Beethoven's Controversial Metronome Mark for the Ninth Symphony Trio

Beethoven and the Metronome, I
Author(s): Peter Stadlen

Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Oct., 1967), pp. 330-349
Published by: Oxford University Press
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BEETHOVEN AND THE METRONOME
BY PETER STADLEN
AMONG those of Beethoven's metronome marks that are controversial

none had a more celebrated and indeed bizarre history than the one
given to the Trio of the ninth symphony; performances show equal
disregard for the = 16 given in the Collected Edition (though
not in all the printings) and for the J =i i 6 to be found in some
other editions, for example the current Eulenburg miniature score.
Almost all conductors remain just below the half-way mark of 87,
four of them taking the piece at 82-84, three at 76, four at 70-72.
Klemperer is an exception at 63 and Boult is reported to have
sounded intoleiably slow at 58, i.e. J = I 16.1 The faster alternative,
O = I I6, has been twice firmly disqualified, once in 1896 by Grove2
and again in Stanford's better-known letter to The Times in 1922.
Both proved that the semibreve was a myth; the minim on top of
the page had its stem rubbed out in the course of the second printing
of the first (Schott) edition some time in i8273 (the first printing
dating from 1826 does not yet contain the metronome marks).
This disposes of the possibility that the semibreve might represent an
afterthought and thus invalidate the minim found in all three
sources of the ninth symphony metronome marks.
They are: (I) the entries which Beethoven's nephew Karl made
on 27 September 1826 in the presentation copy for the King of
Prussia. (2) The marks contained in a letter to Schott, dated
Gneixendorf, 13 October I826, written in the nephew's hand and
signed by Beethoven. (3) The list written in an as yet unidentified
hand (Schindler's Latin script?) appended to a letter to Moscheles for
use at a concert planned by London's Philharmonic Society; the
letter is written in Schindler's hand and again signed by Beethoven;
it is dated I8 March 1827, but was not dispatched until the 24th,
three days before Beethoven's death.
The dotted minims appearing in Emily Anderson's edition both
of the Schott letter and of the Moscheles list4 would have legitimized
the compromise tempo that is now generally adopted, however odd
they would be in view of the Trio's binary metre. But they are the
1 According to Dr. Heathcote Statham's report in a letter to Mr. William Mann.

