Beethoven and George Thomson: A New Letter Fragment from 1816,?
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Aaron S. Allen, Associate Professor of Musicology and Director, Environment & Sustainability Program (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: In his 1956 summary of the correspondence between Ludwig van Beethoven and George Thomson, Donald MacArdle noted parenthetically that Thomson's letter of October 20, 1816, to Beethoven ".. . as it appears in Thomson's Letterbook is apparently incomplete."1 Thom- son's biographer James Cuthbert Hadden made a similar observation in his lengthy chapter on Thomson's correspondence with Beethoven: "... it seems probable that by some accident the copying of the letter was interrupted and the intention of completing it never carried out."2 The letter is also incomplete in the two most recent editions of Beethoven's correspondence .3 Despite its incomplete state in the manuscript source, neither MacArdle nor Hadden expressed any doubt about Beethoven receiving the October 20 letter, and from later missives they were able to infer some of the contents of the missing portion of the letter. With the discovery of a new letter fragment—British Library Additional 35269, f. 154 (see Figures la and lb), hereafter "folio 154"—I will complete, in part, that entry in Thomson's Letterbook and add some clarification to the Beethoven-Thomson relationship. (For an outline of the correspondence, see Table 1.)
Beethoven and George Thomson: A New Letter Fragment from 1816,?
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Created on 1/1/2008
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Additional Information
- Publication
- The Beethoven Journal 23, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 24-32.
- Language: English
- Date: 2008
- Keywords
- Ludwig van Beethoven, George Thomson, Correspondence, 1816