,
"Beethovens Skizzen zur Kantate 'Der glorreiche Augenblick' zum ersten Male mitgeteilt," Die Musik 9 (190910), Heft 1, 22-35, Heft 2, 93-106.

first six volumes of which appeared between

1920 and 1930, and the creation of a Neues
Beethoven-Jahrbuch, of which ten volumes
appeared between 1924 and 1942. In addition
to these ongoing series a number of larger
studies of circumscribed problems were written, including three on Beethoven's early
years (by Hans Gal, J.-G. Prod'homme, and
Schiedermair9) and others on his scherzos
(by Gustav Becking1o), his songs (by Hans
Boettcher"l), and the overtures to Leonore
(by Joseph Braunstein12). Frimmel's own
Beethoven-Handbuch appeared in 1926, and
this sort of specialized activity reached a
natural climax in the congresses and Beethoven issues of the centenary year 1927.
How were the sketches treated in this new
scholarly atmosphere? Certainly there was no
popular surge of interest in them; for most
musicians they remained an exotic enigma.
But a few scholars began, very cautiously at
first, to test their usefulness as evidence in
discussions of Beethoven's style and even as
support for specific analytical points. References of this kind are found in the stylistic
studies of Gal (1916) and Becking (1921) and in
the Erliiuterungsausgaben of the late sonatas
by Heinrich Schenker (1913-20). Finally Paul
Mies was bold enough to suggest that a primer
of Beethoven's melodic style could be based
on the content of the sketches. His Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethovens zur Erkenntnis seines Stiles, published in 1925, is a very
curious piece of scholarship. Although one
would expect the first work of this scope on
this topic to come from someone with an intimate first-hand knowledge of the sources,
Mies was content to rely almost exclusively
on the transcriptions published by Nottebohm. This is already an indication that his

9Hans Gal, "Die Stileigentiimlichkeiten des jungen Beethoven," Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 4 (1916), 58-115;
J.-G. Prod'homme, La Jeunesse de Beethoven (Paris, 1920);
Ludwig Schiedermair, Der junge Beethoven (Leipzig,
1925).

Becking, Studien zu Beethovens Personalstil.

loGustav
Das
Scherzothema (Leipzig, 1921).

11Hans Boettcher, Beethoven als Lieder-Komponist

(Augsburg, 1928).
12Joseph Braunstein,
(Leipzig, 1927).

Beethovens

Leonore-Ouvertiiren

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

conclusions preceded his study of the sketches

and to some extent dictated his selection of
them. On the other hand, whether intentionally or not, Mies was forcing the issue of their
musical relevance. To be sure, the possible relevance of the sketches to certain traits of
style does not challenge Nottebohm's dictum
that they are irrelevant to the analysis of
specific works, for description of style is still
to be accommodated within a broad definition
of biography. But it was certainly implicit in
Mies's approach that the sketches will repay
study on purely musical grounds.
There was a built-in contradiction between Mies's methodology and the implications of his study, for a musical interest in the
sketches could not be sustained on the basis of
the Nottebohm transcriptions, which had
been intentionally excerpted to make a different sort of point. Despite his warning that
Beethoven's musical thought could only be
followed where the sketches were not interhimself had provided
rupted, Nottebohm
like
an
something
uninterrupted sequence of
sketches only once-in
the celebrated series
of first-movement drafts at the beginning of
his monograph on the "Eroica" sketchbook.
Thus although Mies and others could raid the
published transcriptions for material with
which to illustrate their judgements about
style, it was apparent that any increase in the
degree of sophistication in discussions of the
sketches as music would require a fresh
examination of the manuscript sources.
This was spelled out explicitly in 1927 by
Karl Lothar Mikulicz, who in that year published a complete transcription of a 91-leaf
sketchbook from the years 1800-1 (Landsberg
7). To a world which still viewed sketch
transcription as a magical rite, with Nottebohm as its high priest, this must have
seemed an astonishing accomplishment. And
Mikulicz extended the provocation by calling
for a Gesamtausgabe of the sketches, confronting the heritage of Nottebohm with this
direct challenge:

The value and abundance of Nottebohm's works

were enormous; a surfeit of new knowledge was
made available through them. Just within the last
8

years, about half a century after their appearance,

they have been newly assessed and subjectedto systematic investigation [a reference to Mies] . . . But

it is imperative now that the material be

supplemented; we must go beyond Nottebohm, insofar as that is possible. It is not a question of
searching for hitherto unknown sketchbooks and
sketchleaves or of waiting for them to become
available to us by chance: the existing sketches
must be worked over again and their contents
thoroughly comprehendedand published.... I consider this the largest, and also the most significant,
problem facing Beethoven scholarship in the twentieth century. Only then will a relatively secure
foundation have been laid for all studies having to
do with Beethoven's output.13
This passage appears in the preface to
Mikulicz's edition. Later the same year, in a
lecture at the Beethoven centennial congress
in Vienna, he spelled out the ideal shape of his

proposed Gesamtausgabe:
The ideal solution of this problem, which can obviously not be the work of one person, would be an
arrangement in three series: facsimiles; editions
similar to that of a large sketchbook in the Berlin
Staatsbibliothek which I have recently prepared
(among other things, complete and literal transcription-in format and sequence as well!); and finally,
editions arrangedseparately by work and provided
with aids for the reading. All of the sketches for a
particular work would be lifted from their surroundings and put as far as possible into an organic
sequence, so that the growth of a work is made directly perceptible.14
Was Mikulicz serious? He had made no attempt to provide a model with his own edition, which offered only a "vollstaindige und
getreue Wiedergabe in Format und Anordnung," that is, a faithful transcription with no
editorial additions. But of course he was aware
of alternative methods of presenting the