2 'Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies' (London, I896), p. 337.
8 The metronomic indication is also printed in the middle of the page, where the
minim has remained intact in all copies. Otto Baensch, 'Zur Neunten Symphonie', in
'Neues Beethoven Jahrbuch' (Augsburg, I925), p. 150.
4 'The Letters of Beethoven' (London, I96I), iii, pp. I315 & 1344.
330
result of an error. Of this I was able to convince Miss Anderson in
the case of the Schott letter, since I possessed a photostat (P1. I)
obtained from the Stadtbibliothek in Mainz, while more recently
Miss Anderson's collaborator Miss Carolan very kindly presented
me with a photostat copy of the equally dotless Moscheles list which
Miss Anderson secured from the Beethovenhaus, Bonn shortly before
her death (P1. II). Evidently she had taken over Stephan Ley's
erroneous addition of this dot in his reprint of the Moscheles list,
and introduced it into the Schott letter, presumably by analogy.'
Elliot Forbes, who also reprints the Moscheles list with Ley's dot,'
seems undisturbed by the discrepancy with the Schott letter; more-
over he leaves out Thayer's correct observation7 that Moscheles,
when he published the list for the first time in 1841, inexplicably
omitted all dots. Nor does Forbes show himself aware of the signifi-
cance of finding in the Moscheles list, and only in the Moscheles
list, the figure 96 against the dotted minims for the finale Presto,
instead of the 66 in the king's copy and in the Schott letter.
As early as I925 Otto Baensch's suspicions were aroused by that
tempo, which he justly considered to be implausibly fast. He estab-
lished' that the man at Schott's whose job it was to deal with
Beethoven's metronome letter mistakenly turned the 6 into a 9,
quite possibly because in the printed score the Finale happens to
start on page 96-a Freudian slip. This wrong figure turns up in
the metronome list which was first of all published in the December
I826 issue of Caecilia,1o Schott's house journal, of which Beethoven
was a regular and avid reader. (Only subsequently, as mentioned
before, were the marks, including the wrong 96, incorporated in the
second printing of the score; Beethoven's letter had come too late
for the first.) From this Baensch neatly concluded that the list for
Moscheles must have been copied from Caecilia and thus does not
constitute a thlrd, independent manifestation of Beethoven's wishes
in this matter. We shall see later what to make of Schindler's claim
that Beethoven took new metronome readings in March I827,
when he hoped that London's Philharmonic Society would perform
the symphony again." But Schindler is quite certainly wrong when
6 Stephan Ley, 'Beethoven als Freund der Familie Wegeler-von Breuning' (Bonn,
1927), p. 234.
'Thayer's Life of Beethoven', revised and edited by Elliot Forbes (Princeton,
1964), ii, p. 1040.
7'Ludwig van Beethoven's Leben', revised and continued by Hermann Deiters,
revised and completed by Hugo Riemann (Leipzig, 1917-23), v, p. 472.
8'Life of Beethoven' (London, I841), a translation (with additions) of the first
edition of Anton Schindler's biography of Beethoven (Minster, I840), p. 69. They are
also omitted in Charlotte Moscheles's 'Aus Moscheles Leben' edited from his diary
(Leipzig, 1872), p. 152. Evidently Thayer had not seen the original list, nor has Hermann
Beck, who, moreover, states erroneously that these omissions occur in the list itself:
'Studien iiber das Tempo Problem bei Beethoven', Dissertation (Erlangen, 1954), p. 52.
Op. cit., pp. I45 foll.
0 'Caecilia, Eine Zeitschrift fur die musikalische Welt' (Mainz, Dec. 1826), p. I58.
11 'Ludwig van Beethoven', 3rd ed. (Miinster, I860), Part II, p. 250. See also
'Beethoven as I knew him', a translation of the above, edited by Donald W. MacArdle
(London, 1966), p. 425.
33I
2
he says that this list is the result of such an endeavour.l2
However, in the Schott letter and in the king's copy (the marks
tally in these documents) we are left with the unpalatable J = i i6
for the Trio. But do these documents really establish the authenticity
of that tempo beyond reasonable doubt? Or is it possible to find a
still closer approach to Beethoven's intentions ? I obtained permission
from Dr. Koehler, the director of the State Library in East Berlin,
to inspect the Conversation Book which contains a record of the
actual session that took place in Vienna on 27 September 1826.
Thayer mentions it, but merely refers to these crucial pages in a
perfunctory footnote;18 he does not describe them in detail or discuss
their significance. They have been completely ignored by all other
writers dealing with Beethoven's metronome.
It will be seen from the photographs, kindly put at my disposal
by Dr. Koehler, that there is nothing wrong with the figure i 16; in
fact all the figures (not just 'most' as Thayer has it) correspond to
those in the Schott letter and the king's copy. They form a continu-
ous column, interrupted only by Karl's remark (P1. IV): "As long
as there are visible signs I cannot be presented to the general"
(referring to his very recent suicide attempt and the plan to get him
into the army) and "I4 days. You too" (plainly a reference to their
impending trip). Except perhaps for the first one, which I believe to
be by Beethoven," they are written in the hand of his nephew who,
we may thus assume, jotted down his readings of the time machine
as the uncle played one incipit after another on the piano. They
worked under pressure: the king's librarian, Dr. Spiker, had specially
travelled to Vienna to collected the score, and Beethoven's brother
Johan, who had come to take the ailing composer for a short holiday
in the country, was pining to get back to his farming estate at
Gneixendorf in Lower Austria. "You must force him to stay here
tomorrow", writes Karl (P1. III, line 5), but to no avail: "On no
account will the brother wait longer than tomorrow morning", the
nephew informs Beethoven on one of the five pages that come
between P1. IV and V, and he suggests: "We could now write the
necessary letters so that we are ready in the morning". Again: "The
symphony, thinks the brother, could be sent to Haslinger tomorrow
morning with a note; if necessary he will go himself". But on the
next page Karl reports (top of P1. V): "One could now write to
Haslinger, says the brother, rather than go there".
Despite all this, Beethoven took the trouble to check again two
of the tempi: the 88 (P1. IV) is evidently a retake of the first move-
ment. Later in the day Karl writes, with reference to the penultimate
Prestissimo (among the nameless movements on our list): "You are
12 Op. cit., first edition (Munster, I84o), p. 220.
13 Op. cit., v, pp. 394, 395 n.
14 Professor Schmidt-Gorg and Dr. Hans Schmidt, both of the Beethovenhaus, Bonn,
tend to agree with this. My warmest thanks are due to them for examining these pages
and giving their invaluable opinion.
332
taking it faster than 126. 132. This is how we had it in the morning"
(P1. V). (This suggests that it was Karl who read the metronome.) At
such speeds six beats a minute amount to a trivial discrepancy; none
the less Schindler, evidently after Beethoven's death, draws attention
to the divergence in the margin (P1. V), and on the front page of the
Conversation Book he writes: "This proves the unreliability of
Beethoven's own metronome marks", adding: "Tomorrow it would
have been different again".I5 An ill-chosen instance for such acid
comments ? We shall consider this later.
One can see that Karl originally wrote 66 instead of 132 (P1. IV),
explaining at the bottom of the page: "I32 is the same tempo, only
in half-notes (in two beats) which would be better". A little higher
up we find he had made a similar suggestion with regard to the
tempo of the finale, the'Freude' theme of the preceding page (P1. III):
"Twice 80 would make. . .". This is crossed out and so is, just below,
an ominous 80 = o (in ink and thus, I suggest, written later),
which represents, I believe, an unsuccessful attempt to establish the
correct metronomic form for that tempo. It should, of course, and
did eventually, read J = 8o. Here we have uncle and nephew
struggling with the kind of mathematical problem which, we may
well suspect, baffled them in the trio as well.
Certainly the unsystematic lay-out of these pages both suggests
confusion and was apt to give rise to confusion. On the right-hand
side of the neat column of figures there is another, incomplete one
of hastily scribbled notes. At least the first pair of minims (P1. III)
looks so violent and disorderly as to betray Beethoven's impatient
hand.16 Their disproportionate size and awkward proximity to the
figure leave no doubt that they were jotted down at a later stage
and so, presumably, were the rest. In each case we find as many
notes as are required to fill a whole bar; one dotted minim for the
Presto, groups of two or three minims for the other sections. The
sole exception is the single crotchet against the 63 of the 3/4 Andante
Moderato; this is the only instance on this list where a note could
not possibly have been meant to serve any other purpose except to
indicate the unit whose speed had just been determined by the
ticking of the metronome.
The same cannot possibly be said, however, of the two minims
facing the Adagio's first tempo, again in ink (P1. III), since here the
metronomic unit happens to be a crotchet. It is this fact that causes
me to surmise that these duplicate and triplicate notes were intended
as a strange kind of additional time-signature (we find only three
conventional ones)-three minims in a row for the 3/2 in the bar of
