“Production” of what? The next Quintet, Op. 29, no doubt. “At my house”—no longer in the Hamberger House on the Bastion, but in the one pointed out by Czerny: “Beethoven lived a little later (about 1802) on the Petersplatz, the corner house beside the Guard-house, vis-à-vis of my present lodgings, in the fourth (?) storey, where I visited him as often as I did (in the Tiefen Graben). If you will give me the pleasure of a visit (No. 576) beside Daum, second storey, I will show you the windows. There I visited several times every week.”[132]
What whim could have induced Beethoven to remove to this house with the bells of St. Peter’s on one side and those of St. Stephen’s sounding down upon him on the other, and he so suffering with his ears? Perhaps because friends were in the house. Förster’s earliest recollections of Beethoven date from this winter and this house; for his father’s dwelling was in the third storey above him. He remembers that Beethoven volunteered to instruct him in pianoforte playing, and that he was forced to rise at six in the morning and descend the cold stairs, child as he was, hardly six years of age, to take his lessons; and on one occasion going up again crying because his master had whipped his little fingers with one of the iron or steel needles used in knitting the coarse yarn jackets worn by women in service.
The composition of the Marches for Four Hands (Op. 45), ordered by Count Browne, dates also from the house in the Petersplatz.
He composed part of the second march while giving me a lesson on a sonata which I had to play in the evening at the Count’s house at a little concert—a thing that still seems incomprehensible to me. I was also to play the marches on the same occasion with him. While we were playing young Count P... sitting in the doorway leading to the next room spoke so loudly and continuously to a pretty woman, that Beethoven, after several efforts had vainly been made to secure quiet, suddenly took my hands from the keys in the middle of the music, jumped up and said very loudly, “I will not play for such swine!” All efforts to get him to return to the pianoforte were vain, and he would not even allow me to play the sonata. So the music came to an end in the midst of much ill humor.
In composing Beethoven tested his pieces at the pianoforte until he found them to his liking, and sang the while. His voice in singing was hideous. It was thus that Czerny heard him at work on the four-hand Marches while waiting in a side room.
According to Jahn’s papers this statement came also from Czerny.
Beethoven and His Brothers
It is now necessary to turn back to November and again undertake the annoying and thankless task of examining a broad tissue of mingled fact and misrepresentation and severing the truth from the error; this time the subject is the relations which existed between Beethoven and his brothers in these years. A letter written by Kaspar is the occasion of taking it up here. Johann André, a music publisher at Offenbach-on-the-Main, following the example of Hoffmeister, Nägeli, Breitkopf and Härtel and others, now applied to Beethoven for manuscripts. Kaspar wrote the reply under date November 23, 1802:
... At present we have nothing but a Symphony, a grand Concerto for Pianoforte, the first at 300 florins and the second at the same price, if you should want three pianoforte sonatas I could furnish them for no less than 900 florins, all according to Vienna standard, and these you could not have all at once, but one every five or six weeks, because my brother does not trouble himself with such trifles any longer and composes only oratorios, operas, etc.
Also you are to send us eight copies of every piece which you may possibly engrave. Whether the pieces please you or not I beg you to answer, otherwise I might be prevented from selling them to someone else.