13KarlLothar Mikulicz, Ein Notierungsbuch von Beethoven ... vollstiindig herausgegeben und mit Ammerkungen versehen rLandsberg7] (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 3-4.
14K.L. Mikulicz, "Skizzen zur III.und V. Symphonie und
fiber die Notwendigkeit einer Gesamtausgabeder Skizzen
Beethovens," Beethoven-Zentenarfeier.Wien, 26. bis 31.
Mijrz 1927: Internationaler Musikhistoriker Kongress
(Vienna, 1927), p. 95. The article in this congress report
has only excerpts from Mikulicz's paper.

sketches. By 1927 two smaller sketchbooks

had been made available in facsimile only.
One was a 19-leaf sketchbook for the
"Diabelli" Variations and the Ninth Symphony, owned by Wilhelm Engelmann and
published in a limited edition by his firm in
1913.1' The other was a 25-leaf pocket sketchbook in a Moscow library, with sketches for
the String Quartets in A Minor and Bb, op. 132
and op. 130, published with a commentary by
M. Ivanov-Boretzky in a Russian journal in
1927 (a brief description of this edition appears
along with Mikulicz's remarks in the Vienna
congress notes).16 The more exotic notion of
editing transcriptions and rearrangingthem by
work also had a precedent. In his 1909 articles
on the sketchbook for Der glorreiche Augenblick, Schiinemann had done just that with
the sketches for the first two numbers, defending the innovation in language similar to that
used by Mikulicz:

And in 1924, in a controlled experiment involving three early leaves in the Beethovenhaus, Arnold Schmitz had self-consciously appended both facsimiles and carefully edited
transcriptions to a substantial commentary.18
Whether or not a Gesamtausgabe of the

sketches was a practical possibility in 1927,

then, several roads to completeness had been
explored and Mikulicz seems to have seen
some attraction in each. Presented with a
choice of facsimile or transcription, however,
his preference was for the latter; he emphasized that a facsimile alone was not worth
much, that the sketches could become accessible to the average musician only after
Beethoven's hand had been translated into
"bequem lesbare Druckschrift." If proof were
needed, witness the absence of scholarly reaction to Engelmann's facsimile.
In fact, Mikulicz's transcription too seems
to have met with apathy, and the general issue
of publication format failed to arouse much
partisanship. By the 1930s an impasse of sorts
had been reached in the study of the sketches.
Nottebohm's impact had begun to wear off,19
and the reverence with which the sketches
had initially been treated had begun to give
way to a more objective view of their actual
musical content. Analysts with new points to
make found it convenient to quote them as
confirmation. But no one had emerged to challenge Nottebohm's magisterial command of
the sources, and the available catalogues of
some of the important library and archive collections were inadequate to provide an updated overview. The twin necessities of a new
survey and comprehensive publication (in
some format) had been articulated by
Mikulicz,20 but a start had hardly been
made-one volume in transcription, two more
in facsimile, and a laconic checklist of the
surviving sketchbooks tucked away as an appendix to Braunstein's monograph. And there
was certainly no popular rush to support the
projects. Perhaps there was not time; the

'5Beethovens eigenhdindiges Skizzenbuch zur 9. Symphonie (Leipzig, 1913). Engelmann himself had died several years earlier.
16M. Ivanov-Boretzky, "Ein Moskauer Skizzenbuch von
Beethoven," Musikalische Bildung 1-2 (1927), 9-58 (facsimile) and 75-91 (commentary). The summary appears
on pp. 88-90 of the Beethoven-Zentenarfeier report.
17Schiinemann, "Der glorreiche Augenblick," pp. 23-24.
18Arnold Schmitz, Beethoven. Unbekannte Skizzen und
Entwiirfe.
Untersuchung,
UJbertragung, Faksimile,
Ver6ffentlichungen des Beethovenhauses in Bonn, III
(Bonn, 1924).

19Braunstein, Beethovens Leonore-Ouvertiiren, devotes a

lengthy section to Nottebohm's handling of the chronology of the Leonore No. 1 Overture, criticizing both his
conclusions and his methods. Although Braunstein appears to have been wrong and Nottebohm right on this
point (see fn. 27), the criticism is symptomatic of a new
independence.
201t is probably worth pointing out that Guido Adler had
anticipated Mikulicz's call for an edition of the sketches
(see Braunstein, Beethovens Leonore-Ouvertiiren, pp.
30-31) and that the call was subsequently echoed by Oswald Jonas (see fn. 35). There were undoubtedly others.