"Seid umschlungen" and "Ihr stiirzt nieder", or two minims next to
15 He makes no reference to his own participation in these proceedings, nor are there,
in these pages preceding Beethoven's departure to Gneixendorf, any entries in his hand.
This makes it extremely unlikely that he played a part in compiling this list as he claimed
in a letter to Schott on 13 March 1852. Baensch, op. cit., p. 148.
16 Professor Schmidt-Gorg and Dr. Schmidt agree that this is likely.
333
each other to denote the Alla breve of the Trio or the common time
of the Adagio. It looks very much as if these groups of minims had
been put there to complement the equally incomplete column of
time words on the left, starting with 'Ite Allo' and '2te' in Beethoven's
hand" but continuing in the nephew's; they were meant to help
Karl in case of doubt to find the place in the complex score to which
a tempo figure refers when later that same day he came to transcribe
the list into the king's copy. Significantly, the first pair of minims
occurs-almost like the deaf composer's written answer to his
amanuensis's question-where there is the first gap in the column of
time words, a gap all the more confusing since this new tempo
occurs in the middle of a movement, i.e. the transition from Scherzo
to Trio. Further down Karl does indeed ask "Wohin" ("Where does
this one belong")-in ink and with a pen so royally sharpened as to
suggest that he was now occupied with the dedication copy.'8
He might well ask; in the king's copy the first appearance of the
'Freude' theme (to which the figure 80 refers) is not entitled 'Finale'
(the word which Beethoven had evidently called out at this point)
but Allegro assai-and of these Karl had two to choose from: the
trailer (bar 77) and the start of the theme proper (bar 92) which,
in the autograph, is not marked by any time-word. More confusing
still for Karl, the immediately preceding Tempo del Im?. Allegro 88
refers, of course, to the quotation from the first movement in the
introduction to the last movement; this means that Beethoven omitted
to mark the quotations from the second and third movements,
presumably because he had forgotten to write time-words at the start
of these quotations in his autograph.", This suggests that during the
actual session he used the autograph score, playing neither from
memory nor from the Berlin copy.20 In fact, a grammatically am-
biguous entry by his brother Johan leaves it open whether by that
time the presentation copy had returned from the binders; and in
any case Beethoven wanted it to be as neat as possible, much to the
chagrin of Dr. Spiker, who would have preferred to take home the
autograph or at least a copy scarred by autograph corrections.21
There remained the business of writing out the metronomic
equations. "Could you not find a work with the metronome marks
written in ?" asks Karl. "One could then see the style". The fact that
this remark is found on the page following P1. V I take to support
my submission that on the pages under review the task of relating
figures to units had not yet been deliberately and explicitly under-
taken. However, perhaps uncle and nephew did find an early
17 Professor Schmidt-G6rg and Dr. Schmidt agree.
18 The two minims put against the Adagio and the figure 6o to their right are also
in ink.
19 Consequently, time-words and metronome marks for the second and third move-
ment quotations are also absent from the king's copy and the Schott letter.
20 Beethoven did not receive the printed score from Schott's before I3 October.
Baensch, op. cit., p. 138.
21 A. Ch. Kalischer, 'Beethoven und seine Zeitgenossen' (Berlin, 1908-o0), iv, p. 349.
334
I
Yii
.s
i
i:
model, or else Beethoven, after an initial spell of uncertainty,
remembered how he used to set about it the last time he published
metronome marks, seven years earlier. Whichever the case may be,
Karl's calligraphic entries in the dedication copy, and also the list
that is contained in his letter to Schott a fortnight later, are all
written in the familiar form. Whether Beethoven supervised him we
shall never know, but if he did he failed to notice that at least one
indisputably wrong unit had slipped in: in neither of these documents
has the Scherzo a dot next to its minim, though being in 3/4 time
it certainly ought to have one.22
But it is also extremely likely that Beethoven intended the Alla
marcia episode to have a dotted minim instead of the dotted crotchet
that appears in all sources. Hermann Beck23 argues the case on the
grounds that Beethoven gave almost identical metronome marks to
the three appearances of the 'Freude' theme: J = 80, J. ( J. ?) =
84, J. = 84; it would be perplexing, he says, to find just this one at
half the speed. Indeed here, as distinct from the Trio, no conductor
tries to approximate the lower alternative or even dip significantly
below the half-way mark of J. = 66. Moreover, they all considerably
step up the pace with the advent of tbefugato at bar 102. I give both
figures except for the last two readings, for which I am indebted to
Mr. William Mann, who took them during live performances but
only at the opening: Weingartner, who advocated 48, 52,24 in
practice followed 60, 66; Karajan 60, 69; Toscanini 63, 72; Furt-
wangler 69, 75; Klemperer 60, 63; Szell 60, 66-69; Kleiber 58, 63;
Hindemith 57; Beecham 60. If the dotted crotchet were right, this
would mean that the figure would err vastly on the slow side, which,
as I shall argue later, is far less likely than is the opposite case.
There is no dearth of indubitably erroneous units all along the
line between what Beethoven had in mind and some letter, list or
edition. He cannot, of course, be held responsible if the Allegro
energico in the finale has its minim turned into a crotchet in Forbes25
or suddenly loses its dot, not only in the Moscheles publications but
also in the current Eulenburg score, edited by Prof. Altmann and
revised by Max Unger. In the same series we find in the quartet,
22 My photostat of the Moscheles list (P1. II) does show a dot, however; it may be
that the dying Beethoven noticed the absurdity or that whoever copied the list from
Caecilia took it upon himself to make the correction. It may also have been put there
by Moscheles since, as the photostat shows, he did add the words 'e un poco maestoso'
to the first Allegro and changed the 'tempo primo' of the first Adagio into 'molto e
cantabile', evidently after he had compared the list in his letter with the London copy
of the symphony. Ley printed the dot, correctly in this case, and Miss Anderson took it
over from him but, again by way of analogy, arbitrarily added it to the Scherzo minim
in her Schott letter. This constitutes the only difference between the Schott letter and the
Moscheles list, apart from the one already mentioned-96 instead of 66 for the dotted
minims of the finale Presto. (The rather distant spot north-east of the Allo ma non tanto
on P1. I is not a musical dot; there are similar marks to the right of Beethoven's signature.)
23 'Bemerkungen zu Beethoven's Tempi' in 'Beethoven Jahrbuch' (Bonn, 1955-6),
p. 45. Weingartner merely thinks the figure 'rather slow'. 'Ratschlage fur Auffihrungen
der Symphonien Beethovens' (Leipzig, I916), p. 99.
24 i.e. 96, o04: he gives the equivalents in dotted crotchets: ibid., p. I99.
25 Op. cit., p. 1040.
335
Op. 74 an impossible J. instead of . = 1oo for the Pit presto
quasi prestissimo, and J instead of J = 72 for the Adagio, as well
as J instead of ' = 84 for the Adagio of the fourth symphony.
Nobody seems to worry unduly about these things, or even to be
aware of them or of Eulenburg's dotless minims for the Scherzo of
the fifth symphony and the Trio of the seventh.
All these are correctly given in the sources: two booklets pub-
lished in Vienna by Steiner and Company in i817 and i819,
containing (a) the first eight symphonies and the Septet and (b) the
first eleven quartets, all "marked by the author himself"." I possess a
photostat of the quartet list, which is correctly reproduced in
Nottebohm27 (except for the omission of J = 69 for the Poco Adagio
that precedes the Prestissimo in Op. I8, no. 6; it is misnamed 'tempo
primo' in Steiner). As for the symphonies and the Septet I had to
rely on Nottebohm's assertion" that the marks given in the Steiner
list tally with the Collected Edition; but I have checked the latter
against the Leipziger Allgemeine Musikzeitung, where the marks for the
symphonies were reprinted on 17 December I8I7. However, even
these authentic documents contain an obviously impossible J
instead of J = I 16 for the Presto of the 'Eroica'2 and J instead of
dJ 92 for the Presto of Op. 59, no. I.3?
Again, both in the first English edition of the 'Hammerklavier'31
sonata and in the first publication of Beethoven's letter to Riess2 from
which the English metronome marks were evidently taken, the
Scherzo minim lacks a dot. Kalischer in his edition both of the book
and of the letter"3 points out that "the second movement of the giant
sonata later received the metronomisation [ ? ] J. = 80 instead of
J = 8o", but he turns a blind eye on the equally absurd d = I44
for the fugue.34 Both mistakes are given without comment by Emily
Anderson,"3 even though the only possible marks-J. and J-appear
in the first Vienna edition (Artaria) of September I8I9, which is
unjustly disregarded as a source; Beethoven, by then still healthy and
vigorous, is certain to have scrutinized it minutely. Since the letter
is lost36 it is impossible to decide whether the errors contained in
26 As far as is known, no autograph sources of these lists exist, but it is inconceivable

