I

In 1856 an anecdote was published about the gestation of the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1, in 1799. It was a story about Karl Amenda, who had been present at the time. Amenda reported that while composing the movement Beethoven had drawn inspiration from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

This was a delicate topic in 1856. Only two years earlier, Eduard Hanslick had launched an assault on romantic viewpoints, attacking music's capacity to express ‘feelings’ or ‘meaning’. With his manifesto Vom Musikalisch-Schönen he aimed to dismiss all extramusical sources, and he embraced the motto ‘since we don't know them, they don't exist for the work’ (‘wir kennen sie nicht, sie sind daher für das Werk nicht existirend’).Footnote ¹ This elicited hot debate between opposing camps. Some Beethoven commentators denounced Hanslick's views as a ‘grandiose mistake’ (‘kolossaler Irrthum’).Footnote ² Amenda's story thus appeared at a time when discussions were in full swing. It could be harnessed by the romantics as a powerful weapon, for what it suggested was an unequivocal ‘We know it, so it exists for the work’.

The anecdote was contained in the brochure Musikalische Effectmittel und Tonmalerei by the musical aficionado Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann, who had squeezed it into a footnote:

Wiedemann was wedded to the idea that sensations (Empfindungen) evoked by high-quality music could activate in the listener a strain of thinking (Gedankenreihe) by which it was possible, through a process of deduction, to establish concepts (Vorstellungen) that had once been envisaged by the composer. Immanuel Kant had been wrong, he argued, in denying music the capacity to denote intelligible aesthetic ideas, concepts or narratives (as he had done in his Kritik der Urteilskraft).Footnote ⁴ Music was more than mere aesthetic structure or mood-painting: it was possible for the listener to find in it allusions and hidden texts, and it was duly possible, through experience, to translate musical features into expressive equivalents, and these into concrete concepts. To make his case Wiedemann resorted to the anecdote, for Amenda had given perfect voice to his theory: he had identified ‘content’ in music, which could therefore be regarded as ‘tone-painting’ (Tonmalerei – the term used in the title of his booklet). By correlating sentiments correctly, Amenda had demonstrated that it was possible to deduce the ‘images’ that had inspired Beethoven.

Wiedemann's story made its way into the Beethoven literature in 1860, through Wilhelm von Lenz.Footnote ⁵ It was absent from the biographies of Marx (1858) and Nohl (1867),Footnote ⁶ but Thayer disseminated it through the second volume of his biography (1872), although he himself diplomatically abstained from commenting on it.Footnote ⁷ Soon after, Gustav Nottebohm discovered in the sketchbook now called Grasnick 2 important evidence in support of the anecdote, acknowledging the credibility of Amenda in his Zweite Beethoveniana (published posthumously in 1887).Footnote ⁸ Owing to Nottebohm's support, the anecdote became common knowledge. No commentator called it into question, although some bypassed or marginalized it, on account of either carelessness, ignorance or unease. In his study of the string quartets, Theodor Helm (1885) did not mention it. Nor did Hugo Riemann (1910).Footnote ⁹ Paul Bekker (1922) refrained from using it in his chapter on the ‘poetic idea’, where it would have suited him well; where he did mention it, he added a wavering ‘true or not’, reluctant to draw conclusions.Footnote ¹⁰ Paul Mies (1925) did not feel very comfortable with it and could hardly hide his embarrassment.Footnote ¹¹ The general feeling, though, was that the facts could not be glossed over or disregarded, and Beethoven reception conceded that at least one movement of the composer's most autonomous of genres, the string quartet, had been informed by a literary source, a Shakespeare play.

Today, this feeling still holds. The Amenda anecdote is acknowledged as being of a fundamentally different nature from other recollections about extramusical associations in Beethoven's music. Anton Schindler's remarks about ‘poetic ideas’ have been exposed as largely ficticious.Footnote ¹² Carl Czerny's claim that Beethoven was inspired to his most beautiful works ‘by visions and pictures drawn from literature or from his own active imagination’ (‘durch . . . aus der Lektüre oder aus der eignen regen Fantasie geschöpfte Visionen und Bilder’) was rendered unconvincing by implausible allusions to galloping horses, birdsong and ghosts from the underworld.Footnote ¹³ Ferdinand Ries's statement that Beethoven often had a ‘particular subject’ (‘bestimmten Gegenstand’) in mind when composing was immediately followed by the relativistic parenthetical remark that he also ‘ridiculed and scorned pictorial music’.Footnote ¹⁴ Charles Neate's recollection of Beethoven enunciating ‘I have always a picture in my mind when I am composing, and work up to it’ involved a conversation about the Pastoral Symphony, which gives a context to the quotation.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, Johann Sporschil's account that Beethoven was often excited by ‘a glorious deed, a poem, a recently read tragedy, or in other cases by a major historical event like the heroic death of Nelson or the fall of Napoleon, or an agreeable or sublime nature scene’ (‘eine glänzende That, ein Gedicht, eine Tragödie, die er eben las, bald ein grosses heroisches Ereigniss, wie der Heldentod Nelson's, der Sturz Napoleon's, bald eine freundliche oder erhabene Naturscene’) may have been prompted by programmatic works (the ‘Eroica’, the Pastoral, Egmont, Der glorreiche Augenblick, Wellington's Sieg and songs).Footnote ¹⁶ When Karl Holz commented in a conversation book, ‘I always ask myself when listening to this [instrumental music by Mozart]: what is it supposed to portray?’ (‘Ich frage mich immer selber, wenn ich so etwas höre, was soll das vorstellen?’), he probably had in mind the moods depicted in Beethoven's passionate late string quartets, not something mimetic or narrative.Footnote ¹⁷