FirstI shall dealwith the sketchesfor[op. 136]nos.

1 and 2..., and in a manner,moreover,which
differsfrompreviouspublicationsof such sketches.
My basic principleis to presentnot only the most
importantvariants,but wheneverpossible all of
them. Moreover,the relatedsketches will be juxtaposed,even thoughthey areoftenseparatedin the
book. I must also ask the readerto supply a few
obvious accidentals and clefs himself. All the
uncertainplaces, as well as a few additionsof my
own, havebeen identified.17

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

Third Reich disrupted scholarship along with

everything else.
When the effort was resumed after World War
II, it was still almost exclusively German and
for practical reasons it became increasingly
centered around the Beethovenhaus and the
associated Beethoven-Archiv in Bonn. Significantly, the leadership there was that of an
older, pre-wargeneration. The director, Joseph
Schmidt-G6rg, had been associated with the
previous director Ludwig Schiedermair since
the formation of the Beethoven-Archiv in
1927. Schmidt-G6rg now became the general
editor of four new series of Veriffentlichungen:
1) Skizzen und Entwiirfe
2) Beethoven-Jahrbuch
3) Ausgewihlte Handschriften in FaksimileAusgaben
4) Schriften zur Beethovenforschung
The Jahrbuch, now "Zweite Reihe," resumed
publication in 1954 under the joint editorship
of Schmidt-G6rg and Mies. The first of the
new Schriften (monographs after the fashion
of the original Ver6ffentlichungen of the
1920s and 1930s) appearedin 1957.21
The most ambitious, and to us the most
relevant, plans of the rejuvenated Beethovenhaus involved publication of the sketches.
Although not planned as a Gesamtausgabe,
this new series was modeled on Mikulicz's
edition of 1927--transcriptions of complete
sketchbooks aimed at translating Beethoven's
hand as faithfully as possible into "bequem
lesbare Druckschrift," an easy-to-read printed
text. This method of transcription without
editorial additions was called "diplomatic."
No facsimiles were contemplated. The first
three sketchbooks to be issued in this format
appeared in 1952, 1957, and 1961, the first
edited by Schmidt-G6rg and the latter two by
his assistant Dagmar Weise.22 Several more

were assigned for transcription to other German scholars.

Thus the debate about the sketches had
been reopened. In retrospect, the Kinsky-Halm
thematic catalogue, published in 1955, appears
now as a last great monument to Nottebohm,
while the sketchbook editions followed
Mikulicz's cautious first step beyond him. At
the time, of course, no one viewed the new
editions as breaking new ground; the excitement that Mikulicz had felt in confronting the
Nottebohm tradition was lost in the mechanics of producing more volumes of the
same sort. And if the new editors envisaged
how the sketches would now be used, they did
not articulate their vision in provocative
terms. No major and remarkably few minor
interpretive studies appearedin the secondary
literature. Even two contemporary German
dissertations (1951 and 1956) on other sketch
materials remained unpublished.23 SchmidtG6rg, in charge of both the edition and the
Jahrbuch, functioned as a sieve for new work
on the sketches and little got through. Now,
twenty years later, the debate has finally been
engaged, but the principals belong to a younger
generation and most of them speak another
language.
The absence of a continuing tradition in
England and the United States, where much
recent Beethoven scholarship has been done,
may account for the uninhibited approach to
old problems that has characterized the new
work. It was inevitable that as the scholarly
community grew larger each new segment
would have to be persuaded anew to accept
the traditional assumptions concerning the
sketches. And so it was probably also inevitable that some of those assumptions would
have to be re-evaluated. The contributions of
recent scholarship to the study of the sketches
can be divided, at least for discussion, into
three general areas: their publication, their
relevance to biography, and their relevance

21This was vol. II of the series (Paul Mies, Textkritische

Untersuchungen bei Beethoven); for some reason vol. I
(by Schmidt-G6rg) was not published until 1964.
22J. Schmidt-G6rg, Drei Skizzenbiicher zur Missa Solemnis: I. Ein Skizzenbuch aus den Jahren 1819/20 (Bonn,
1952); Dagmar Weise, Ein Skizzenbuch zur Chorfantasie
op. 80 und zu anderen Werken (Bonn, 1957), and Ein

Skizzenbuch zur Pastoralsymphonie op. 68 und zu den

Trios op. 70, 1 u. 2 (Bonn, 1962).
23Erna Szabo, Ein Skizzenbuch Beethovens aus den Jahren
1798-99 [Grasnick 1] (Ph.D. dissertation, Bonn, 1951);
an den Skizzen zum
J. v. Hecker, Untersuchungen
Streichquartett cis-moll op. 131 von Beethoven (Ph.D.
dissertation, Freiburg, 1956).