that they should have been issued without Beethoven's imprimatur.
27 'Zweite Beethoveniana' (Leipzig, I887), p. 519?
28 'Beethoveniana' (Leipzig, 1872), p. 131.
29 Beck's elaborate argumentation seems superfluous here ('Bemerkungen', p. 38).
This slip is corrected in the Eulenburg score.
0a Corrected in the Eulenburg score. Presumably this is the cause of Nottebohm's
unspecified misgivings with regard to the marks of the quartets (i, p. 131).
31 The Regent's Harmonic Institution, autumn 1819, London.
22 Franz Wegeler und Ferdinand Ries, 'Biographische Notizen fiber Ludwig v.
Beethoven' (Coblenz, 1838), p. Io6.
33 Wegeler-Ries, ed. Kalischer (Berlin and Leipzig, I906), p. 176, and Kalischer,
'Beethoven's siimtliche Briefe' (Berlin, I907-8), iv, p. i6.
34 Here too, there seems little need for Beck's arguments against the minim. ibid, p. 49.
35 Op. cit., ii, p. 806.
36 Or until it turns up; perhaps not all Beethoven documents in a sealed coffer at the
Wegeler family's house in Coblenz have been photographed and their facsimiles given
to the Beethovenhaus, Bonn.
336
Wegeler-Ries are Beethoven's or the editor's. But there is one such
mistake that Beethoven had certainly seen. "So I am to mark the
second movement of the A major symphony J = 80" asks Schindler
in a conversation book of 1823."8 No comment from the painstaking
editor or anybody else so far as I know (including Nottebohm) and
apparently no abuse from Beethoven, since Schindler continues the
conversation not with "Oh what an idiot I am" but calmly "I
cannot find your more recent metronome list".
My purpose in going into such detail was to show how accident-
prone are the units in metronome indications. Since the figures in
the Conversation Book are identical with those in the two later
sources of markings for the ninth symphony, the question of a
erroneous transcription does not arise here. It is thus less relevant t
report that I have not come across that kind of clerical mistak
except for the 96 instead of 66 at the start of the finale-expose
with due ceremony by Baensch 40 years ago but still left uncorrecte
in our editions-and five wrong figures that appear in an article b
Rudolf Kolisch-a startling bunch admittedly but then it bristl
with all sorts of mistakes. I would stress, though, that his purpose,
unlike that of publishers and editors, was not to establish and recor
exact texts but to engage in complex metronomical speculations;
shall discuss these later."3 I submit that these pages of the Conversa
tion Book do not unambiguously reveal which units Beethoven ha
in mind for the figures recorded by Karl. Considering how unverse
and uncertain in metronomic mathematics uncle and nephe
emerge from this bit of documentary evidence and how likely it is
that Beethoven condoned or even committed some of the indubitable
errors I have pointed out with regard to this and other works, it does
not seem unreasonable to suspect that the problematic minim of the
Trio in the king's copy and the Schott letter represents a wrong unit
after all. There would seem some point, then, in proceeding to
examine the inner evidence provided by the music, and to take into
account some further, non-musical factors.
The study of sketches and autograph alterations holds many
fascinations; a prosaic but useful by-product are the clues which the
genesis of a work may yield for arriving at the correct text. If one
finds in a sketchbook the last four bars of the Scherzo followed by
the two introductory bars of the Trio"--or rather four bars, since
the passage is here written in 2/4 time:
| r br r 2 rrr XT r j ; j_
38 J#? j. [j. ,J. fr r _
87 'Beethoven's Konversationshefte', ed. Georg Schiinemann (Berlin, 19
a8 Rudolf Kolisch, 'Tempo and Character in Beethoven's Music', Music
April and July 1943.
39 Quoted by Antonin Sychra in 'Beethoven's Skizzen zur IX. S
'Beethoven Jahrbuch' (Bonn, 1959-60), p. 93.
337
the impression is certainly that the latter has been conceived merely
as a rhythmic transformation of the former and that no change of
tempo is contemplated. The impression is strengthened when on
other pages there appear side by side the Scherzo theme and the
Trio theme (again in 2/4 time): one is reminded of the alla breve
episode in the 'Eroica' Scherzo (bar 381) even though it is written
differently: instead of changing from three crotchets (3/4) into two
crotchets (2/4) as he did in the Trio of the ninth symphony, Beet-
hoven wrote two minims (C1I) for three crotchets (3/4) (Ex. a and b
below).
In eighteenth-century theory and practice, to some extent still
adhered to by Beethoven, alla breve used to be chosen in preference
to a metrically corresponding if not altogether equivalent 2/4
notation40 in order to convey the emphatic, robust or indeed heavily
accentuated character of a musical idea. One can see, then, why in
the sketches for the Trio Beethoven did not adopt the alla breve that
is the alternative to the 2/4 that he did write: in the introductory bars
(not to mention the bulk of the Trio) the second beats (crotchets) are
not nearly so contrary and syncopated as are the second minims in
the 'Eroica' episode. Besides, in the Trio proper this category of alla
breve would have entailed a cumbersome and archaic looking nota-
tion (Ex. d):
o 116
(a) (J.- 116) r (b) Alia breve
I^ rThTr IJJ I1'd i l " I r if r IJ J IJ
i^]rlfR=
A ]r r I-,J
j r ij^~li^ r
r~ -rir r
j' d 1
.
As for the short and simple 'Eroica' ep