None of these contemporary sources, it seems, has enough potential fundamentally to challenge the (Hanslickian) position that Beethoven's sonata-form-governed instrumental compositions are in principle autonomous aesthetic structures – interactions of melody, harmony, rhythm and sonority.Footnote ¹⁸ The Amenda anecdote, however, is a different case: not only does it explicitly reveal what had inspired Beethoven, it also passes the test of external verification, on account of the sketchbook jottings. Consequently, it opens a hermeneutic window and affords glimpses into Beethoven's musical imagination, which was plainly sparked by elements of Romeo and Juliet. At the same time, this raises several issues. An intriguing question is whether this was an isolated case, a one-time flirtation with the extramusical in a genre standing so high in the aesthetic hierarchy, or whether there were perhaps other forays into this terrain that are now resistant to verification. It would also be interesting to know whether this extramusical aspect related to discussions in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung about ‘content’ and ‘meaning’ in learned genres: the desperate cry ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’ by those who felt alienated by abstract substance was much in the air.Footnote ¹⁹ But above all there is the conundrum of Beethoven's choice of Shakespeare. What, or who, may have prompted or triggered him to relate a sequence of sonic events in a string quartet to dramatic episodes from Romeo and Juliet? This article will primarily address the latter issue.Footnote ²⁰ It aims to examine Amenda's anecdote in an effort to adduce and appraise a common-sense explanation for Beethoven's artistic choices.

II

During much of 1798–1799 Beethoven was on friendly terms with Karl Amenda, who had studied theology and music in Courland. Arriving from Lausanne, he spent one and a half years in Vienna, where he was engaged by Prince Lobkowitz, and by Mozart's widow Constanze as a tutor for her two sons. According to oral family tradition, contact with Beethoven was made at an evening session for string quartets where Amenda played the violin, probably at Lobkowitz's.Footnote ²¹ This led to mutual visits of the two friends, who developed a sincere affection for each other. Contact was on a daily basis. They even made plans for a concert tour to Italy, but this was cancelled because Amenda had to return home unexpectedly, owing to family matters.Footnote ²² He left Vienna for good shortly after 25 June 1799, on which day he received from Beethoven a dedication copy (instrumental parts written by three copyists) of the String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1, as a farewell present.Footnote ²³

It must have been shortly before that date that Beethoven sat down at the piano to play for Amenda the second movement (Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato) of his quartet. This was the occasion of the anecdote: Beethoven's intimation, after having finished playing, that Romeo and Juliet had inspired him. Back in Courland, Amenda (who died in 1836) passed on his recollection to Wiedemann, who documented it in his 1856 footnote. Given the double transmission, and the extended time frame between actual event and ultimate documentation, it stands to reason that a margin of error should be allowed for with regard to Beethoven's exact formulation. Even so, it is remarkable that he asked Amenda ‘what thoughts had come to his mind’ (‘was er sich dabei gedacht habe’), implying that he expected the music to have conjured up ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’, thus provoking in the listener an act of interpretation. To be sure, the riveting climaxes in the movement's closing section gave ample reason for that, with ruminating phrases verging on narrative explicitness, suggestions of direct communication through operatic tremolandos, shocked and pensive silences, heartfelt cries and a two-and-a-half-octave vertiginous drop (as in the Marcia funèbre of the ‘Eroica’) described by Joseph Kerman as ‘almost hysterical’.Footnote ²⁴ Such expressiveness invited comment, and for Amenda it portrayed ‘the parting of two lovers’ (‘den Abschied zweier Liebenden’). He perceived a loving couple saying goodbye, with attendant sentiments – sadness, pain, despair, melancholy. (Wiedemann will have perceived down-to-earth ‘content’ as well, perhaps a goodbye kiss, a valedictory embrace or the act of taking leave.)

It is not difficult to imagine what led Amenda to this response. On 25 June he would receive from Beethoven his copy of Op. 18 No. 1. He left the city probably the day after, knowing that he would never return to Vienna and would never see his friend again.Footnote ²⁵ It was thus a goodbye for ever. If Beethoven performed the Adagio shortly before 25 June, which seems plausible, the parting was imminent at that time, which would mean that both friends would have been in a melancholy mood. Beethoven was to lose a comrade to whom he had entrusted his deepest thoughts and feelings, and who had been, by his own admission, one of only two people in the world in whom he had fully confided.Footnote ²⁶ Amenda, on his part, was obliged to take leave from someone whom ‘I would have liked to devote my entire life to’ (‘hätte ich mein ganzes Leben widmen mögen’), as he wrote to Andreas Streicher.Footnote ²⁷ He frequently alluded to his ‘love’ (‘Liebe’) for Beethoven and he had no compunction about addressing his friend with ‘beloved one’ (‘Geliebter’).Footnote ²⁸ The German ‘Liebenden’ was not limited to standard love affairs, but involved various kinds of intimate friendship. Amenda, then, may have experienced in the sorrowful Adagio of Op. 18 No. 1 the atmosphere of apprehension and grief that he associated with his forthcoming farewell, the ‘parting of two lovers’. This was esoteric: the music resonated with his personal feelings, and only he (and Beethoven) could understand the actual association. The circumstances of the moment provided ‘the affective backdrop against which any emotions aroused by the music will be superimposed as phasic perturbations’.Footnote ²⁹ There was thus a plausible cognitive-psychological explanation for Amenda's answer.Footnote ³⁰