10

to analysis. We can consider these areas

separately.
It was the intention of the Beethovenhaus
editions to make the sketches available to the
non-specialist, and the purpose of "diplomatic"
transcription was to eliminate the need to
struggle with the original sources. Ideally the
editor was a copyist rather than an interpreter,
rendering the sketches legible without questioning what he saw. In practice, however,
Beethoven's sloppiness involved more than
penmanship; it extended to the placement of
notes, their rhythm, and even such seemingly
basic information as clefs and accidentals.
Diplomatic transcription reproduced his inaccuracies, relegating interpretative aids to a
separate commentary. The alternative--transcriptions edited to make musical sense, with
clefs and accidentals supplied and pitches
adjusted to reflect Beethoven's presumed intentions-was rejected, since it risked substituting the editor's interpretation for the composer's intention. Diplomatic transcription at
least left each reader to interpret for himself
where the musical sense was obscure.
Compromises were available. If a facsimile could be included with the transcription, it would reduce the need for editorial
diplomacy. This was the solution adopted in
two publications from unexpected sources: a
Russian edition of the Wielhorsky sketchbook
by Nathan Fishman in 1962 and a British edition of the Kafka sketch miscellany by Joseph
Kerman in 1970. Both of these editions combined carefully edited transcriptions with a
complete facsimile and commentary. As
Western reviewers, and gradually even some
German scholars, expressed a preference on
the grounds of utility for the Fishman-Kerman
approach, Bonn began to reconsider. Four
more editions in the Beethovenhaus series
were issued between 1970 and 1974, three of
them by Schmidt-G6rg and the last by
Wilhelm Virneisel;24 all four retained dip-

lomatic transcription. But sometime around

1970 a decision was made to add facsimiles to
the new publications.25 The combination of a
diplomatic transcription and a facsimile was
more or less redundant, of course, but these
transcriptions had been in preparation under
the old guidelines long before the decision to
add facsimiles was made. With the retirement
of Schmidt-G6rg in 1972, the general editorship of the Bonn sketch edition passed to
Sieghard Brandenburg, who has adopted the
principle of combining edited transcriptions
with facsimiles. This new policy brings the
Beethovenhaus series into general conformity
with the Fishman-Kerman procedures. Brandenburg's own edition of the Kessler sketchbook is scheduled to appear in 1978, and
future volumes are in preparationby a number
of Anglo-American scholars.
The second area in which recent scholarship has made significant contributions involves the use of the sketches for biographical
purposes, Nottebohm's home ground. Nottebohm had shown that the sketches could decide points of chronology, indicate projects
left unfinished, and provide a general idea of
Beethoven's approach to composition and the
genesis of specific works. His command of the
sources was such that, except in isolated instances, no one had seriously challenged
either his methods or his results (this dependence is still evident in Kinsky-Halm).26On
the other hand, some new sources had
emerged since Nottebohm's death and important new techniques for studying them had
evolved. A century after he began his work the
time was ripe for a second look.
Nottebohm had based his findings very
largely on the content of individual sources.
Although he was able to note where something was missing from a sketchbook or where
foreign leaves had been added, he had little
success in demonstrating that two distinct
sources belonged together or were roughly

24J. Schmidt-G6rg, Drei Skizzenbiicher zur Missa Solemnis II and III (both Bonn, 1970), and Ein Skizzenbuch zu
den Diabelli-Variationen und zur Missa Solemnis [Wittgenstein] (Bonn, 1972); Wilhelm Virneisel, Ein Skizzenbuch zur Streichquartetten aus op. 18 [Grasnick 2]
(Bonn, 1974).

25Although the facsimiles of the three sketchbooks edited

by Schmidt-G6rg bear the date "1968," they were not actually available until several years later. The facsimile accompanying Virneisel's edition is dated 1972.
260ne such isolated instance was mentioned in fn. 19.

11

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC

contemporary where there was no direct overlap in content. A more methodical approachto
the description of manuscripts has greatly increased the sophistication with which they
can now be related or differentiated. The new
methods are not themselves very sophisticated: observation of watermarks, staff-ruling,
blotting, stitch holes, the profiles of torn
edges, etc. And they have been developed in
innocent ways; it became a scholarly duty to
note the watermark and the number of staves
as part of a thorough description, even when
no use for the information immediately
suggested itself. To a considerable extent,
then, it was the desire to re-evaluate Nottebohm's work which led to the combination
and use of these techniques, not vice versa.
The work that is now being done in this
area is quite varied. It will suffice here to
mention two lines of inquiry which have produced interesting results. First, the possibilities for associating distinct sources on
the basis of shared physical relationships,
especially watermarks, have substantially
broadened the application of Nottebohm's
procedure for relating works chronologically.
A leader in the exploitation of these possibilities is Alan Tyson, who has been able on
the one hand to expose some weaknesses in
Nottebohm's work (e.g., on the genesis of
Leonore) and on the other to reaffirm some
provocative conclusions of his that had been
doubted by others (e.g., the date of the Leonore
No. 1 Overture).27On a much largerscale, the
new techniques form the basis for most of the
redating of Beethoven's early works proposed
in my own dissertation.28
Besides the direct application of new descriptive techniques to the dating of sources,
the same techniques have made possible the
reconstruction of dismembered manuscripts.
In many cases we can now identify leaves
27"Das Leonoreskizzenbuch(Mendelssohn 15): Probleme
der Rekonstruktion und Chronologie," Beethoven Jahrbuch 9, Jg. 1973/77 (1977), 469-500; "The Problem of