might have continued in 3/4 time and w
would have been wholly unambiguous. Yet
conventions of the period, alla breve left litt
Beethoven, if we are to believe the Leipziger
and the Collected Edition, went out of his w
when he returned to this score in order to
in 18I7, 14 years after its completion. Hav
J. = Ii 6 (ironically-and significantly ?-t
symphonies are allotted the same figure) he
bars, an additional cautionary metronome: o
of the Trio of the ninth symphony, give
would amount to writing J = I I6. Expres
that, in both cases, the same musical busine
40 Beck, op. cit., p. 40.
338
III
IV
same span of time: what changes (as between the main motives and
their transformations in both symphonies) is merely the rhythmic
figuration within equally long bars.
Yet it is precisely for that reason that J = I I6 cannot possibly
be correct in the case of the Trio of the ninth symphony. For,
whereas in the 'Eroica' the bars (irrespective of their rhythmic
character) proceed at a constant pace, in the ninth symphony they
do not. A new feature, not found in the sketches, appears in the final
score: the last eight bars of the Scherzo are very clearly marked
'stringendo il tempo' and the Trio is marked Presto; that is to say,
there is an increase in speed before the rhythmic transformation
occurs-in fact the latter is understood as a continuation and indeed
the goal of the former. Tovey, a fervent partisan of the J = I6
camp, is wrong when he comes to deal with this crucial point; he
writes:41 "The tempo is hurried until the octave figure is compressed
into duple time". Yet if he and others of his persuasion were to have
their way the octave leap would not be compressed at all since in
the 3/4 version, too, it divides the bar into two equal halves. It
would, on the contrary, be heard precisely at the speed that prevailed
before the stringendo began, and the same is true of the even more
characteristic alternations of the initial A's and D's.
While Tovey is at least vague and evasive over the question of
stringendo ("two crotchets of the Trio should correspond roughly to
three .. of the Scherzo . . . If the half-bar corresponds too exactly
to the original tempo the effect will be heavy and stiff") Hermann
Beck tries to argue away the stringendo altogether.42 Having professed
his belief that Baensch has established the authenticity of J = I6
beyond a shadow of doubt he writes: "A few bars before the alla breve
the lighter (3/4) metre begins to assimilate to the heavier (alla breve)
one. Then, at the Presto, the minims follow with the same speed that
had formerly obtained among the whole bars, but the minims are
sharply accentuated and hardly differentiated. In this sense a
stringendo il tempo is possible even though the pace remains constant".
What this amounts to is that an instruction addressed to the
performer is turned, absurdly, into the composer's prediction how
the composition will at this point affect the listener. Besides, in his
assumption that an alla breve is heavy Beck gets hold of non-corres-
ponding units to produce the assimilation which he claims takes the
place of the stringendo: the 3/4 bars which in the sketches and, as we
shall see, in an early version of the score, are transformed into 'light'
2/4 bars (in preference to the 'heavy' alternative of a short, 'Eroica'-
like alla breve, where the two crotchets would have been written as
two minims) correspond only to pairs of crotchets, i.e. to the halves
of the 'long' alla breve bars of the final version. There is nothing heavy
about the metric relation between the two crotchets in any such pair;
41 'Essays in Musical Analysis' (London, I936), ii p. 25.
42 Beck, op. cit., p. 44.
339
2*
because the heaviness of the present, 'long' alla breve bar, of which
the 'light' alternative would have been a 'long' 2/4 bar which
Beethoven never wrote, resides in the accentuation of the first and
the third crotchets, each of them formerly the carriers of the sole
accent in a 2/4 bar. Moreover, one way of explaining why Beethoven
turned these short 2/4 bars into long alla breve ones is precisely that
what he felt was in a state of assimilation were not the 3/4 bars but
the 6/4 bars that are beginning to be perceived just before the change
into binary metre is accomplished. Unlike the super-bars earlier in
the Scherzo, comprising groups of three or four 3/4 bars, which
needed to be marked in the score: 'ritmo di tre battute, ritmo di
quattro battute' because they have to berendered perceptible through
extra accentuation, these 6/4 bars Beethoven did not bother to mark
since they represent a contraction that is automatically felt to result
from the stringendo.l4
Beethoven's mathematics may have been fallible but he was a
seasoned practitioner; it is quite inconceivable that he should have
planned an anti-climax such as would inevitably result if after a
threefold accelerando the same musical idea is served up once more-
in a different rhythmic guise, to be sure, but none the less at the pace
that prevailed before the accelerando began. It is even less likely that
under these disappointing circumstances, by way of distinguishing
the new tempo from the preceding Allegro molto vivace of the
Scherzo, he should have called it Presto, adding in pencil on the
lower margin faintly, indeed hardly perceptibly on my reproduction
(P1. VI), but undeniably: 'Prestissimo'44-his last time-word in this
matter, which ought to be adopted by our editions. This argument
is not new; in fact it has been half-heartedly conceded by some of
the Minimites, among them Baensch who recommends the judgment
of Solomon delivered in this case by Wagner. According to Heinrich
Porges's detailed account of the performance of the ninth symphony
at the inaugural concert of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus,46 Wagner
took the first two bars of the Trio as a proper Presto and only after
that slowed down to the rustic idyll we have been familiar with ever
43 As a matter of fact he did omit, earlier on, to mark five lots of ritmo di sei (3 x 2)
battute: bars 117-22, I7 -6, 242-7, 308-13, 354-9. This leaves him with two bars over:
the total of ritmo di quattro battute bars in this movement is not divisible by four. But since
these asymmetries do not involve alternating between duple and triple metre he may
never have noticed.
44 Baensch suggests (op. cit., p. 153) that the faintness may not be due to wear and
tear but that the word may have been deliberately erased. This is invalidated by the
occurrence of other, equally faded pencil entries: one (though not the other) of two
Prestissimos pencilled at the symphony's last tempo change (after the Maestoso, not
showing in Karl's lists) on the same page; the remark at bar Io of the finale, 'Selon le
caract6re [sic] d'un recitative, mais in tempo' (the last three words have become virtually
illegible); the word 'assai' after Allegro at bar 77 (called Allegro moderato in Eulenburg,
I do not know why); and the surely innocent remark 'Seque Andante Maestoso' at the
end of the page preceding that section. Weingartner (op. cit., p. I67) acknowledges the
significance of the Trio's Prestissimo and does his best: 0 = 80 in print, and 84 on his
recording.
45 'Die Auffihrung von Beethoven's Neunter Symphonie unter Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth' (Leipzig, 1872), p. I7.
340
since. Needless to add, it is equally inconceivable for Beethoven not
to have marked such a further tempo change had he wanted it.
If, then, we have to accept as a sine qua non that the first bar of
the Presto must be faster than the last one of the stringendo and that
the new tempo must prevail throughout the Trio, then J = I I6 is
absolutely certain to be wrong-always provided that we do not
doubt the J. =- 1 6 for the Scherzo. But now the question arises
what overall increase of pace Beethoven did have in mind. Tovey46
is quite right when he draws attention to the autograph, where the
Trio can be seen to have been originally notated in 2/4 bars (as in
the sketches, though he does not mention these). But he draws the
wrong conclusions from a correct, or partly correct, observation.
Pouring scorn on the sporadic attempts over the best part of a century
to approximate the fast alternative-"violent efforts ... to take it
twice as fast as it has any business to go"-he declares: "With this
notation it would have been impossible to conduct the trio too fast".
Certainly, at o = 16, i.e. J = 232, it would be ridiculous for a
conductor to mark every 2/4 bar with a downbeat; but Tovey leaves
out of account that the very reason why Beethoven changed his mind
from 2/4 to (IC may well have been that on second (or third) thought
he considered that the music as he had come to imagine it was now
too fast for a 2/4 bar.
I say 'on third thought' because, to complicate matters further,
closer scrutiny of the autograph (P1. VII) reveals that the last page
of the Trio was first of all written four in a bar (there is no time
signature). This is obvious in the case of the crossed out four bars,
but the remaining ones, too, undoubtedly had their subdividing bar
lines added after the skeleton score, containing melody and bass, had
been composed-notice the unnaturally narrow bars and the one
line that virtually bisects one of the notes. Of the eight tied minims
of the double basses the second, third, sixth and eighth (the last one
a hollow note in the facsimile if not in my reproduction) were
originally semibreves. With the help of a magnifying glass it will be
seen that the down-stems were added separately, not executed in one
bold stroke and of a piece with the upper crescent of the note, as
was Beethoven's custom.47 It looks as if this page, the lead-back into
the repeat of the Scherzo, had been written at an earlier stage than
the bulk of the Trio; its cancelled four and a half bars are identical
with the melody and bass lines at the end of the preceding page
(bars 523-6 of our scores), and not even a Beethoven in the early
stages of gestation is likely to have penned the same phrase five times
in succession (it is reiterated once more in bars 527-9).
It is very likely that Beethoven 'overshot' when he arrived at this
point of the final, 'clean' score; notoriously disinclined to write more
46 Op. cit., p. 26.