Whereas this verbal commentary was determined by thoughts and feelings conditioned by expectations, Beethoven's perspective was of quite another nature, as may be inferred from his astonishing reply about extrinsic motivation: ‘Well, I thought of the vault scene in Romeo and Juliet’ (‘Wohl, ich habe mir dabei die Szene im Grabgewölbe aus Romeo und Julia gedacht’).Footnote ³¹ He intimated that his thoughts had been with the concluding scene from Shakespeare's play. Was it Beethoven's intention here to point out that with ‘parting of two lovers’ Amenda was close to the mark? Or did he mean to correct him? The sticking-point here, it seems, is the linguistic context of the word ‘wohl’, which is difficult to translate because it sounds like archaic German (in the sense of ‘wohlan’). Of course, given the insecure transmission one should not be over-scrupulous about the word, but that does not alter the fact that ‘good!’ or ‘right’ are tendentious misrenderings.Footnote ³² Nor can the suggestion be accepted that Amenda's answer ‘delighted Beethoven’.Footnote ³³ A dictionary is of no help here, and it seems best to ignore the word altogether in translations, or to employ a neutral term.Footnote ³⁴ While it is true that Amenda will have related his story to Wiedemann because his assessment was comparable to that of Beethoven (why otherwise invoke it at all?), the inference that there existed a correlation between the ‘parting of two lovers’ and Romeo and Juliet seems tenuous at best.Footnote ³⁵

As already noted, jottings in the sketchbook Grasnick 2 have been found that corroborate Beethoven's utterance. Following sketches for the first movement on the final pages of Grasnick 1, Beethoven continued with those for the Adagio in Grasnick 2, a movement which, according to sketch experts, was begun by February or March 1799.Footnote ³⁶ For present purposes it suffices to give the four verbal Shakespeare clues entered underneath the sketches: ‘il prend le tombeau’ (he comes to the tomb), ‘desespoir’ (despair), ‘il se tue’ (he kills himself), and ‘les derniers soupirs’ (the last sighs).Footnote ³⁷ These are unequivocally predicated on Romeo and Juliet, for all relate to the state of frenzied despair and to the sinister mood that overhangs the closing vault scene. The ‘desespoir’ tags rapidly ascending demisemiquaver motives succeeded by achingly tense rests and a cadential ending (bars 102–104, Amenda version);Footnote ³⁸ this shows at least seven reworkings in Grasnick 2. Romeo seems to kill himself at a high sforzato f³ (fortissimo in the final version), followed by a plunge onto a C♯ two and a half octaves lower – the dynamics suddenly tuned down here to piano (bar 105 in the Amenda version). The ‘derniers soupirs’ are associated with a succession of sigh motives, reworked in the sketchbook but in the end omitted.

These clear signposts of the vault scene suggest that it was in the coda of the Adagio that Beethoven chose to reflect elements from Romeo and Juliet, more or less comparable with the birdsong in the Pastoral's second movement, the anthropomorphic ‘sobbing’ in the Marcia of the ‘Eroica’ and the dying breath of Coriolanus. Nothing indicates that programmatic features determined the structure of the movement, although some commentators have claimed this on the premise that the main themes designate Romeo's mental anguish and Juliet's beauty respectively.Footnote ³⁹ References to the deep pathos of the tearjerking vault scene were restricted by Beethoven to the closing bars of the Adagio. But what may have kindled the idea to do this?

III

Shakespeare was much in vogue in Germany by the end of the eighteenth century, including within the domain of music.Footnote ⁴⁰ As has been extensively demonstrated, impulses came from translations, primarily those by Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Joachim Eschenburg. The English poet was read, staged and discussed, and theatrical performances were frequently provided with incidental music, for which the term ‘analoge Musik’ was coined.Footnote ⁴¹

Information on what Beethoven knew of Shakespeare is scarce.Footnote ⁴² Some contemporaries claimed that he was one of the composer's favourite poets (Louis de Trémont, an English visitor in 1825, and Anton Schindler, the latter no doubt exaggerating when he claimed that Beethoven knew his plays ‘as thoroughly as his own scores’).Footnote ⁴³ This notwithstanding, the engagement remains somewhat obscure. Primary sources (letters, conversation books, Tagebuch (a sort of diary)) provide only a few references, certainly compared to those concerning Schiller and Goethe, or Greco-Roman authors. Indeed, it is not easy to picture Beethoven lost in admiration for Shakespeare's characteristic inner-life mysteries, double meanings, hidden agendas, concealed purposes and psychological entanglements – although he may have liked the writer's robust humour. Up to 1800 the picture of Beethoven's interest is blurred, although the 1790s saw a respectable amount of activity in Vienna with regard to Shakespeare. Emanuel Schikaneder played a successful (although popularized) Hamlet in his Freyhaustheater, and he also organized stagings of Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, sometimes graced with music.Footnote ⁴⁴ On 5 March 1796 Macbeth proved a sensation. Schikaneder effectively brought into the limelight Shakespeare's blending of the ostensibly incommensurable, the tragic and the comic. Alternation within single scenes of the dramatic with strokes of hilarity, and, vice versa, the humorous with the moving and upsetting, was at the time compared to the style of Mozart, who in his mature works had done pretty much the same. The quick succession of whimsical contrasts was labelled ‘romantic’ in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which hailed Shakespeare and Mozart as the two great romantics who had both excelled with trend-breaking masterpieces.Footnote ⁴⁵ This might have triggered Beethoven's interest, certainly at a time when he was immersed in the string quartet.Footnote ⁴⁶

