Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 1.djvu/213

BEETHOVEN. body lay in one of the rooms, and a sketch of the face was made by Danhauser.

The funeral took place on the 29th at 3 p.m., and was attended by an immense mass of people, including all the musicians of the city. From the house to the Church of the Minorites, in the Alsergasse on the glacis, a procession was formed, in which Breuning, Johann van Beethoven, and Mosel, were chief mourners; the coffin was borne by eight members of the Opera, with Eybler, Hummel, Seyfried, Kreutzer, Weigl, Gyrowetz, Gansbacher, and Würfel, and 32 torch bearers—including Czerny, Lablache, and Schubert—round it. A choir of 16 men singers and 4 trombones alternately sang and played two Equali of Beethoven's, originally written for trombones for All Souls Day during his stay in Linz, and arranged to the words of the 'Miserere' and 'Amplius' by Seyfried. The crowd was enormous, soldiers had to be called in to force the way, and it took an hour and a half to pass the short distance from the house to the church. From the church the body was taken in a hearse drawn by four horses, and without music, to the Währinger cemetery, followed by a long string of carriages and many people.

At the gate of the cemetery an address by Grillparzer was recited by Anschütz—who being an actor was not permitted to speak on consecrated ground—and two poems by Castelli and Schlechta were read and distributed. Before the earth was filled in three laurel wreaths were placed on the coffin by Hummel. The grave is against the south wall of the cemetery, near the middle. Schubert is three places off, and Clement and Seyfried lie nearly opposite.

On April 3, the furniture and clothes, with the pianos by Graf and Broadwood, were sold by auction at the lodgings. The same day a solemn mass was performed in the Hofpfarrkirche of the Augustines; Mozart's Requiem was sung, Lablache not only taking the bass part but paying Barbaja a sum of 200 gulden for the cost of the singers. Two days later Cherubim's Requiem was sung at the Karlskirche.

In November [App. p.534 "On Nov. 5 and following days"] the sale of his musical effects took place by auction. Thayer has reprinted the catalogue in his Verzeichniss, p. 173. There were 50 lots of sketch and note-books; 19 autographs of unpublished and 73 autographs of published pieces; 5 MS. copies of published pieces; 40 copies of unpublished works; 10 sets of MS. parts; 17 MS. copies of music by various authors—including Cherubini's 'Faniska' and Mozart's 'Zauberflöte'; 26 lots of printed music; 6 of works on music; 1 autograph symphony of Haydn's; a pianoforte; a medal; and two violins. The produce of the sale was 1193 florins, curiously little when compared with the prices which such treasures would fetch now. This sum, added to the value of the bank shares and the Philharmonic £100, made in all, according to Schindler, a total of 10,232 florins (in silver), or a little over £1000.

In course of time the grave fell into neglect, and in 1863 the Gesellschaft der Musik-freunde undertook to exhume and re-bury the remains of both Beethoven and Schubert. This was done on Oct. 13, and Beethoven's monument now consists of a large flat stone covering the grave, surrounded by an iron railing, and headed by an obelisk in stone bearing a lyre, the usual emblems of eternity, and the simple name.

Beethoven's music has been divided by Herr von Lenz into three styles, and the division has evidently some justice in it, or it would not have been so widely accepted as it is even by those who differ about its details. That the division is not chronological is evident from the fact that M. Lenz includes the 2nd Symphony (op. 36), written in 1802, in the first period, while he places the Sonatas op. 26 and 27, which were completed a year earlier, and the 3 Sonatas op. 31, which were written in company with the 2nd Symphony, in the second period. As far as the Sonatas are concerned he ends the first period with op. 22.

But we may go further than that. The first movement of the Solo Sonata in E&#x266d; (op. 7) and the Finale of the Quartet in F, op 18, No. 1, contain examples of the episodes which form one of Beethoven's main characteristics, such as even the first movement of the Eroica can hardly surpass for independence and originality. The Scherzo of Symphony No. 1 and the Scherzo and Finale of Symphony No. 2 contain passages which would be found original and characteristic if met with in the compositions of many years later. Some will find it hard to place the Quartet in F minor, which Mendelssohn thought the most Beethovenish of all Beethoven's works, in anything but the third style; while the overture in C, op. 124, written in 1822, might be classed with the works of an earlier period. And yet on the whole the division is just, as an expression of the fact that Beethoven was always in progress; and that, to an extent greater than any other musician, his style matured and altered as he grew in life. He began, as it was natural and inevitable he should, with the best style of his day—the style of Mozart and Haydn; with melodies and passages that might be almost mistaken for theirs, with compositions apparently moulded in intention on them. And yet even during this Mozartian epoch we meet with works or single movements which are not Mozart, which Mozart perhaps could not have written, and which very fully reveal the future Beethoven. Such are the first two movements of the Sonata in A (op. 2), the Sonatas in E&#x266d; (op. 7) and D (op. 10, No. 3) and B&#x266d; (op. 22), the Scherzos of the 1st and 2nd