This small but telling British Library exhibition was one of the many events planned for the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s death which fell victim to the pandemic. It should have taken place last March and had to be postponed twice.
But Beethoven really doesn’t need anniversaries, and this exhibition is hardly less welcome for being late.

It’s drawn almost entirely from the Library’s own holdings of Beethoveniana, which are the largest outside Germany and Austria thanks to a number of ardent 19th-century collectors who bought various manuscripts, letters, and other memorabilia which eventually passed into the hands of the British Library. The holdings are especially rich in sketchbooks, some of which have hundreds of pages.

Only a few of these have made their way into this exhibition, which is housed in a modest single room. It’s arranged chronologically, beginning with Beethoven’s early teens when he was living in the cultivated city of Bonn, and ending with the London premiere of his Ninth Symphony and death a few years later.

The early exhibits are among the most touching. There’s an early piano sonata published when Beethoven was 13 with annotations in the composer’s hand, and his copy of the first edition of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (his teenage ambition to set it to music didn’t bear fruit until almost 40 years later, in the Ninth Symphony). The range of Beethoven’s reading really comes across in this exhibition. There’s an extraordinary loose leaf containing Beethoven’s copied-out version of a poem by Herder about the wonders of nature, and another has a passage from Homer. Beethoven is often thought of as an uncouth genius, but he was actually widely read.

Another surprise is the range of Beethoven’s handwriting. One imagines such a hugely self-willed man would have one instantly recognisable ‘hand’ but in fact his writing style seems to vary according to the kind of sketchbook he was using, and also the kind of music. The manuscript of the cadenza he composed for his own performance of Mozart’s D minor piano concerto has a vigorous flowing quality, almost as if he wanted it to look improvised. Other pages seem a chaotic jumble of ideas, and are extraordinarily difficult to read. Sometimes he mixes ideas together for different pieces on a single page – such as the one which contains a scrap of the 3rd Piano Concerto, “God Save the King” and fragments of an unfinished symphony.