Another incentive to engage in Shakespeare was the publication of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), an educational novel widely consumed by sophisticated youngsters in the late nineties. Goethe suggested in this that Shakespeare could supply vital spiritual sustenance to artists, irrespective of the field in which they were active. The book was the talk of the town for a number of years, and it is inconceivable that Beethoven and Amenda disregarded it.Footnote ⁴⁷ About the same time (1797), August Wilhelm Schlegel published an essay on Romeo and Juliet in the much discussed periodical Die Horen, edited by Friedrich Schiller. Schlegel also translated the play, and he included it in the first volume of his Shakspeare's [sic] Dramatische Werke.Footnote ⁴⁸ Beethoven seems to have known this series; at least, he recommended it to Therese Malfatti in 1810.Footnote ⁴⁹ The edition he had in his possession, though, was not Schlegel's but Johann Joachim Eschenburg's prose translation, published as William Shakespear's Schauspiele (1775–1783, revised 1798–1805). Some of the volumes were in his estate when he died, and these included Romeo and Juliet.Footnote ⁵⁰

As regards music, Beethoven was familiar with at least three operas informed by the story. Georg Benda's Romeo und Julie (1776, in German) had been performed regularly in Bonn, with Beethoven in the orchestra.Footnote ⁵¹ Daniel Steibelt's Roméo et Juliette (in French) was premiered in 1793 in Paris. And Giulietta e Romeo by Niccolò Zingarelli (1796, in Italian) was performed in Vienna from 1797 onward.Footnote ⁵² None of these operas, though, had a bearing on the Shakespeare jottings in Grasnick 2, and Owen Jander was mistaken when he surmised that these had been taken from Steibelt's libretto.Footnote ⁵³ Benda's and Steibelt's librettos were only expurgated versions of Shakespeare's original, in the sense that the vault scene had been altered into a happy end.Footnote ⁵⁴ Censorship forbade dramatic deaths on stage, particularly if these involved suicides, and ever since 1777 the ending of Romeo and Juliet had been adjusted in such a way that, for the sake of ‘public morality’, it did not end with death.Footnote ⁵⁵ A Viennese theatrical adaptation by Franz Heufeld in 1802, for example, ended cheerfully.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1816, when the original scene was reinstated in an adaptation by Josef Schreyvogel, there were still theatre-goers ‘for whom the accumulation of tragic effects in the final act were too heavy’ (‘denen die Accumulation der tragischen Effecte im letzten Aufzuge zu heftig ward’).Footnote ⁵⁷ Since Beethoven's Grasnick 2 entries relate exclusively to Romeo's impending doom as related in the vault scene, his attendence at an operatic or theatrical performance does not account for their employment.

Nor is it a viable explanatory strategy to invoke Beethoven's reading of the play. His jottings were in French, and it is hardly conceivable that he lavished time on delving into an edition in this language. A German version would have been difficult enough for him, and, as mentioned, his personal copy was the Eschenburg edition (though theoretically he may have acquired this after 1799).Footnote ⁵⁸ It has been sufficiently demonstrated that Beethoven's proficiency in French was limited. The dictionary he possessed was Nouvelle Grammaire à l'usage des Dames et des autres personnes qui ne savent pas de Latin (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1782) – which was of a very basic level.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is not in itself strange to observe that he sometimes ruminated in French in his sketchbooks: he grew up in a frenchified region, and French words may have lodged themselves in his mind. In Grasnick 2, after a passage in the minor mode, he noted ‘et après cela le majeur’ (and following that, the major mode),Footnote ⁶⁰ and on the back page of a manuscript containing a copy of Mozart's String Quartet k387 (from c1800) he jotted, ‘Je ferais mettre en partie tous mon qu[ar]tett tri[o]s etc.’. (I want to put into full score all my quartets, trios etc.)Footnote ⁶¹ If this was a soliloquy, French must have been ingrained in his mind.

The Shakespeare entries, however, are of quite another kind. These cannot have resulted from mere ‘thinking in French’. They were not meant to be set to music, nor were they of Beethoven's invention, for they seem to describe events. What comes closest here are stage directions that derived from some third party.