Beethoven's 'First' Leonore Overture," Journal of the

American Musicological Society 28 (1975), 292-334.
28Douglas Johnson, Beethoven's Early Sketches in the
"Fischhof" Miscellany, Berlin Autograph 28, Ph.D. disser-

tation, University of California at Berkeley, 1978.

12

which were removed from sketchbooks and

establish their original locations; even loose
leaves from the same gathering outside the
context of a sketchbook can sometimes be associated. Again the most active scholar in this
area has been Alan Tyson. An article written
in 1972 by Tyson and myself, "Reconstructing
Beethoven's Sketchbooks,"29 summarized the
principles and illustrated their use, and Tyson
has subsequently demonstrated the procedure
in separate articles on two sketchbooks.30One
important result of this new work is the adoption of the principle of reconstruction as a
requirement for future volumes in the Beethovenhaus series. In more general terms, reconstruction of damaged sources has become
recognized as a necessary prerequisite to serious study of their musical content.
In these two areas the issues are relatively
easy to formulate and recent achievements
easy to evaluate. I think it is true, however,
that the treatment of the sketches as documents in Beethoven biography is unlikely to
attract a wide public, since the obvious
difficulties they pose may seem out of proportion with the nature of the results they yield.
If interest in the sketches is ever to reach the
non-specialist, it will have to be stimulated by
faith in their relevance to the study of Beethoven's completed works. In this regard it is
surely symptomatic that the topics of so many
of the doctoral dissertations undertaken recently are defined by works rather than by
sources: the sketches for op. 30 (Richard
Kramer), op. 111 (William Drabkin), op. 131
(Robert Winter), op. 18 (Donald Greenfield),
op. 92 (John Knowles), and op. 93 (Kathryn
John). This emphasis contradicts both the accepted approach to the publication of sketchbooks and the discussion of their content for
biographical purposes.

29Journal

of the American

Musicological

Society

25

(1972), 137-56.
30o"A Reconstruction of the Pastoral Symphony Sketchbook," Beethoven Studies, ed. Alan Tyson (New York,
1973), I, 67-96, and the article on Mendelssohn 15 cited
in fn. 27.

At issue here is the purely musical significance of the sketches. The subject left
smoldering by Nottebohm and fanned lightly
after World War I has now burst into flame.
Although more heat than light has been generated thus far, the very quantity of recent
work seems bound to determine whether or
not a consensus can be reached on this issue.
Certainly there is none at present.
Indeed it is difficult even to formulate the
issue in simple terms. A preliminary distinction must be made between the possible relevance of the sketches to an understanding of
Beethoven's stylistic development and their
possible relevance to an analysis of specific
works, as has already been suggested. Whether
or not the evolution of Beethoven's style can
be chronicled by compositional choices
documented in the sketches, such a chronicle
itself belongs ultimately to the realm of biography and has only indirect implications for
our study of individual works. Nottebohm
was surely right on this point ("...dieser
Ueberschuss, den die Skizzen bieten, fillt der
Biographie des Kiinstlers Beethoven, der Geschichte seines kiinstlerischen Entwicklungsganges anheim"),31and the use of the sketches
by Mies, Gal, Becking, and others earlier in
this century, while drawing attention to their
musical content, remained clearly within the
scope of musical biography. Despite the title
of Mies's book, it seems obvious that in most
cases the sketches were adduced to support
conclusions already reached.
But what of the sketches in relation to
analysis? Are there problems in the completed
works which can be elucidated by the
sketches? If so, why would someone as capable as Nottebohm have not seen the possibility? Advocates of the analytical relevance of
the sketches would probably have the least
difficulty with the last question; after all, although nineteenth-century scholars, including
Nottebohm, spoke a great deal about the artwork as an organism, their analytical vocabulary now seems scarcely adequate to the task
of articulating organic relationships. If Notte-

31Zweite Beethoveniana,

p. ix.

