‘For anyone engaged or interested in current research into Beethoven's creative world, the appearance of a new sketchbook in transcription is an important event’.Footnote ¹ Thus did William Drabkin, writing in 1980, hail the appearance of Sieghard Brandenburg's edition in facsimile and transcription of Beethoven's ‘Kessler’ Sketchbook of 1801–02.Footnote ² Drabkin was writing during the second great heyday of Beethoven sketch research: the pioneering efforts of Gustav Nottebohm in the period c1860–1880 found their true and surpassing continuation a century later, largely in an Anglo–American scholarly alliance spearheaded by the brilliant work on paper types and sketchbook reconstruction of Alan Tyson, Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter,Footnote ³ from which flowed the critical and interpretative examination of the relationship between sketches and completed works of Joseph Kerman, Lewis Lockwood and so many others.Footnote ⁴ Drabkin's own scholarly career was forged in this environment, and sealed with a 1976 dissertation on the sketches for the C minor Piano Sonata, op. 111.Footnote ⁵ It is in fact in this work of over three decades ago that the origins of the present sketchbook edition are to be found; and while musicological fashions have inevitably moved on, the availability of Artaria 197 in facsimile and a transcription in Drabkin's utterly authoritative hand remains ‘an important event’.

There have been precious few such ‘events’ in the interim between ‘Kessler’ and Artaria 197. Clemens Brenneis's edition of Landsberg 5, a sketchbook dating from 1809, appeared in 1992; four years later, Richard Kramer's reconstruction and transcription of Autograph 19e – itself promised since the early 1980s – finally appeared in print.Footnote ⁶ It is to be hoped that the leadership at the Beethovenhaus since 2007 of Bernhard Appel, formerly of the Düsseldorf Schumann Forschungsstelle and founding editor of the Neue Schumann Ausgabe, will succeed where his predecessors Brandenburg and Joseph Schmidt-Görg so signally failed in accelerating the pace at which sketchbook editions appear, even if the earlier vision of a Gesamtausgabe of the sketchbooks long ago gave way to a plan for more selective publication. It was at least partly frustration with the snail's pace at which things were proceeding in Bonn that led William Kinderman to inaugurate in 2003 a parallel ‘Beethoven Sketchbook Series’ with his own three-volume edition of Artaria 195, the desk sketchbook which precedes Artaria 197 in the chronological sequence.Footnote ⁷ This adjacency makes the appearance of Drabkin's work all the more valuable, since Beethoven's sketchbooks are rarely entirely self-contained and discrete in terms of their content; all the more is this true of the early 1820s, when work on the Missa solemnis in particular spilled not only across four desk sketchbooks but also into the several pocket books which Beethoven used alongside the larger desk sources. Drabkin's Table 3 (II, 18–19) usefully summarizes the desk and pocket sources for the Missa spanning the years 1819–1822.

Artaria 197, housed in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz (formerly the Königliche Bibliothek) since 1901, is an example of a homemade sketchbook rather than one professionally prepared. Its 88 pages are assembled into 19 gatherings of between two and six leaves of no fewer than five differing paper types. Drabkin speculates (II, 10) that Beethoven may have been driven to assemble such a disparate volume as ‘the consequence of a shortage of paper in Vienna’. The fact that two leaves – pp. 13/14 and 65/66 – bear sketches for, respectively, Wellingtons Sieg, op. 91 (1813), and An die ferne Geliebte, op. 98 (1816) speaks eloquently to the crowded contents and state of Beethoven's workshop in 1821. But these are merely the most glaring examples of sketches that were obviously made prior to the main contents of the book. After outlining the history, early descriptions, and present structure of Artaria 197 in his Introduction (II, 9–24), Drabkin patiently examines (II, 12–14) the contents of two portions of the book that give cause for concern. The presence of sketches for the Credo of the Missa solemnis on pages 60–63 might seem suspicious, since the main work on that movement, documented in Artaria 195 and the preceding ‘Wittgenstein’ sketchbook, had taken place in 1820; Artaria 197 is principally concerned with the Agnus Dei of the Missa. Even though Drabkin admits that ‘Beethoven was sketching the Agnus Dei before he had finished composing the earlier movements of the Missa’ (II, 12), he argues convincingly – not least thanks to evidence drawn from a pocket sketchbook of late 1821 – that there is good reason to assume that these Credo sketches do not date from before September 1821 and reflect a late stage of revision of that movement. Likewise, writing of the sketches for the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A flat, op. 110, on pages 63–8, he patiently offers plausible counterarguments to Kinderman's suggestion that these too may have predated the assembly into a single unit of the various leaves and bifolia which make up Artaria 197.