IV

In Vienna, French was common in aristocratic circles and in upwardly aspiring middle-class surroundings. The language was important for upholding class distinction and status, and from about 1798 it gradually permeated the Wiener Zeitung. A person's proficiency in this field reflected his or her sophistication or Bildung.Footnote ⁶² To remain close to Beethoven, the language was, for instance, used by the Brunsvik sisters Therese and Josephine, whom Beethoven first met in May 1799. These young ladies were of German-Hungarian birth, but they corresponded in a high-society French – except when a word or an expression was not immediately within their grasp.Footnote ⁶³ Around 1800 French was often employed for dedications and titles.Footnote ⁶⁴ Beethoven contributed to the convention with his Pathétique Sonata, Op. 13 (1799). Moreover, he frenchified his name to ‘Louis’ on his visiting card.Footnote ⁶⁵

As is well known, Beethoven often frequented high-society salons. His economic situation depended largely on performing, improvising, commissions from well-to-do houses and the teaching of young aristocratic ladies. From his early Vienna years on, he was on a good footing with the households of Lichnowsky, Browne, Lobkowitz, Rasumovsky, Esterházy, Fries and Swieten. If it is assumed for a moment that the French Shakespeare entries in Grasnick 2 were in any way related to these venues or surroundings, the question arises as to what role Shakespeare played in these upper echelons of society. A possible answer brings into focus a phenomenon that has been largely disregarded at least in the Beethoven literature, but that may nevertheless have had a substantial impact biographically and musically: that of Viennese Haustheater (in the plural). These involved private or semi-public performances of scenes from classical theatre, in the form of declamations, dialogues, mime or ordinary theatrical performance, staged for a select group of invitees with relatively modest props and brightened up with ‘tableaux’ and music. A tableau could be a painting or an assembly of ‘living statues’ (‘lebendige Bilder’).Footnote ⁶⁶ Productions of this kind enjoyed a considerable vogue in Vienna, as may be inferred from a panoply of sources.

Most popular were Hauskomödien, comic plays. Organizers of these were under police surveillance, for government authorities suspected that the frivolity could undermine public morals. As early as 1793 the Minister of Police, Count Pergen, pronounced an official ban, which was renewed by Emperor Franz personally via directives dated 1 January 1798 and 19 October 1801.Footnote ⁶⁷ This had little effect, though, for Haustheater became ever more popular, so much so that they threatened to impair the revenues of official public theatres (the Theater an der Wien, Burgtheater and Kärtnertortheater, and the suburban Josephstadt and Leopoldstadt theatres).Footnote ⁶⁸ This induced the directory of the two court theatres to file a complaint with the Polizeioberdirektion, the head of police, urging the authorities to impose an outright ban on all private productions (1811). The police were reluctant to carry this out, but took action when unlawful competition threatened:

Private theatrical performances continued to flourish, so much so that a few years later, at the time of the Congress of Vienna (1814), new complaints were filed. It was now decided by the police that all locations were to be secretly (‘im stillen’) observed and participants individually screened, ‘in particular, those performing at the house of Baron Spielmann’ (‘insbesondere sei über das Haustheater des Barons Spielmann und die mitwirkenden Dilettanten stille Erhebung zu machen’).Footnote ⁷⁰

Ignaz von Spielmann's mansion in the Bäckerstrasse was thus under surveillance. But there were many more locations where private performances could be enjoyed. These were organized by such figures as the Countesses Hatzfield and Wrbna,Footnote ⁷¹ by Franz Anton Schrämbl at his house at Mariahilf, by Karl Zichy-Vásonykeö at the Auersperg Palace, by Joseph Anton Paradis at the Schottenhof and by Franz Sales von Greiner, father of the writer Caroline Pichler-von Greiner.Footnote ⁷² Staying a bit closer to Beethoven, there were productions at the dwelling of Count Joseph Deym, who married Josephine Brunsvik on 29 July 1799; Beethoven gave her piano lessons and was a ‘regular guest’ there twice a week. Josephine's sister, Therese, recalled that at Deym's residence ‘now and again tableaux were given’ (‘Man gab zuweilen Tableaux’).Footnote ⁷³ Beethoven was also a guest at the villa of the banker Moritz von Fries, to whom he dedicated several works (the violin sonatas Opp. 23 and 24 and the String Quintet Op. 29); it was at Fries's mansion on the Josephplatz that Beethoven gained his famous triumph over Daniel Steibelt during the latter's visit to Vienna in 1800. Fries had organized Haustheater over a long period of time, from 1795 at the latest, for in the Wiener Theater Almanach from that year, edited by Josef von Sonnleithner, his choice of plays was lauded. The Almanach also mentioned that at Fries's villa these stagings were in French, and that they were frequently accompanied with music: ‘One gives comical plays and little operas in French, and they are performed excellently. On the stage curtain one finds the modest motto Gayeté et Indulgence’ (‘Man giebt Französische Lustspiele und Operetten, welche vortrefflich aufgeführt werden. Auf der Courtine sieht man das bescheidene Motto: Gayeté et Indulgence’).Footnote ⁷⁴ The reputation of the Fries Haustheater spread rapidly, and culture-minded visitors to Vienna rarely missed the opportunity to attend them. On 17 March 1809 Johann Friedrich Reichardt recorded:

This account has quite a bit to offer. It certifies that there were acts and declamations on private stages with tableaux; the repertory comprised classical works; the audience consisted of Vienna's high society (‘schöne Welt’); and the happenings were organized not only by Fries but also by Lobkowitz (who, it may be recalled, was Amenda's employer). Reichardt's report is consistent with a review that had appeared somewhat earlier in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, about tableaux given at the palaces of Lichtenstein, Lobkowitz and Count Zamoiský, where ‘French theatre plays’ had been performed ‘by dilettants of the nobility’. One of these dilettants was Lobkowitz himself, who had a part in scenes from the opera Camilla.Footnote ⁷⁶

