Between Exegesis and Mystification: Anton Schindler, the Unfaithful Popularizer of Beethoven's Sketches

Much has been said about the figure of Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s secretary and biographer, rarely a reliable witness and notorious forger of the conversation books. This article investigates an aspect underrated up to now, namely the crucial (and equally controversial) role he played in the reporting of Beethoven’s musical papers. For almost twenty years, Schindler owned, among others, eleven sketchbooks which, after several unsuccessful attempts, were sold to the Royal Library of Berlin in 1846. An examination of these manuscripts reveals the indelible traces of his action: he added notes to explain the meaning of certain Beethoven’s writing practices, traced the sketches in ink to highlight variants, and noted down in the margins of the staves his hypotheses of attribution. Behind this deplorable breach of the inviolability of documents, one can glimpse a positive impulse, which should be understood against the background of a broader historical reconstruction. Well before Gustav Nottebohm, Schindler was confronted with the problem of deciphering the sketches and the strategies of their popularization. He was the first to transcribe and publish some excerpts, developing, together with the archivist Siegfried Dehn, a program of systematic cataloguing of the Beethoven bequest. This research reveals, however, how the attempt to valorize the relics is part of a “marketing strategy” that aims to emphasize rare and unpublished works, even at the cost of unscrupulous counterfeits. Emblematic in this sense are the sketches attributed to an “unfinished four-hand sonata”, in which we recognize the Adagio of the String Quartet Op.127.