Although the sketchbook that Drabkin transcribes here is essentially the same object that Domenico Artaria acquired, with so many others, at the auction of Beethoven's Nachlaß on 5 November 1827, and that Thayer, Nottebohm and others perused later in the nineteenth century, and Johnson, Tyson and Winter catalogued in the late twentieth, his non-pareil examination of its contents and structure give us more information than has ever previously been available. Aside from his close interrogation of matters of dating (not all of which, by his own admission, can be incontrovertibly established), Drabkin is, for example, apparently the first to notice the sketch for An die ferne Geliebte (II, 31, n15), as also to observe that the pocket sketchbook of 1821 contains material for all three movements of op. 110 (II, 14 and 32, n23); and while his structural chart (Table 1, I, 11–12) is fundamentally that of Johnson, Tyson and Winter,Footnote ⁸ it supersedes this in certain ‘minor details’ (II, 10), including the location and measurement of stitch-holes and the refinement of the details of one paper type.

While concern for such physical minutiae has long been a standard part of the business of Beethoven sketch studies, we continue to care about these documents above all because of their musical contents. The lengthy subtitle of this volume – ‘sketches for the Agnus Dei and other movements of the Missa solemnis, the Piano Sonatas op. 110 and op. 111, and the Canon WoO 182’ – leaves the reader in no doubt as to the high stakes involved here. As has been common with the Beethoven-Haus sketchbook editions since Brandenburg's ‘Kessler’, Drabkin's ‘Commentary’ (II, 25–30) is not a painstaking account of disparities between transcription and facsimile or possible alternative readings (although a curious throwback to this tradition appears in the ‘Note on the Transcription’, II, 34–5) but rather a masterly overview of the sketches for each of the three major works represented, as well as notes on the many unrelated jottings which are always a tantalising feature – the trace of roads not taken – of any Beethoven sketchbook. Thus Drabkin notes ‘the definitive start of work on a sonata in C minor’ (II, 28) in a series of sketches on pages 75–81. Although not all these ideas can be related to the final version of op. 111, the possibility that what is outlined here is a potential five-movement work consisting of an opening movement in $$)(-->$<>\raster=&#x0022;fx2&#x0022;<$> <!--$$ followed by an ‘Adagio’ in A flat, a ‘presto’ fugal third movement in C minor employing the eventual principal theme of op. 111/i, a C-minor ‘Episode’ and ‘a [C-major] rondo-like “All[egr]o con Brio’’ on pp. 80–81’ is fascinating, not merely in itself but as a harbinger of the multi-movement designs of the late quartets which were to follow after 1824.

The sketches for op. 110 also provide glimpses of unpursued designs, such as (p. 65, st. 10; p. 68, st. 4) a scheme for a middle-movement andante in A-flat minor, the key in which the eventual third-movement ‘Klagender Gesang’ will commence, and a finale (‘le[t]ztes Stück’: p. 65, st. 11 and 3) in ♯8 time in which the rising fourths of the first movement's opening theme (already present on p. 65, st. 9/10ff.) are presented in a dance-like idiom. Even when those fourths have been refashioned as the fugue subject of the eventual finale (p. 69, st. 1/2ff.) it is clear that Beethoven's conception of the movement was at this stage much simpler than its final version: as Drabkin rightly notes, what is projected here is ‘a fugue in A flat, interrupted by an arioso in the same key (but probably minor), and resumed with the subject inverted’ (II, 28).