Scenery and props for these domestic productions incorporated ‘tableaux’, which were literally painted screens that captured salient moments of the spectacle that was presented on stage. These could also consist of silent and frozen actors and actresses (‘lebendige Bilder’) or dancers. A ballet was to all intents and purposes a ‘series of tableaux’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Over time, the designations Tableaux and Haustheater became interchangeable, both referring to a loose combination of painting, mime, declamation, graphic arts, music and dance.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tableaux were especially appreciated by the younger generation, as the police report of 1811 specified. They were regarded as beneficial to their education and ‘extremely advantageous for the improvement of presentational skills’ (‘für die Jugend, zur Bildung des Vortrages, äusserst nützlich’).Footnote ⁷⁹ A salon's respectability was measured by the degree of care lavished on the organization of a tableau, and even an element of competitiveness crept in: ‘Much loved, both at court and by the high nobility, were the tableaux, which reflected the vitality with which the hostess was able to outstrip other distinguished parties’ (‘Sehr beliebt waren, wie bei Hofe und beim Hochadel, die lebenden Bilder, und es entspricht dem Wesen der Hauswirtin, dass sie die Veranstaltungen der ersten Gesellschaften zu überbieten hatte’).Footnote ⁸⁰

The Beethoven literature has not had much to say about Haustheater.Footnote ⁸¹ Sparing references to it are buried in citations or recollections by contemporaries, such as the one by Therese Brunsvik mentioned above. This would imply that such performances were of limited concern to Beethoven, but given their immense popularity it is inconceivable that he was ignorant of the practices in the salons he visited so frequently – the more so because it was not seldom that music was involved. It may be expected that once in a while he was in the audience, and he may even have participated in productions. Owing to a lack of documentation, frustratingly little is known about this: Haustheater hardly left theatre bills, public announcements, reviews or financial settlements in the form of invoices or receipts. All that survived were occasional references by participants.

Beethoven's knowledge of, and perhaps involvement in, tableaux organized in the official theatres is somewhat better documented. On 12 February 1812, for example, when Carl Czerny performed the Fifth Piano Concerto in the Kärtnertortheater, there were three ‘lebende Bilder’ on stage.Footnote ⁸² Shortly after, on 29 March 1812, the same theatre presented a tableau of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, in front of which declamations were held taken from the play, and this was spiced up with a performance of Beethoven's Coriolan Overture.Footnote ⁸³ On 23 February 1814 the music for Leonore Prohaska was also given in front of a tableau, with declamation by the actress Antonie Adamberger of a poem written by Caroline Pichler.Footnote ⁸⁴ In November of that year, tableaux (‘Gemählde mit lebenden Figuren’) combined with operatic scenes from a comic play, in French, were performed in the Redoutensaal.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1815 Der Sammler reviewed a concert with seven tableaux, all illustrated with music.Footnote ⁸⁶ In March 1816 the Kärtnerthortheater stage presented three ‘mimetic performances, together with tableaux’ (‘mimische Vorstellungen, nebst Tableaux’) with music by Gyrowetz,Footnote ⁸⁷ and in May of that year, twelve ‘mimetic-pictorial representations of various sentiments’ (‘mimisch-plastische Darstellungen verschiedener Gemüthsbewegungen’) were performed, all supported by music.Footnote ⁸⁸ In February 1820 a concert was organized that consisted of ‘Tonstücke’, ‘Poesien’ and ‘Tableaux’ (music, poetry and tableaux).Footnote ⁸⁹ Needless to say, the genre also flourished outside Vienna. In Dresden, in April 1817, a company of singers, instrumentalists, actors and declamators participated at a ‘Deklamatorium’ featuring a Madame Schirmer.Footnote ⁹⁰ The tableau (a scene from Goethe's Tasso) was opened with Beethoven's overture Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus.

These examples of public productions very probably reflect to some degree the tableaux undertaken privately, and there can be little doubt that music played a role in those as well – although it is likely that more modest ensembles would have been employed.Footnote ⁹¹ One obvious choice would be the string quartet, which was the most cherished instrumental combination in aristocratic surroundings. Indeed, in 1816 the salon of Clam-Gallas in Prague utilized ‘splendid quartet music’ (‘eine vortreffliche Quartett-musik’) as Zwischenaktmusik for summoning up feelings in the listener during a production of a tableau of Schiller's Maria Stuart.Footnote ⁹² Combing through contemporary magazines and journals may reveal information about comparable initiatives.

V

If it was customary in upper-class circles to organize private theatrical performances of classical plays, in French, this begs the question whether perhaps Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, or at least its dramatic final scene, formed part of the repertory. By a stroke of good luck, information has survived about the shape and the set-up of one particular Haustheater production, which may cast light on the issue. It was arranged by the above-mentioned Franz Sales von Greiner, who kept a ‘second-society salon’.Footnote ⁹³ Details of what he organized were recorded by his daughter, Caroline Pichler, whose lively memoirs about Vienna's cultural life from around the turn of the century were published posthumously in 1844.Footnote ⁹⁴

Caroline's parents were in the habit of hosting the culture-minded Viennese, including writers, musicians, philosophers, playwrights, painters, poets and actors. Haustheater performances were part of their carefully devised programmes aimed at entertaining these guests, in a variety of pursuits. Caroline specified customs and routine, relating what the visitors of the salon could expect. In a paragraph in her memoirs dealing with 1791 she described the costly tableaux that were ordered by her parents, as well as the costumes (such as masks, helmets and spears for historical plays), the props and the techniques used for lighting.Footnote ⁹⁵ About the repertory she noted that it was not so much complete plays that were performed, but rather selected dramatic scenes from them, those liable to capture the imagination of the audience.Footnote ⁹⁶ She singled out one example that had made an unforgettable impression on her as a young girl, so much so that she could still envisage its particulars late in life:

