It seems as if the last year of Beethoven’s sojourn in Bonn was especially influential in the development of his artistic character and ability. Of the works of 1792, besides trifles, there were two of larger dimensions which, if we were not better advised, would unhesitatingly be placed in the riper Vienna period. The autograph of the Octet for wind-instruments, published after the composer’s death and designated at a later date as Op. 103, bears the inscription “Parthia in Es” (above this, “dans un Concert”), “Due Oboe, Due Clarinetti, Due Corni, Due Fagotti di L. v. Beethoven.” From a sketch which precedes suggestions for the song “Feuerfarbe,” Nottebohm concludes that the Octet was composed in 1792, or, at the latest in 1793. In the latter case it would be a Viennese product. It is improbable, however, that Beethoven found either incentive or occasion soon after reaching Vienna to write a piece of this character, and it is significant that in his later years he never returned to a combination of eight instruments. But there was an incentive in Bonn in the form of the excellent dinner-music of the Elector described by Chaplain Junker, which was performed by two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons. It may be set down as a fruit of 1792, his last year in Bonn. For the same combination of instruments, Beethoven also composed a Rondino in E-flat, published in 1829 by Diabelli, probably from the posthumous manuscript. From the autograph Nottebohm argued that it was written in Bonn, and what has been said of the origin of the Octet applies also to the Rondino. The autograph of a little duet in G for two flutes bears the inscription: “For Friend Degenharth by L. v. Beethoven. August 23rd, 1792, midnight.”
We are lifted to a higher plane again by a work which in invention and construction surpasses the compositions already mentioned and still to be mentioned in the present category, and discloses the fully developed Beethoven as we know him—the Trio in E-flat, for violin, viola and violoncello, Op. 3. Its publication was announced by Artaria in February, 1797. According to Wegeler, Beethoven was commissioned by Count Appony in 1795 to write a quartet. He made two efforts, but produced first a Trio (Op. 3), and then a Quintet (Op. 4). We know better the origin of the latter work now; but Wegeler is also mistaken about the origin of the Trio; it was a Bonn product. Here the proof:
At the general flight from Bonn, whether the one at the end of October or that of December 15, 1793, the Elector ordered his chaplain, Abbé Clemens Dobbeler, to accompany an English lady, the Honourable Mrs. Bowater, to Hamburg. “While there,” says William Gardiner in his “Music and Friends,” III, 142, “he was declared an emigrant and his property was seized. Luckily he placed some money in our (English) government funds, and his only alternative was to proceed to England.” Dobbeler accompanied Mrs. Bowater to Leicester. She,
having lived much in Germany, had acquired a fine taste in music; and as the Abbé was a very fine performer on the violin, music was essential to fill up this irksome period (while Mrs. Bowater lived in lodgings before moving into old Dolby Hall). My company was sought with that of two of my friends to make up occasionally an instrumental quartett.... Our music consisted of the Quartetts of Haydn, Boccherini, and Wranizky. The Abbé, who never travelled without his violin, had luckily put into his fiddle-case a Trio composed by Beethoven, just before he set off, which thus, in the year 1793, found its way to Leicester. This composition, so different from anything I had ever heard, awakened in me a new sense, a new delight in the science of sounds.... When I went to town (London) I enquired for the works of this author, but could learn nothing more than that he was considered a madman and that his music was like himself. However, I had a friend in Hamburg through whom, although the war was raging at the time, I occasionally obtained some of these inestimable treasures.
The Trio for Strings, Op. 3
What trio was this so praised by the enthusiastic Englishman? On the last page but one of Gardiner’s “Italy, her Music, Arts and People” he writes, speaking of his return down the Rhine:
Recently we arrived at Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven. About the year 1786, my friend the Abbé Dobler, chaplain to the Elector of Cologne, first noticed this curly, blackheaded boy, the son of a tenor singer in the cathedral. Through the Abbé I became acquainted with the first production of this wonderful composer. How great was my surprise in playing the viola part to his Trio in E-flat, so unlike anything I had ever heard. It was a new sense to me, an intellectual pleasure which I had never received from sounds.
Again, in a letter to Beethoven, Gardiner says, “Your Trio in E-flat (for violin, viola and bass).” To all but the blind this narrative pours a flood of light upon the whole question.[53]
There come up now for consideration the compositions in which Beethoven’s principal instrument, the pianoforte, is employed. They carry us back a space, and to the earliest examples we add a related composition for violin.
It was a part of Beethoven’s official duty to play pianoforte before the Elector, and it may therefore easily be imagined that after his first boyish attempt in 1784, he would continue to compose concertos and parts of concertos for the pianoforte and orchestra, and not wait until 1795, when he publicly performed the “entirely new” concerto in B-flat. Quite recently the world has learned of a first movement for a pianoforte concerto in D, concerning which the first report was made by Guido Adler in 1888, and which was performed in Vienna on April 7, 1889, and then incorporated, as edited by Adler, in the supplement to the Complete Works. It was discovered in copy, solo and orchestra parts, in the possession of Joseph Bezeczny, the head of an educational institution for the blind in Prague, and the handwriting is his. Immediately after its first performance its authenticity was questioned by Dr. Paumgartner, who called attention to its Mozartian characteristics, but failed to advance any reason for doubting the testimony of so thorough a musical scholar as Adler. The latter had emphasized the resemblances to Mozart’s works, which, indeed, are too obvious to escape attention; but for a long time after 1785, especially after Beethoven met Mozart personally in Vienna, the former was completely in the latter’s thrall, and that his music should occasionally be reminiscent of his model is not at all singular. Such reminiscences are to be found in the quartets of 1785 and the trio for pianoforte and wind-instruments. It is safe to assume that the movement was written, as Adler suggests, in the period 1788-1793, perhaps before rather than after 1790, and that Beethoven attached little value to it and laid it permanently aside.