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Ludwig van Beethoven. Extraordinary autograph manuscript for the first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in Eb major, Op. 7...
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Description
Ludwig van Beethoven's working handwritten manuscript for the first movement of "The Emperor Concerto" - exhibiting how he shaped the motives and textures of the music at a seminal stage of composition of what would become one of the greatest piano concertos of all time
Ludwig van Beethoven. Extraordinary autograph manuscript for the
first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in Eb major, Op. 73
("Emperor Concerto"). No place, no date [but Vienna,
circa late 1808 - early 1809]. Two pages of a single leaf,
measuring 12 x 9.25 inches. The present manuscript was originally
stiched together with other leaves (minor pin holes present), but
used separately from the larger sketchbooks then in use in late
1808 and early 1809. The paper has distinctive fold marks, contains
14 staves per side, instead of the more standard 16 staves of the
contemporary sketchbooks, and carries the watermark "KotenSchlos"
(no. 21 in the standard catalogue by Johnson, Tyson, and Winter,
The Beethoven Sketchbooks). Both sides of the manuscript are
filled with notations for various passages, some of which diverge
from the finished work. Slight spotting. Housed in custom full
morocco clamshell decorated in gilt.This working manuscript documents a crucial turning-point in Beethoven's life and musical career. Beethoven had just held the most impressive concert of his career at Vienna on December 22, 1808, including the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto, and Choral Fantasy, among other works. He sought to impress his aristocratic sponsors, and had received a job offer from Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been installed as King of Westphalia in Kassel. When Beethoven threatened to leave Austria to work at the court of Austria's enemy, he eventually received a counter-offer of a lifetime annuity by March 1809, on the condition that he remain in Austria. Little did he know that by May 1809, Napoleon's armies would occupy Vienna, and that the value of his annuity would be soon devalued by wartime conditions.
The title "Emperor" for this last completed piano concerto by Beethoven is unfitting, in view of the composer's expressed ambivalence and even distaste for both Emperor Napoleon and the Austrian Emperor Franz. The concerto embodies an idealized heroism, while the imposing role granted here to the piano soloist also became distanced from Beethoven's own pianistic mastery. After the December 1808 concerto, Beethoven retreated from the concert platform on account of his incurable deafness. However, in this concerto he builds into the music stirring virtuosic solo passages, specifying in meticulous detail those elaborate textures that he would earlier have committed to spontaneous improvisation. Hence the first movement begins with an impressive improvisatory passage, or cadenza, for the soloist, and a variant of this passage recurs at the recapitulation. The main theme of the movement as given later to the soloist appears on the manuscript at the top of the first page, or recto (which would have been the second or verso side according to the order of pages as originally stiched). This dolce theme is not realized here in chords but rather as a single melodic line, and its lively ascending continuation, featuring dotted rhythms, differs in intriguing ways from the completed work. Other notations on this page capture the kind of pianistic brilliance that surely marked Beethoven's spontaneous improvisations. In many ways, the music notated on this sketchleaf captures an early, seminal stage of Beethoven's creative process.
Comparison with other larger manuscripts demonstrates the special importance of this sketchleaf. Beethoven's hasty work in preparation for his December 1808 concert is preserved in the Grasnick 3 Sketchbook held in the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin preussischer Kulturbesitz), which contains some early sketches for the Fifth Concerto in its last pages. On the other hand, the following desk-sized sketchbook, the Landsberg 5 Sketchbook also held in Berlin, documents Beethoven's later work on the piece beginning in March 1809, by which time he had decided to decline Jérôme Bonaparte's offer and remain in Vienna.
This remarkable manuscript offers insight into Beethoven's position at the crossroads of changing circumstances in early 1809. At the end of the Grasnick 3 Sketchbook, he refers to "travel at the very beginning of Lent," and in a letter from January 7, 1809 he wrote to his publishers Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig that he had that very day mailed his acceptance of the position in Kassel, and would be traveling through Leipzig during Lent. It seems likely that the new concerto was bound up with these professional plans and the position at Kassel, yet his prospects of fulfillment with the notoriously self-indulgent Jérôme as newly minted King of Westphalia would surely have been doomed to failure. The reverse side or verso side of the sketchleaf shows fully harmonized gestures marked for trumpet and drums and ingenious musical textures, as Beethoven works out ideas for one of the most brilliant movements in all his works, yet the political context for his musical creativity was problematic. The composer's favorite saying, which he set repeatedly to music, was "Ars longa, vita brevis" ("Art is long, life is short"), asserting the abiding value of artistic expression over historical conditions. Music like the Fifth Concerto reaches beyond his own troubled war-torn time, and our own as well, embodying an undiminished spiritual aspiration.
Special thanks to William Kinderman, Professor and Leo and Elaine Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies, Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles.
This item is protected by Heritage's NFTrust+ , a digital fingerprint that photographically authenticates it as the original, recorded permanently in our archives and in an NFT.
Auction Info
2022 July 16 Historical Platinum Session Signature® Auction #6258 (go to Auction Home page)
Auction Dates
July, 2022
16th
Saturday
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