This reveals that the final scene from Shakespeare's fifth act, which was banned from public theatres by the authorities, was featured privately at Greiner's salon. It was evidently a sort of forbidden fruit. One can imagine the audience's excitement about Romeo having taken poison in despair about his beloved's assumed death, whereafter Juliet, awakened, decides to join him by stabbing herself. This was nowhere to be witnessed. Caroline Pichler's enthusiasm for the gripping drama, then, would never wane. Following in the footsteps of her parents, she programmed the very scene herself when she organized Haustheater in her own salon in the Alservorstadt. About a performance in 1817 she recollected:

It would be reasonable to conjecture that such undertakings were not restricted to the Pichler salon. In view of its magnetic appeal, Pichler's dearest lady friends Fanny Arnstein, Cäcilia Eskeles, Eleonore Flies and Elisabeth Matt would no doubt have taken the scene on board as well.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sparse information exists about the salons of Deym, Fries, Lobkowitz and others frequented by Beethoven, but one might not be far wrong in assuming that Romeo and Juliet's popularity extended in these directions as well, the more so since every one of its productions would have been a challenging project for stage designers and tableau painters: already in the case of Steibelt's Romeo und Julie, in 1793, a reviewer had singled out the admirable effect of the ‘beautiful decorations, particularly of the burial scene of Juliet in the third act’ (‘schöne Dekorationen, zumal das Grabmal der Julie im dritten Akt’).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The balcony and vault scenes were established topoi in the visual arts.

To sum up, the following facts present themselves. Amenda stayed in Vienna from late spring 1798 to summer 1799, a period that coincided with the gestation of Beethoven's quartets Op. 18 Nos 3, 1 and 2 – in that order. He was employed by Prince Lobkowitz, who had commissioned these works. Both friends were regular guests in aristocratic salons, where they gave concerts. Amenda also played first violin in a string quartet, and he was particularly famed for his renderings of Adagios.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When he left Vienna, in late June 1799, he received a copy of the second quartet (now Op. 18 No. 1) with Beethoven's parting remark that it was ‘a small token of our friendship; whenever you play it, think of the days we spent together’ (‘ein kleines Denckmal unserer Freundschaft, so oft du dir es vorspielst, erinnere dich unserer durchlebten Tage’).Footnote ¹⁰² This work included an expressive Adagio, composed in early 1799, that involved allusions to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet – as borne out by jottings in French in a sketchbook and by Amenda's later recollections. The palace of Lobkowitz was the venue of Haustheater, private or semi-public stagings in French of classical plays. By a fortuitous coincidence an eyewitness report of such a Shakespeare tableau has survived: Caroline Pichler gave testimony that the vault scene was for her one of the absolute highlights of the genre.

Does this constellation of facts warrant the assumption that Beethoven's entries in Grasnick 2 were precipitated by his attendance of a Haustheater performance of Shakespeare's scene? It is true that evidence is not conclusive, but the cumulative weight of clues pointing in that direction makes it a possibility too strong to be ignored. If some time in early 1799 Beethoven witnessed a tableau in an aristocratic surrounding (probably not at Pichler's, for Caroline would have proudly mentioned it),Footnote ¹⁰³ this occasion may have been the key factor in the emergence of the coda of the Adagio affettuoso, and it would make logical sense of his question posed to Amenda, ‘what thoughts had come to his mind’: Beethoven was possibly asking whether his friend recognized elements of the tableau they had enjoyed some time earlier, in the hope – perhaps also in the expectation – of a response that acknowledged their shared experience. It is tempting to go even a step further, by imagining the scenario that the Adagio was specifically composed for a Haustheater production, which would solve the mystery conclusively and persuasively. No facts can be advanced for substantiating such a scenario, but the possibility should not be fully ruled out. After all, string-quartet music was destined to be performed in private surroundings, and, as adumbrated above, it was sometimes employed for tableaux. As a contributing factor, it can be added that Lobkowitz maintained his own ensemble and was thus well equipped should he want to spice up theatrical stagings.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But, of course, Beethoven may also have played his Adagio on the piano, as he did for Amenda.

Then again, Grasnick 2 gives no hint of a separate gestation for the Adagio. Sketches addressing it were entered after Beethoven had finished the exposition of the first movement, which was, in the words of Donald Greenfield, ‘an appropriate time for him to relax his concentration and think ahead briefly to the rest of the quartet’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The sketches occupy pages 4 to 20 and are interspersed with those for other movements. The Shakespeare jottings are on pages 8 and 9, where Beethoven directed his concentration to the final bars of the coda. The sketches still await a line-by-line critical investigation in the manner executed by Greenfield almost half a century ago (he confined himself to the first and fourth movements of the quartet). Mysteries still surround the sketches. Those on pages 9 and 17 feature the ‘sospire’ motives that in the end were not used. Unclear is why Beethoven discarded them, after he had put so much effort into them as a basic conception, pivotal to what he endeavoured to convey programmatically. Uncanny sketches on page 8 reinforce the mystery, for these entail a ruminating Adagio featuring a chromatic phrase laced with cello tremolos and a sinister dialogue between violin and cello, again with tremolos (staves 3–10). Their function remains unclear, but they seem to bespeak something programmatic, and the explicitness is redolent of the ‘analogous music’ of the Egmont entr'actes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In the absence of unassailable evidence, the perspective on the Amenda anecdote advanced here is submitted to scrutiny with a degree of trepidation, for it is of a provisional nature. It may be premature to call it a game-changer, but at least the scenario allows for a fresh glimpse at the material, calling a halt to peering into the complete unkown. The phenomenon of the Vienna Haustheater may yield a common-sense solution for otherwise inexplicable observations.

