[176] The principal contributions to Beethoven’s biography from Czerny’s pen are in Schmidt’s “Wiener Allg. Mus. Zeitung,” 1845, No. 113; Cock’s “Musical Miscellany,” London, 1852; and manuscript notes in Jahn’s papers.
[177] It is Thayer who is speaking here.
[178] “Mödling,” said Potter in narrating the incidents of his association with Beethoven to Mr. Thayer in 1861; but Potter was nearly 69 years old at the time and his memory of the suburbs of Vienna may have been a trifle faulty. Beethoven was in Mödling in 1818, but it has not been learned that he went thither after his sojourn in Heiligenstadt and Nussdorf in 1817. At any rate, he was in Nussdorf till late September, perhaps early October, and was then on the eve of a new experiment in housekeeping so that he might have his nephew with him, concerning which he wrote to Giannatasio in Vienna on November 12. There is nothing in his letters to Frau Streicher and others at this time to indicate a change to Mödling, whither he went in May of the next year after he had reported Potter’s visits to Ries in March.
[179] This agrees with the theory that the first meetings took place at some other place. To Ries, Beethoven wrote on March 5, 1818: “Botter [sic] visited me a few times; he appears to be a good man and has talent for composition.”
[180] Other instances of this nature have been recorded in this biography. In December, 1811, a visitor, Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee, reported to Nägeli in Zürich that Beethoven had said to him: “All Viennese, from the Emperor to the bootblack, are good for nothing.” “I asked him,” von Wartensee continues, “if he took no pupils?” “No,” he replied, “teaching is a disagreeable task; he had only one pupil who gave him a great deal of trouble and whom he would like to get rid of if he could.” “And who is he?” “Archduke Rudolph.”
[181] Treitschke had provided the libretto of “Romulus”; it does not appear that Beethoven ever began its composition.
[182] The letter, which is reproduced in facsimile in Schindler’s biography, is a more or less fantastic scrawl or flourish which may be read as an “R” as well as an “M.”
[183] The letter to Thayer is dated May 21, 1873. Mälzel, it will be remembered, lived in Philadelphia for some time before his death at sea on July 21, 1838.
[184] Thus copied by Fischoff.
[185] Beethoven does not seem always to have maintained so reverential a feeling for the instrument as is indicated by the above statement. In Thayer’s note-book the American editor of this biography found this anecdote: “Once Beethoven told Stein that some strings in his Broadwood Pf. were wanting, and caught up the bootjack and struck the keys with it to show.”