bohm was unable to describe organic relationships in the first place, small wonder that he
found no help in the sketches. The great
growth of analytical technique in our own
century (so the argument continues) has led to
a far more sophisticated discussion of internal
relationships than was hitherto possible, and
as our questions have become more sophisticated, so too must our resources. Analysis has
admittedly become difficult. It would be
foolish to reject help from any quarter. So,
then, we take another look at the sketches.
The results thus far are disappointing. Is
there a single important analytical insight derived from the sketches which has become
common knowledge among musicians? None
that I am aware of; and the reasons are
perhaps not so complex as the above discussion may seem to suggest. Since the same
analytical tools can be trained on both the
works and the sketches, and since the
sketches, to be interesting, must be different
in some respect from the finished work, a
rather simple question arises: how shall we
interpret events in the sketches which differ
in some potentially instructive way from their
counterparts in the work? It might be instructive here to see some precedents.
Let us look first to Heinrich Schenker,
whose analytical technique dwarfedthat of his
contemporaries and who was among the few
to supplement Nottebohm's published transcriptions with his own. On the face of it,
Schenker's distinction of structural layers
would seem like fertile ground in which to
cultivate the sketches. One might legitimately
expect those principles of voice leading which
govern the completed work to emerge with
some clarity in the less embellished material
of the sketches. But there is a complication:
for Schenker, voice-leading principles predetermine the course of the work, and the further one proceeds into the background, the
smaller the scope for significant divergence
from them. Hence the process documented in
the sketches becomes one in which undesirable alternatives yield to the appropriate solution. Since the latter is necessarily present in
the completed work, the sketches can at best
confirm what we find there.
13

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH

CENTURY
MUSIC

Thus when Schenker discusses a sketch, it

is usually to demonstrate the progress of Beethoven's thought:
Right away on folio 3 there is a sketch clearly
intended for the development:

#!f

r .and:

Is

Furthermore, Beethoven attempts already on the

same leaf to combine the principal motive with a
counterpoint in half notes:

At the same time, the too-closely-parallel motion

between the half notes and the essential outline of
the motive must have eventually caused him second thoughts, since it is really in fundamental contradiction to the true requirements of proper counterpoint, which should rather serve to set off the
principal motive through rhythmic contrast. And
so Beethoven achieved something close to the
definitive version already on folio 12 (incidentally,
after several experiments with stretto had failed).
But if we bear in mind that even here he first
sketched the following:

then we have the best evidence of how little Beethoven himself must have been thinking of an actual augmentation of the principal motive in his
original conception of the half notes. For the construction of such an augmentation would certainly
have been easy for him had he intended one from
the beginning.32

This example is taken from the Erliiuterungsausgabe of the Sonata in C Minor,

op. 111, published in 1915. Since the theory of
layered analysis was not developed until the

1920s, after the editions of the late sonatas, it

might be objected that this passage is unrepresentative. But in fact there are few references
to the sketches in Schenker's later essays.
Whereas in the sonata editions they seemed to
belong to the documentation, Schenker must
have come to feel that they were largely superfluous to a thorough analysis. Despite the development in his own technique during the
last twenty years of his life, the sketches rea source of didactic
mained essentially
material:
The sketches-which, as the explanation will
show, offer a really valuable contribution to the artistic understanding of the master's compositional
technique, and hence of composing in general-are
from the collection of Artariain Vienna. .. (1914)33
Anyone who has seen sketches of the great masters
must have come across voice-leading progressions
that, far from merely having the character of
momentary inspirations and suggestions, present
goals and directions of a sort that could have originated only from the farsighted inspiration that is
given to genius-genius which, taking root in the
relationship of background, middleground, and
foreground,is able to create a purely musical continuity even in haste.
And so a thorough and profound study of the
surviving sketches of the great composers is
strongly recommended:for they show a masterfully
conceived musical continuity in the course, as it
were, of achieving itself (1935).34
Provocative ideas, but even Schenker was not
about to taunt Mies with a Kornpositionslehre
based on the sketches.35
Except in its potential sophistication,
Schenker's view of the sketches really differs
little from Nottebohm's. The new techniques
might find more of the mature organism there
than Nottebohm was willing to admit, but a
sophisticated analysis of the sketches-even
to Schenker-did not mean an improved anal-

33Beethoven: Sonate As dur op. 110. Kritische Einfiihrung

und Erliiuterung von Heinrich Schenker, ed. Oswald Jonas
(Vienna, 1972), p. 3 (original edn. 1914).
34Der freie Satz (Vienna, 1935), p. 33.

3"Thedidactic function of sketch study is strongly echoed

32Beethoven: Sonata C moll op. 111. Kritische Einfiihrung

und Erliauterung von Heinrich Schenker, ed. Oswald Jonas
(Vienna, 1971), p. 33 (original edn. 1915).

14

in Oswald Jonas, "Beethovens Skizzen und ihre Gestalt16

ung zum Werk," Zeitschrift fiir Musikwissenschaft
(1934), 449-59 (see especially pp. 449 and 459).