VI

If the Adagio was indeed bound up with a Haustheater performance, with the proviso that this stimulated Beethoven's interpretative flights, one of the provocative corollaries is that for Beethoven the string quartet was not a sacrosanct genre immune to down-to-earth approaches. While genre assuredly determined and controlled idiom and musical language, which were tailored to expectations and performance requirements, there were evidently no boundaries with regard to ‘inspiration’. What stimulated the imagination in Op. 18 No. 1 (dungeon, poison, last sighs) was essentially not very much different from features that inspired the chronologically close Prometheus music (chase, storm, sleep, sadness, joy, surprise, threat, anger, murder). What is more, programmatic aspects also infiltrated the symphony: on a sketch leaf roughly contemporary with Op. 18 Beethoven toyed with the idea of a ‘symphony with an Adagio in which doubt is expressed’ (‘Sinfonie mit einem adagio worin der Zweifel ausgedrückt ist’). According to this stray entry, a preconceived ‘concept’ could be a starting-point for this noble genre as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

At the turn of the century, discussions about the extramusical in instrumental music were very much alive. By and large, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung wrote pejoratively about what was called Musikmalerei,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but over time its position became somewhat more differentiated and nuanced. In 1813 the journal made an effort to separate autonomous (‘selbstständige’) instrumental works from those that pursued heteronomous strategies (‘an Zwecke gebunden’), avoiding the term ‘programmatic’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As hinted at at the opening of this article, early nineteenth-century reception no longer accepted ‘mere sound’ in Beethoven, until Eduard Hanslick ruffled a few feathers in 1854. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, in an outcry against Adolf Bernhard Marx, felt challenged to make value judgments on the two categories, stressing that ‘mere musical painting . . . Beethoven could and did dispatch with extreme rapidity, but works of a different order, for which he could take his own time, and which were to be the expression of the grand feelings of his own great heart, – the composition of these was no light holiday-task’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thayer was ill-disposed towards ‘mere painting’, which he could not identify with serious music. It was anathema to him that this was used in a string quartet, and this may explain his reluctance to discuss the Amenda anecdote in his 1872 biography, although he did mention it. Much literature has followed in Thayer's footsteps, particularly with regard to the Shakespeare connection. To single out a few examples: William Henry Hadow (1926) pursued the idea that ‘it is dangerous to lay any emphasis on statements such as this. Even when they are seriously made – and Beethoven was not always serious – they convey no more than a very general hint of very limited application.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Joseph Kerman (1966) contended that Romeo and Juliet had been little more than ‘a sort of externalization or excuse’.Footnote ¹¹² And Lewis Lockwood (2003), taking a cue from Mies, attempted to purge the hermetic, esoteric string quartet from unwanted associations as well, by claiming that Beethoven, ‘not wanting to be literal, destroyed all traces of any . . . program in the finished work. . . . what evidence he left exists only by chance in the sketches, which he never expected the world to know’.Footnote ¹¹³ Tellingly, when Bathia Churgin (2008) compiled a list of ‘Programmatic Works and Movements’, in an effort to provide a summary of the current consensus, she plainly omitted both Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus and the Op. 18 No. 1 Adagio.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Downplaying Beethoven's negotiations with Romeo and Juliet is a rearguard action. It is adopting an idealist stance and amounts to denying knowledge, intention and responsibility on Beethoven's part. Even if it were true that he wilfully ‘destroyed traces’ (which suggests an aggressive form of self-correction), and that he did not anticipate that posterity would study his sketches (which is a matter of contention),Footnote ¹¹⁵ this still does not explain away the main point, which is extramusical inspiration. Resistance to ascribing Beethoven's intent to the use of the programmatic in Op. 18 No. 1 has understandably made much of the lack of references in the finished work. But the argument may backfire: if he deliberately concealed inspiration, he may theoretically have done so on other occasions as well. Resistance may thus have the opposite effect: it may lead to a proliferation of interpretation, fuelling the hermeneutic industry.

It seems best to stick to the facts. If the emphatic musical effects in the quartet's Adagio were indeed spawned by poetic impulses of a Haustheater production of Romeo and Juliet, it may reasonably be assumed that this was a particular and individual case, with no fundamental repercussions for the rest of Beethoven's oeuvre. Nothing suggests any kind of pattern that stretches to other instrumental works (apart from the other individual cases mentioned above). While it is no longer a viable strategy to marginalize the Shakespeare jottings, it is at the same time hazardous to draw them into a wider hermeneutic debate by extrapolating interpretative impulses to other works on the grounds of stylistic similarities.Footnote ¹¹⁶ With meagre or no confirming data, an alignment of the Adagio with works of a comparable expression brings with it the danger of making claims that go beyond what evidence supports. It is true that ‘We know it, so it exists for the work’, but the Shakespeare connection was historically contingent and may be classified as a one-time digression from normal practice.