That Beethoven's sketches show us that many of his most sublime ideas have their origins in much simpler, not to say banal, ones is one of our cherished notions about them (which is not to say that other trajectories, including the opposite one from complex to simple, cannot also be traced). The Agnus Dei of the Missa solemnis is in its own way at least as complex, both structurally and programmatically, as is the finale of op. 110; but as Drabkin shows in a highly succinct yet hugely informative summary (II, 25–7) taking in detailed reference to the plethora of other sketch sources for the Missa,Footnote ⁹ sketches made prior to Artaria 197 project an initial ‘relatively simple, monotonal ternary form following a brief introduction’. The starting-point in Artaria 197 included ‘two features that were to remain a fixed part of Beethoven's scheme: the setting of the opening line of text as a section in its own right, .. and the use of a march for the sounds of war’. What remained in flux were metre and rhythm, as well as the exact role and placement of the evocation of the sounds of war, in order to underline ‘the attainment of peace’: Drabkin notes that ‘pacem’ was ‘the key word in the text’ as Beethoven read it (II, 25). A watershed moment seems to have been the idea to have the warlike march not merely precede the statement of the ‘Dona nobis’ in the major mode, as in a sketch on page 2, staves 5/6ff, but rather, as in the final version, to interrupt it, as first appears in sketches on page 22; though it seems to me debatable whether the appearance of ‘a formally designed sixteen-bar march [‘Marcia vivace’] in D major’ on p. 23, st. 13/14 really constitutes ‘evidence of Beethoven's uncertainty over an interrupted “Dona” ‘ (II, 25).

As Drabkin observed in 1980, ‘it is for musical resourcefulness and editorial imagination that [Brandenburg's] “Kessler” will, I believe, become the principal model for the future transcription of Beethoven's sketches’.Footnote ¹⁰ Drabkin is nothing if not Brandenburg's heir; anyone who has ever worked with Beethoven's sketches, especially those from the late period, knows the subtle blend of insight into the composer's writing mannerisms, familiarity with his musical style and sheer imaginative reach that goes into deciphering these recalcitrant notations, so often shorn of the conventional niceties of initial clefs, key and time signatures and accurate pitch notation which we take for granted in reading a musical score. Drabkin has full mastery of these skills, and it is merely for the sake of doing reviewerly duty that I point out a number of errors (which may be typographical) in the opening of that projected ‘le[t]ztes Stück’ on page 65, stave 11: Beethoven writes semiquavers, not demisemiquavers, in bar 1, and a [dotted] crotchet crossed with a quaver beam rather than three separately notated quavers in bar 2; meanwhile the final bar is missing a slur, and should be closed by a final (that is, thin-thick) double barline, rather than Drabkin's single (thin) one. Turning to the very first entry in the book (p. 1, st. 1/2), I would have been inclined, given the presence of sketches for the third movement of op. 109 further down the page, to assume a key signature of one sharp rather than two flats here: the second movement of op. 109 is in E minor and shares its 6/8 metre with this sketch.Footnote ¹¹

Drabkin went even further in 1980, suggesting that the time might come when our faith in the correspondence between a transcription and Beethoven's intentions would be so complete that we might ‘think about dispensing with the luxury of a facsimile volume’.Footnote ¹² Certainly there would be economic reasons for doing so, and Drabkin's suggestion may have been partly motivated also by the hope that the need to publish only transcriptions might aid in speeding up the publication of sketchbook editions. But as he now admits, while the interpretative rather than diplomatic style of his transcription gives him, ‘as editor, more authority to interpret Beethoven's intentions than would always seem warranted, the facsimile volume acts as the user's “insurance policy,” and it is always available for cross-checking of readings’ (II, 34). The Verlag Beethoven-Haus and Carus-Verlag have produced an excellent colour facsimile, at 97% of original size: luxurious, indeed, but more than a mere luxury. Take, for example, the fascinating appearance of the name ‘Klärchen’ across staves 10–11 on p. 61. Drabkin's transcription gives the impression that this is closely connected with a draft of the ‘Dona’ which begins at the top of the page and continues through staves 8/9. I am not especially convinced by his attempt (I, 27 and Example 4) to connect ‘a tune that appears first as the subject of a keyboard fugue on p. 39’ and ‘resurfaces’ elsewhere, including in the page 61 draft, with Beethoven's Egmont music; and in any case, the physical connection between ‘Klärchen’ and the ‘dona’ draft is considerably less close in Beethoven's manuscript than Drabkin's transcription suggests. In the absence of the original, only the facsimile can show us this. If one wants to connect the name and the sketch, however, the facsimile might encourage a connection precisely to the celebrated ‘dona’ theme, beginning g2–b1–d2–e2–f♯2 …, rather than with anything else, since the name is vertically aligned with the initial note of that theme, some way in from the beginning of stave 9. What, if anything, Beethoven intended here must, like so much else in the pages of his sketchbooks, await further Erklärung. Meanwhile, we and Drabkin have waited far too long for his Artaria 197; may his edition of Artaria 201, the next desk sketchbook in the sequence, be not far off.