47 cf. Max Unger, 'Beethoven's Handschrift', in 'Ver6ffentlichungen des Beethoven-
hauses' (Bonn, 1926), p. 24.
34I
than was absolutely necessary he decided to utilize the existing page
(he proceeded in two stages: the ' = de' corresponding to a 'vi = '
at the end of the previous page had to be moved on by two crotchets).
He drew the subdividing (2/4) bar lines to bring this page into line
with the rest as it then was, and he filled in the subsidiary notes.48
On the first page of the Trio, too (P1. VI), there are signs to
suggest that it had originally been written in 4/4 bars; it is more
complex than a first glance might lead one to believe. The second
and third notes in the first violins look suspiciously close; true, they
have been disturbed by the erasion of a bar line but at no stage
could they have been further apart: the stave is intact on either side.
There is scope on the other hand for the high A in the next bar to
have occupied a position further to the left so that these four notes
may have been spaced more evenly like the notes of the lower
strings in both bars.
Of the two bar-lines that subdivide the second and third bars of
the oboe theme the first was certainly not drawn in one go and the
second, reinforced one probably not. Yet their neighbours were; of
these at least the one starting below figure 2 is too crooked to have
possibly been drawn at an earlier stage when Beethoven might have
prepared the empty page, as he sometimes did, by drawing bar-lines
before starting to write (the first two bar-lines on this page may
answer to such a description). But if one line (below figure 2) drawn
in the course of writing the notes goes right through the page it is
unlikely that the next line should belong to the same phase if, as can
be seen, it originally reached no further down than the fourth stave;
it is more probable that it represents an afterthought. The third D
of the second oboe is almost certainly a later addition, having been
drawn with a single sweep of the pen as Beethoven used to do in
emergencies; it is tied to a preceding D that may easily have been a
semibreve and to a succeeding one that may conceivably have been-
perhaps it points to a stage when Beethoven did not yet intend to
accompany the melody in thirds. Turning that note into a minim
resulted in a blot, perhaps because the same operation was designed
to eliminate a dot which the first oboe F X must have had if this was
once a 4/4 bar. Traces of the first oboe's independent minim D
(which it needed as long as the second oboe had a semibreve) can
be seen just below the 'dolce'-though I cannot imagine, quite
irrespective of the 4/4-2/4 question, how the E came to have its
up-stem on the left.
If one visualizes the erased bar line between figures I and 2 by
tracing it through the restored sections of the staves one sees that
especially at the top it was too close to its left neighbour to have
been planned from the outset. The suspicion is confirmed when one
48 The oboe correction beneath fig. I I8, i.e. in bar 625, suggests that the harmony
had been different here, perhaps G minor or D major; it is impossible to guess the original
shape of the violin phrase, but the belated sub-division of the last minims of flutes and
oboes into two crotchets suggests that the poco rit. was a last-minute decision.
342
91
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VI
compares this narrow strip with the acres of space that Beethoven
allowed himself for the indubitably original 2/4 bars on the later
pages of the Trio or indeed for the two 3/4 bars on my illustration.
The oboe D, which must have been on the left of this line, is more
likely to have started life as a semibreve and only subsequently to
have been turned into a minim, tied to another one that now had
to be added on the right hand-side of this new (2/4) bar-line. Later,
when this line was erased, the minims had to go too, and a semibreve
was put back, but this time in the middle of the bar where we see
it now.
The semibreve of the bass trombone, added on the bottom stave,
could not possibly have among its ancestors a semibreve dating from
the initial 4/4 stage; for, if Beethoven had decided on this additional
instrument before he began writing in 2/4, he would have drawn
his bar-lines through the extra stave as from bar 417 (on the page
following). He did not, and later had to lengthen bar-lines through-
out the Trio. But that semibreve did very likely replace two minims;
in fact, the bass trombone part, at any rate from bar 491 (seconda
volta), dates from the 2/4 stage: all the 2/4 bar-lines are lengthened,
and the semibreves at bars 491 and 499 were each written as two
tied minims. Where the bass trombone is silent (bars 417-74), only
4/4 bar-lines are lengthened (except for three instances where the
originals happened to be long enough to cross the additional stave)
and likewise from bars 475-91 prima volta (with four exceptions,
evident slips-one of them is crossed out). Hence these lengthenings
must date from the final stage, since otherwise there would be traces
of 2/4 bar-lines having been filled in. This proves, by analogy, that
on the first page it is possible for the trombone notes and their bar-
lines (reinforced, as can be seen) to have originally been written as
2/4 bars, that is to say earlier than the bar-lines of the empty (4/4)
bars and the clef on that line. The erasures suggest that the original
minims were written an octave lower; a similar change of mind
occurred at bars 513-2 , first minim, where, as the autograph shows,
the bass trombone notes were originally an octave higher.
What operates against the theory of a primary four-in-a-bar
state on this page (as distinct from the last one, where there can be
no doubt) is the assumption it entails that Beethoven started the
Trio without immediately writing time-signatures to mark the
transition from a ternary to a binary metre. Unless, that is, the CiA
signs we now see in the strings were to represent a second generation
of C signs, the originals (stroke-less since the white between the
staves has remained undisturbed) having been erased imperfectly-
only enough to make room for the 2/4 time signatures that must
have been there (had they not, we would find no erasures but
simply (Il's, either written at the outset or the result of putting a
stroke through original C's). It is conceivable that such parts of the
present C(l's as are situated on evidently undisturbed staves were
343
made use of for the final time-signatures, and indeed the doublings
and re-drawings on the roughened parts of the paper do not on the
whole look as if they had been caused merely by obstructions met
with by the pen. As for the (1A signs in the wind parts, they neces-
sarily belong to the final stage since here the notes are so clearly
grouped in pairs that they could not possibly have been filled in
before the 2/4 bar-lines had been either drawn or indeed erased;
nor could there have been earlier, different time-signatures here
since the staves accommodating the visible ones are intact.
There must have been a stage when the whole Trio was written
in 2/4 bars. Beethoven then changed his mind.49 He altered the
time-signatures in the strings and erased the second, fourth and
sixth bar-lines. Finding this procedure too cumbersome he then
decided to number those bar-lines-the even ones-that were to be
retained (naturally the numbering jumps the four bars already
cancelled on the last page) and appended a memorandum to the
copyist: "All this to be written in (CI bars-turn two minims, for
example dJ, into one semibreve".50 The 'La prima volta-la
seconda volta' arrangements of which we can still see the traces
(also in the strings which perhaps had here originally a sustained
note like that of the bass trombone) were upset by the change of
time-signature and by the consequently necessary transformation of
two minims, tied across a bar-line now to be deleted, into a semibreve,
half-way through which the repeat would now have to start. To
avoid this, Beethoven moved the repeat sign forward by one and a
half (4/4) bars; this entailed the need to add the now missing prima
volta on the margin of the next page, after the first half of what is
now bar 422-all as we know it today. Before this ingenious solution
had occurred to him he had evidently resigned himself to having
the first part of the Trio written out twice and the second part also,