ysis of the works. The natural tendency, in

fact, was to proceed in the opposite direction-from
the work to the sketches (as was
true on another level in Mies's work). At least
one recent theorist, Allen Forte, has recognized this and proceeded frankly from a
Schenkerian analysis of a completed work (the
Sonata in E, op. 109) to a study of the sketches
for it. In the preface to The Compositional
Matrix (1961), Forte spells out his approach as
follows:
In the following, which constitutes the central part
of this study, I have undertaken to interpret certain
of the sketches with reference to the final version
of the appropriatemovement. Accordingly, I shall
begin by presenting an analysis of the first movement, section by section, using an analytic synopsis
in order to achieve an efficient over-view. I will
then present sketches of selected passages in what I
assume to be correct chronological order with respect to each other and to the finished work.36
The first paragraph of sketch analysis illustrates the procedure:
In almost every respect this ink sketch matches the
final version. However, closer examination reveals
an interesting discrepancy in the voice-leading: the
descending octave line from G# to G# does not occur; instead the line proceeds only as far as B (in the
third complete measure). This suggests that only
after working out the entire movement in some detail did Beethoven realize the significance of the descending tetrachord in relation to the thematic
third.37

simism was duly forthcoming. A necessary

first step was the circumscription of the
Schenkerian achievement. If one accepts that
there is more to the finished work than meets
the Schenkerian eye, the door opens to other,
less systematic methods and the products of
analysis seem less comprehensive. In this context it becomes easier to justify a re-appraisal
of the sketches. The new humility has encouraged a faith that the analytical process
might yet work both ways.
A great deal of sketch analysis has been
done in the past decade, and a great deal more
is now in progress in several unfinished dissertations. Perhaps it is premature to speculate
about its significance. But what are we to
think when Richard Kramer, after 260 pages of
analysis of sketches for the op. 30 violin
sonatas, concludes:
The creative act (the point needs restressing) is
mysterious. If that puts it too romantically, it is an
act that is so complex, motivated by so many impulses-as remote and impersonal as the entire web
of knowable history, and as remote and intensely
personal as the sum of one man's experience-that
the material evidence (records of the act) are little
more than occasional memos of a deeper, continual
process.38

If, as I have suggested, the codification of

Schenkerian principles eliminated the need to
consider alternative solutions to analytical
the problems themselves,
problems-rejected
some skeptics would say-then
the sketches
could be safely characterized as failed experiments. Forte's dissection merely dramatized
the view of them as a branch of pathology.
This created a pretty paradox for the
younger analysts of the 1960s and 70s, for it
now appeared that only a more pessimistic
view of analysis could accommodate a more
optimistic role for the sketches. The pes-

This is virtually a paraphrase of Nottebohm.

The quotation is not really a fair one, perhaps,
since Kramer is concerned throughout his
lengthy work with the sketch process rather
than the product, and he says so quite
straightforwardly in his own introduction.
Nevertheless, the possible relevance of the
sketches to an analysis of the work is too obvious an issue to have escaped an analyst of
Kramer's sophistication. His caution in this
area is discouraging, and certainly dampens
the ammunition for the salvo of dissertations
yet to come. But by stressing the complexity
(not to say the mystery) of the creative act,
Kramer is at least implicitly inviting us to
view the work from many perspectives. Between the lines of his conclusion one seems to
detect an indictment of the New Criticism, a

36TheCompositional Matrix (Baldwin,N.Y., 1961), p. 11.

37Ibid.,p. 29.

38RichardKramer, The Sketches for Beethoven's Violin

Sonatas, Opus 30: History, Transcription,Analysis (Ph.D.
dissertation, Princeton, 1973).
15

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC

plea that the composer's experience-repreadmitted to

sented here by his sketches-be
the discussion of completed works.
Philip Gossett has attempted to formulate
the new position in more explicit language
than was ever adopted by Kramer. Rejecting
the "intentional fallacy" as inapplicable to the
sketches because they share material with the
art-work, Gossett suggests that we accept help
wherever we find it:
Our understandingof a work of art is constantly in
flux. Each analysis will focus on different aspects or
qualities, and none can hope to "explain" exhaustively even a relatively simple work. Whether or
not we wish to invoke for a specific analysis information garneredfrom the sketches, they affect our
more general understanding of the work and the
kinds of questions we ask about related works.
That an omniscient critic might perceive without
assistance everything of significance knowable
about a given work, whatever such knowledge
might consist in, is irrelevant until such a critic appears.39
And he goes on to classify the contribution of
the sketches to our understanding of Beethoven's intentions in three rough categories:
The first category is "confirmatory":sketches provide evidence for compositional intent with respect
to relationships perfectly obvious to us before.
A second category is "suggestive": sketches provide
evidence for compositional intent with respect to
relationships which, while present, we may have
overlooked or undervalued.
A third category is "conceptual": sketches provide
evidence for compositional intent behind relationships which seem remote in the piece.40
What are we to make of this? From the
analyst's point of view, the first two categories
are useless; if we have observed relationships
in the piece, we hardly need the gratification
of observing them in the sketches. But
whereas gratification of this sort seems innocent enough, Gossett's third category is a good

39Philip Gossett, "Beethoven's Sixth Symphony: Sketches

for the First Movement," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 27 (1974), 261.
40Ibid., pp. 261, 263, and 268.

