Entwurf für ein Beethoven-Denkmal - Reproduktion einer Fotografie von Georg Partenheimer nach einer Lithographie von Adolph von Menzel, die nach einer Zeichnung eines Denkmalentwurfs von Friedrich Drake von 1837 geschaffen wurde

Johann Friedrich Drake worked as a colleague of Christian Daniel Rauch (1777-1857) in Berlin. Only a few years after the death of Beethoven, he made several sculptures portraying the composer. In 1836, those statuettes were shown for the first time in public at the academy exhibition in Berlin.

Those models showed the composer standing or walking and apparently he was wearing contemporary dresses. Drake changed this draft in 1840, when he participated in the competition of the Beethoven statue in Bonn. He now handed in the draft of a statue, showing Beethoven in a seating position. Even though Drake's models had gone lost, his ideas are handed down by a lithography, which Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905) made after a drawing of the sculptor.

Drake was one of the first sculptors who designed a high pedestal with allegorical figures, on which Beethoven was to be shown in a seating position on a kind of throne. With a score on his lap, the composer was looking upwards, meditating on something. His garment was to be idealizing and not corresponding to the contemporary way of dressing in the 19th century. This draft is of special interest, since it already shows the tendency of spatially raising Beethoven and giving him prominence with rich allegorical additions. In this respect, Drake´s draft gets beyond the bourgeois statues and already announces the splendidly designed monuments of the Wilhelminian era.(S.B.)