presumably for symmetry's sake: note the instructions to the copyist
on the top and bottom of this page, and the cancelled repeat sign
overleaf, which he restored as soon as he was able to think up
something less unsightly and wasteful. The key-signatures, too, he
moved forward (forgetting the accidentals that were now required
for the bassoon's C and B) merely, as far as I can make out, because
the original bar was by now in such a mess. Hence the oddity of a
piece that starts in D major two bars before it is seen to do so.
We shall never know for certain whether the initial four-in-a-bar
stage (itself implying a change of mind after the 2/4 of the sketches)
49 The bulk of the Trio between the first and last page, i.e. coming between P1. VI
and VII, looks as if it had been written right away in 2/4; there are no traces of an original
4/4 stage nor is it likely to represent a clean copy, since this would hardly start on the
reverse of a leaf which on its front bears all the signs of metric indecision.
50 As will be seen from P1. VII, Prof. Altmann's reference, in his preface to the Eulen-
burg score, to 'half-bars' instead of 'two half-notes' is erroneous. Not only is the word
'Noten' clearly legible except for the first letter; since the German word Takt is masculine
Beethoven would have had to continue with 'einen gantzen' instead of 'eine gantze'.
In Eulenburg's English translation 'It is written' should read 'To be written'.
344
was conceived as alla breve or in common time. The fastest metro-
nome mark that Beethoven recorded for common time is J = I00
for the first movement of the second symphony, and among the
common-time movements without an authentic metronome mark
none would seem to call for a substantially faster pace. Yet we must
remember that in the second symphony there are plenty of semi-
quavers, while in our Trio the smallest units are crotchets, with the
sole exception of the two grace notes, as one almost feels tempted to
call the quavers that form part of the theme. Again, if it be doubted
that Beethoven would ever write such fast crotchets (genuine ones,
that is, as distinct from the quasi-quavers represented, in theory at
any rate, by the crotchets of the 'long' (15 bars we eventually find in
the Trio), we may, while making due allowance for the somewhat
different notational conventions in triple time, none the less point
to the J = 348 (J. = 16) of the Scherzo; indeed it took the
J = 600 (,. = Ioo) in the 3/4 Trio of Op. 74 for Beethoven to
apologise for such insanely fast crotchets, by adding a note to the
players: "Imagine this as a 6/8 bar". (He would have said '6/4 bar',
if he had merely wished to bracket two 3/4's into one super-bar.)
Nearer home, the possibility of that hypothetical C, with its
unusually fast crotchets, is surely proved by the 2/4 version which
did, after all, exist. Nor is this a case of quod erat demonstrandum;
even assuming that at first Beethoven intended no more than a
moderate increase in the tempo of a Scherzo not yet marked and
thus only approximately J. = 16 (there is no graphological
evidence to suggest that the stringendo at the end of it was added
after the Trio had been written in 2/4), this would have made for,
say, J = 276 (J = 138). We may add that, other things being
equal, common-time crotchets belong to a somewhat faster species
than those in 2/4 bars: if it be objected that the J = 216 (J = Io8)
of the fifth symphony's first movement, which happens to have been
awarded the highest mark among Beethoven's 2/4 movements, is
yet faster than the J = 200 of the second symphony's first move-
ment, we must remember that here again the semiquavers of the
second symphony tend to create the impression of a considerably
faster tempo than is created by the quavers which are the smallest
units occurring in the fifth. Similarly, if the gap between the J =
216 of the fifth's first movement and J = 276 or so of the ninth's
Trio in its post-stringendo 2/4 state still seems large, we may draw
comfort from the Scherzo of the piano sonata, Op. IIo. It is the only
pendant among Beethoven's completed works to the Trio's quaintly
short-winded 2/4 bar with its highly unusual lack of distinction
between the first and second beats, due to the absence of sub-division.
Yet for the Op. i o Scherzo, J = 276 (J = 138) would not seem
excessive. Furthermore, the tempo of the Op. I Io Scherzo still has
to cater for the running quavers of its own Trio.
Tempo apart, is it conceivable that Beethoven would have
345
entertained such fundamentally divergent notions as to the metric
nature of a musical idea? It is one thing to vacillate between a
'short' 2/4 and a 'long' CC, i.e. a super-bar which is in any case felt
to result from the slight variations of emphasis on the down-beats of
the 2/4's; in fact we find similar hesitations in sketches,1 of the first
movement of Op. 59, no. 2: 6/8-3/8-6/8, of the first movement of
Op. 26: 3/8-6/8, and of the third movement of Op. 106: 6/8-I 2/8.
But to alter the metric status of unstressed off-beats is a very different
affair. Yet this is what the difference between 2/4 and (C on the one
hand and C on the other amounts to (there is no comparable dis-
tinction in triple time). However, for this too, there are precedents:52
the off-beat notes have more weight in the sketch than in the final
version of Op. 9, no. i, fourth movement,53 and of Op. 130, third
movement, where, moreover, the best and the second-best accents
exchange their positions to begin with. But the most striking proof
of Beethoven's broadmindedness in metrical matters is furnished by
the three completed versions of the 'Opferlied', Op. I2ib;54 it was
notated first in (I< and then in 2/4, but finally in C55-all the more
remarkable since this heightened metric status of the off-beat notes
contrasts with a particularly marked lowering of their value in a
sketch, strangely enough underlaid with scansion symbols.
It is quite possible, then, that the initial, 4/4 stage of the auto-
graph of the Trio was conceived in common time-a fact that is not
irrelevant when one comes to consider what it was that caused
Beethoven's threefold change of mind. It must, of course, remain
pure conjecture if one tries to apportion his motives between the
two factors that are expressed through a time-signature and are
never easily disentangled: tempo and metre. While we must not
exclude the possibility that Beethoven merely kept on alternating
between 2/4 and alla breve, common time would seem to make more
sense for a first step. To a composer who must have felt torn between
the conflicting metric demands of the introductory bars, where
every second note needs to be stressed with equal vehemence, and
the Trio proper, where the hierarchy of odd and even (2/4) bars
soon makes itself felt, common time may have appeared particularly
apt in view of the nature of the second subject. Even at the break-
neck speed which I believe Beethoven eventually intended, these
scalic undulations do not strike one as alla breve but rather as four
in a bar. They are an elaboration and continuation of the counter-
point that accompanies the first idea and we might as well note that
51 Quoted by Paul Mies, 'Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethoven's zur Erkenntnis
seines Stiles' (Leipzig, I925), pp. I6I foil.
2 Both quoted by Paul Mies, 'Stilkundliche Bemerkungen zu Beethovenschen
Werken', in 'Neues Beethoven Jahrbuch' (Brunswick, 1937), p. 91.
68 Etulenburg's C for the final version is an error.
64 Quoted by Kurt Herbst, 'Beethoven's Opferliedkompositionen', in 'Neues Beet-
hoven Jahrbuch' (Brunswick, '933), p. I37).
"5 The (C found in Herbst's final music example (op. cit., 258) and in Mies (op. cit.,
p. 94) is an error. I am much indebted to Professor Razek of the Wiener Stadtbibliothek
for consulting the autograph.
346
VII
Ritratto di Francesca Caccini
(Firenze. R. Conservatorio di Musica).
the last page of the autograph (originally written four in a bar)
comprises those passages where the counterpoint appears emanci-
pated from the theme to which it belonged at its first appearance.
Quite possibly it was this kind of passage that prompted Beethoven's
first change of mind. At the same time, if we assume that his notion
of the Trio's tempo underwent a drastic change between the first
jottings in the sketchbook and the final score, it seems plausible that
he should have negotiated the vast gap not in one go but in stages;
