Beethoven Notebooks

The Beethoven notebooks have at last been made public in entirety by Walter Nohl of Munich. They have been the most cherished possession of the Music Department of the State Library at Berlin.

Beethoven stands classically for a certain mode of composition. He worked out his music with infinite effort and care. He began with a fairly commonplace set of notes. Then, endlessly, he rewrote the melody until it had gained marvelous originality and beauty. With equal labor he built up the harmonies and orchestrations, and carried the whole through a further set of changes in which it appeared in altering forms of beauty. These processes he worked largely on paper, jotting down the ideas that came into his head. He wrote in notebooks. These notebooks then contain a graphic record of the path of composition by which Beethoven elaborated his greatest works.

But the Beethoven notebooks are not as expressive as one might hope. Much of the musical significance is expressed in cabalistic dots and circles accompanying the jotted symbols of regular notation. Much is impossible to decipher.