Ludwig van Beethoven, Skizzenblatt zur Violoncellosonate op. 69, Autograph

Springing back and forth while working? Unlike Beethoven!

Here you can see a sketch leaf with jottings for the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano op. 69. Beethoven first mentions this sonata in a letter of 8 June 1808 to the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, to whom he wished to sell the sonata. We can assume that he had already finished it at this time. The sketches are therefore from around the first half of 1808, maybe even from the previous winter. The Beethoven scholar Alan Tyson has reconstructed a sketchbook of Beethoven's from this time, which no longer exists as a complete book and whose leaves are widely scattered. He dates the reconstructed sketchbook between autumn 1807 and around February 1808. Tyson describes this book as being one that Beethoven assembled himself from the remains of various pieces of paper. So it is not surprising that the leaves are made of different kinds of paper. Tyson proves that they belonged to this reconstructed book due to the uniform stitch holes which can be found on the different leaves. Sieghard Brandenburg, on the other hand, believes that the stitch holes alone furnish "weak proof" (in his commentary to the facsimile edition of the autograph score of the first movement of the sonata), but does not fully discount the existence of the book. He does, however, stress that if one follows the reconstruction, Beethoven would have sprung back and forth between empty pages while writing the Cello Sonata op. 69. Should the sequence of the reconstruction be taken to be chronological, Beethoven would have worked in a very unsystematic manner. It is unlikely he did so to this extent. (J.R.)