16

deal more self-indulgent. To enhance conceptually a relationship that the composer has
gradually weakened is to reverse the compositional process and substitute the sketches for
the work-in
short, to contradict his intentions. In the abstract it would seem axiomatic
that any analytical technique is powerless to
discover something in the sketches that it
cannot discover in the work. But analysis is
not done in the abstract, of course. None of us
is Gossett's omniscient critic, and it is surely
easier to discover tracks if we have seen the
beast go by. In practice, one suspects, "conceptual evidence" is an artificial term (and
category). Where such evidence is persuasive,
we are likely to view it as "suggestive" or
"confirmatory"; where it is unpersuasive, we
are likely to ignore it.
If I have overstated the case concerning analysis of the sketches, it is because their biographical interest, though broad, seems to me
insufficient to warrant the scope of the recent
literature, much of which is frankly analytical. For whom are the editions and the
analyses intended? All this activity will have
been a vacuous exercise indeed if the product
turns out to be a luxury, created for its own
sake by the Beethovenhaus and American doctoral programs and applauded reflexively with
enthusibicentennial and sesquicentennial
asm. It would be foolish to deny that institutional scholarship creates its own inertia,
tolerating description and explanation where
they serve no real critical goals. Although
aimed at another medium, the following sour
remarks apply equally well to our own:
The act of elucidation is satisfying, it gives the
critic a feeling of having achieved something. Energy
spent on the elucidation seems to verify the poem.
The fact that the argument of the poem is as unconvincing after the elucidation as before, if reasonably tough criteria of sense are applied, is easily
dispelled by the unbroken circuit of interest between poem and elucidation. So commentaries proceed. They are not good enough.41

41Denis Donoghue, "A Hard Look at Yeats," The New

York Review of Books, 26 May 1977, p. 4.

Granted that it is not always easy to distinguish between description for its own sake
and elucidation in the service of a persuasive
argument. But how will time treat passages
like these?
Beethoven was still dissatisfied with the muchrevised codetta. The very last measure on stave 9 is
his final word on the subject of the motive that had
also troubled him in revision (e) of the previous
draft. This was simply another matter of contrapuntal inversion, for in the score the motive occurs
both ways simultaneously... Other problems with
the coda were more important. After working on
various melodic details within the draft, Beethoven
decided to scrap the little cadential extension he
had added to Draft 3 in revision (g); this he did by
cancelling the last three staves of the present draft
and directing a "Vi::de" to stave 10, where a new
ending (ultimately adopted) is provided. The sequential ascending figure, corrected so many times
in the various drafts,has been given up in favor of a
direct stepwise ascent to the top of the register.
Beethoven vacillated briefly, however, trying the
older figure one more time (stave 12) while retaining the new melodic peak.42

the sequential passage now firmly within the recapitulation. It leads to a strong tonic arrival in the
upper octave, as already hinted in Example 4, but
an arrivalwithin the first group and hence independent of the real tonal motion of the piece.
One might consider this a momentary lack of
nerve. The earlier continuity draft, Example 7, is
formally much bolder. But faced with the differing
demands of the Pastorale world and the conventions governing symphonic sonata movements,
Beethoven felt compelled to experiment with alternative solutions.44

To solve his predicament, Beethoven again wrote

out the two versions, side by side, on folios 8v and
9r, as if to weigh their relative advantages. In the
"normal" version, however, with the sequential
passage in the retransition, he approaches the recapitulation from a dominant harmony, though
without the extreme prolongations of earlier
sketches. In the "alternative"version, the subdominant is implied, the dominant being reserved for

One hopes the tedium is not the message.

Skepticism about the role of analysis in
the study of the sketches need not be considered subversive to the discipline as a whole.
The sketches are central documents in the
history of Beethoven's creative life, even if we
must concede that at present we have no
efficient way of appraising them. It is inevitable that concise conclusions about their import be preceded by a good deal of unfocused
preliminary activity, like a public health program in which millions are immunized to
save a few lives. Thus the history of scholarship in this area, as outlined briefly here,
may be called unfocused. Its goals have shifted
perceptibly over the years, and its impact on
Beethoven biography in general has been diffuse. To an extent, no doubt, the sketches
have been assimilated into our larger picture
of the man, but the process of assimilation has
been so gradual as to defy formulation in
terms that would suggest the appropriate
channels for further study. And while the recent concern with musical analysis may
perhaps effect some changes in our view of
Beethoven's works, it seems safe to say that
the changes will not altogether
conform to present expectations.

Johnson, "Beethoven's Sketches for the Scherzo

of the Quartet Op. 18, No. 6," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 23 (1970), 402.
43Kramer, The Sketches for Op. 30, p. 373.

44Gossett, "Beethoven's Sixth Symphony," pp. 259-60.

From the beginning, Neapolitan neighbors lace the

theme at critical points. Now, their larger implications are exploited in a monstrous revision to the
draft that in effect cancels all the previous thinking
about the second limb of the theme. Evidently, the
seed of the digression was sown in an isolated entry, after the draft, at 127/7: the idea is concise and
sharply drawn, opening from a fifth which pins two
of those early Neapolitans, C-flat and G-flat.43

42Douglas

17

DOUGLAS
JOHNSON
Beethoven
Scholars