common time might in that case represent a kind of half-way house.
We are faced with two more volte-face of which the final one
turns 2/4 into (Il. With Beethoven, it is true, such a change no longer
automatically transmuted crotchets into quavers, thus halving the
time-values and doubling the tempo as eighteenth-century theorists
claimed it did. (It does so, actually, in the case of the 'Eroica'
episode where the extra metronome mark makes it clear that the
four crotchets in the bar amount to four quavers.) But there can be
no doubt that the new time-signature implies a considerable increase
in speed; thus here the motive behind the change would seem to
have been the wish to pay heed to a still faster tempo notion that had
meanwhile formed in the composer's mind. Yet by the same token
it seems likely that the penultimate change did not proceed from (CA
to 2/4, i.e. from quasi-quavers to crotchets, with consequent loss of
speed but from C to 2/4 i.e. as between crotchets, implying not
necessarily loss of speed but rather a reversal of the first metric
change and a temporary decision to subject the whole Trio to the
scheme of the transition. To preserve its metric aggressiveness despite
the final change into (I Beethoven added the equalizingforte signs,
of which at least the even ones must date from the alla breve stage
since quite a few of them are partly written over erasures. This in
turn appears to have set off the wish to increase the loudness of the
passage as a whole fromforte to fortissimo: note the correction in the
first violins whoseforte sign may well have been written before the
otherfortissimos.
A further point in favour of the theory that the final change
signifies a substantial increase of pace is what I believe to be the
belated arrival in the autograph of the word 'Presto'. Significantly
it does not appear in the customary position at the top of the page,
as it would have done if the composer had quite such a radical
tempo character in mind at the time of writing the notes. Instead
we find it in the middle of the page, on top of the first violin stave-
the first to have its 2/4 erased-as if to symbolize a connection
between a changed notion of tempo and the final change of time-
signature. 5
56 Beethoven showed himself aware of the unorthodox and inconspicuous location
of the word 'Presto'; going through the score on a later occasion he repeated it at the
bottom of the page with a thick red pencil which he usually reserved for reinforcing
expression marks (the 'Prestissimo' he added later, further down still, in an ordinary
lead pencil).
347
I should add that this is not the only known instance to prove
that with Beethoven the tempo of a musical idea was just as liable
as any other of its features to be subjected to decisive alteration.
In an early sketch-book he happened to write 'Andante' over the
very theme which many years later emerged as the 'Allegro con
brio' of Op. III ;7 and probably no more than a few months or
perhaps weeks separate the composition of the tranquil figuration
for the bassoon in the prisoners' chorus of 'Fidelio' and its first
appearance among the sketches for the Vivace rondo of the G major
piano concerto.58 Admittedly, the intervention of an earlier 4/4 stage
means that I am unable to turn the tables on Tovey as smoothly
and elegantly as I would have wished, and I regret not to be able
to give a simpler account of the facts. None the less, the existence in
the autograph of a 2/4 stage argues not against but in favour of a
fast tempo for the final version.
How fast ? It would have been soothing to find in the Conversa-
tion Book some such figure as 76 or 8o, the kind of compromise
which, as we have seen, is in fact being adopted by most conductors.
But the figure is I I6; since this is the same as the preceding one it is
only fair to point out that on two pages of the conversation book
Karl shows that he was liable to commit a not uncommon kind of
slip. Instead of what he means to write he starts with a figure or a
word he has written already-'84' (P1. IV) and 'Zu' (P1. V), which
is the first word of the preceding sentence. Did he perhaps not
intend to write the second I 6 but quite a different figure ? Supposing
this was so it would imply that he had to move the weight on the
pendulum when Beethoven started to play the Trio. This renders it
rather unlikely that he should not have been alerted when he saw
afterwards two identical figures. Indeed, Beethoven himself, who
as I have argued undoubtedly had some increase of pace in mind,
would have been similarly startled on finding the same figure twice-
unless he was well aware that the increase was in fact such as to
keep the pulse of the whole bars constant. And as it happens his
scribbled minims leave no doubt that his attention had been drawn
to this very spot on the list. It is for this reason that a wrong figure
is far less likely here than anywhere else.
If, then, the evidence provided by the autograph score proves
conclusively that the Trio needs to be played substantially faster
than the Scherzo, the evidence contained in the Conversation Book
suggests, though not quite so categorically, that Beethoven, on that
day, took the alla breve bars twice as fast as the 3/4 bars. But is it
possible to find a common denominator, a figure that will make a
reasonable fit for both ?
O =II I6 would be the fastest metronome mark that Beethoven
prescribed for alla breve-though not by far: he demanded = I12
57 Mies, op. cit., p. 92.
68 Nottebohm, i, p. 13.
348
for the Presto of the fifth symphony. If this tempo is less controversial
it is because it meets with less resistance from its crotchets; while
these are no less (or rather no more) an integral part of the movement
than those of the Trio of the ninth symphony, the sense they produce
is simpler: there is no counterpoint and they are heard as the diminu-
tive form of a theme often heard before. But in the Allegro molto
of the string quartet, Op. 95, with its o = 92 next on the alla breve
list, the musical sense is almost exclusively produced by quavers.
And while, admittedly, the Trio sounds absurd when taken at , =
I6, Boulez's 92-6 during a recent performance made, I thought, a
very convincing effect; nor did he cause undue embarrassment to the
horns. We cannot assume anything like such virtuosity in their 1826
predecessors; but Beethoven's minimal compassion for his players is
as well documented as his own pianistic prowess, and it is a common
experience that one is apt to take orchestral music significantly
faster on the piano than one would like to hear it played by an
orchestra.
The Scherzo, on the other hand, is admittedly quite comfortable
at I 6. Most people take it like that or even a little faster; but
Weingartner59 recommends IO8-I2 (though he has recorded it at
i 6), and even Klemperer's Ioo, while not exactly Dionysian still
strikes one as possible, unlike Boult's reported d = I I6 for the Trio.
Moreover, there are sketcheso6 where the Scherzo theme appears
inscribed with such notes as "to be thoroughly fugued", and in ver-
sions that are rendered less mobile through the combination of two
octave and two fifth leaps:
or through the sub-division of the crotchets into repeated quavers:

in der Mitte auch 8tel
7r tTrr Jw i\ 7,7FrZ
-indications that at some time or other Beethoven was ap
a slower Scherzo than the one we are accustomed to.
on that fateful occasion he did play both Scherzo and
Ioo or even I04-is there anything to account for t
remains between that sort of figure and the two
Conversation Book ?
[To be concluded]
69 Op. cit., p. I67.

60 Nottebohm, ii, pp. 158, 171, 173.
349

Beethoven's Controversial Metronome Mark for the Ninth Symphony Trio

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Beethoven and the Metronome, I

Author(s): Peter Stadlen

AMONG those of Beethoven's metronome marks that are controversial

1 According to Dr. Heathcote Statham's report in a letter to Mr. William Mann.

26 As far as is known, no autograph sources of these lists exist, but it is inconceivable

(a) (J.- 116) r (b) Alia breve

I^ rThTr IJJ I1'd i l " I r if r IJ J IJ

As for the short and simple 'Eroica' ep

46 Op. cit., p. 26.

"i: jij rt?iiiiii::::::::::I

::a:i:: q%,?,-: ,Y','?::?i::::.:::-::I :

or through the sub-division of the crotchets into repeated quavers:

69 Op. cit., p. I67.

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