Frau Court Councillor von Belzer “plays the clavier and sings. She has a strong, masculine contralto of wide range, particularly downwards.”
Johann Gottfried von Mastiaux, of the Finance Department and incumbent of divers high offices, is a self-taught musician. He plays several instruments himself and has given his four sons and a daughter the best musical instruction possible in Bonn. All are pianists and so many of them performers on other instruments that the production of quintets is a common family enjoyment. He is a devoted admirer of Haydn, with whom he corresponds, and in his large collection of music there are already 80 symphonies, 30 quartets and 40 trios by that master. His rare and valuable instruments are so numerous “that he could almost equip a complete orchestra. Every musician is his friend and welcome to him.”
Count Altstädter: “in his house one may at times hear a very good quartet.”
Captain Dantoine, “a passionate admirer and knower of music; plays the violin and the clavier a little. He learned composition from the books of Marpurg, Kirnberger and Riepel. Formed his taste in Italy. In both respects the reading of scores by classical masters has been of great service to him.” Among his compositions are several operettas, symphonies and quartets “in Haydn’s style.”
The three Messrs. Facius, “sons of the Russian agent here, are soundly musical; the two elder play the flute and the youngest plays the violoncello.” (According to Fischer the members of this family were visitors at the house of the Beethovens.)
There are many more music-lovers here, but the majority of them are too much given to privacy, so far as their musical practice goes, to be mentioned here. Enough has been said to show that a stranger fond of music need never leave Bonn without nourishment. Nevertheless, a large public concert institution under the patronage of His Electoral Grace is still desirable. It would be one more ornament of the capital and a promoter of the good cause of music.
What with the theatre, the court music, the musical productions in the church and such opportunities in private it is plain that young talent in those days in Bonn was in no danger of starvation for want of what Neefe calls “musikalische Nahrung.”
So much upon the dramatis personæ, other than the principal figure and his family. Let an attempt follow to describe the little city as it appeared in 1770—in other words, to picture the scene. By an enumeration made in 1789, the population of Bonn was 9,560 souls, a number which probably for a long series of years had rarely varied beyond a few score, more or less—one, therefore, that must very nearly represent the aggregate in 1770. For the town had neither manufactures nor commerce beyond what its own wants supported; it was simply the residence of the Elector—the seat of the court, and the people depended more or less directly upon that court for subsistence—as a wag expressed it, “all Bonn was fed from the Elector’s kitchen.” The old city walls—(the “gar gute Fortification, dass der Churfürst sicher genug darinnen Hof halten kann” of Johann Hübner’s description)—were already partially destroyed. Within them the whole population seems to have lived. Outside the city gates it does not appear that, save by a chapel or two, the eye was impeded in its sweep across gardens and open fields to the surrounding villages which, then as now hidden in clusters of walnut and fruit trees, appeared, when looked upon from the neighboring hills, like islands rising upon the level surface of the plain. The great increase of wealth and population during the last 150 years in all this part of the Rhine valley under the influence of the wise national economy of the Prussian government, has produced corresponding changes in and about the towns and villages; but the grand features of the landscape are unchanged; the ruins upon the Drachenfels and Godesberg looked down, as now, upon the distant roofs and spires of Bonn; the castle of Siegburg rose above the plains away to the East; the chapel crowned the Petersberg, the church with the marble stairs the nearer Kreuzberg.
A Prospect of Bonn in Beethoven’s Day
The fine landing place with its growing trees and seats for idlers, the villas, hotels, coffee-houses and dwellings outside the old walls, are all recent; but the huge ferryboat, the “flying bridge,” even then was ever swinging like a pendulum from shore to shore. Steam as a locomotive power was unknown, and the commerce of the Rhine floated by the town, gliding down with the current on rafts or in clumsy but rather picturesque boats, or impelled against the stream by the winds, by horses and even by men and women. The amount of traffic was not, however, too great to be amply provided for in this manner; for population was kept down by war, by the hard and rude life of the peasant class, and by the influences of all the false national-economic principles of that age, which restrained commerce by every device that could be made to yield present profit to the rulers of the Rhine lands. Passengers had, for generations, no longer been plundered by mail-clad robbers dwelling upon a hundred picturesque heights; but each petty state had gained from the Emperor’s weakness “vested rights” in all sorts of custom-levies and taxes. Risbeck (1780) found nine toll-stations between Mayence and Coblenz; and thence to the boundary of Holland, he declares there were at least sixteen, and that in the average each must have collected 30,000 Rhenish florins per annum.