Beethoven the Discarder Matthias Pintscher
A few years ago, a television feature in the United States brought me the unexpected honor of being allowed to handle some of the most important music manuscripts held by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Without wearing gloves, I was permitted to take a close-up look at manuscripts of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Mendelssohn’s Octet— I still write with pencil on paper and, fortunately, never learned to compose at the computer, so it is truly fascinating for me to encounter other composers in this fashion and to be able to feel a small part of their soul. Among the manuscripts was also the autograph of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor Op. 131. I think I read music fairly well, but on those pages, I could decipher almost nothing—contrary to Mendelssohn’s Octet, which is written in ink, without a single mistake from beginning to end, every note perfectly spaced according to the tempo. Compared to this, Beethoven’s handwriting resembles calligraphy penned with an incredible amount of verve, spontaneity, and emotion. Unlike almost any other composer’s hand, it reflects the unique ability to discard things, to cross them out, to delete them, in an incredibly vehement manner. To me, Beethoven is probably the most gifted “discarder” in European music history. Almost like a gold miner: if no nuggets remain in the pan, everything is brutally tossed out. I don’t think there is any other composer who had to act so radically against himself: casting aside, throwing away everything to get from one piano sonata to the next, from one symphony to the next, from one quartet to the next—destroying, burning everything from piece to piece, erasing the hard drive, starting again from scratch. As a composer, my working method is quite different: the questions that remain at the end of one piece to me become the
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