Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio op. 72, 3. Fassung 1814, zweites Finale, mit Bildnis und Haarlocke, Klavierauszug, Überprüfte Abschrift, Fragment

You can't sing on a "t"

Green leather embossed with gold and several carefully fitted endpapers - this fragment from a corrected copy of the second finale from the 1814 version of Fidelio was bound luxuriously. It contains fragments from the piano reduction which the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles had made on the request of the publishers Artaria and with Beethoven's approval. Although the chorus parts were done by another copyist, the piano part and quite a few of the corrections in the chorus parts are in Moscheles' handwriting. Beethoven had each of the numbers in the arrangement given to him and corrected them. In Moscheles' biography, which was edited by his wife using his letters and diary entries, he talks about the work on the piano reduction of Fidelio. He had separated the letters in the text "Ret-terin des Gat-ten" ("a wife who saves her husband") of the last major duet "O namenlose Freude" ("O joy beyond expressing"). He said that Beethoven had crossed out this hyphenation, correcting it to "Rett-erin des Gatt-en", as nobody would be able to sing on a "t". As the biography was published in England, it can be supposed that the English text wrongly reproduced Beethoven's correction of the hyphenation. The argument that nobody would be able to sing on a "t" is only valid if the composer had changed the words to "Re-tterin des Ga-tten". The copy shown here also supports this supposition. The same text also appears here in the finale of the opera. Here we can see the same correction: on leaf lv (image 8) the copyist had first of all written "Gatt-en"; the hyphenation was corrected and the two tts were attached to the second syllable. (J.R.)