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The researcher who desires to reconstruct the genesis of a particular work of Beethoven often bumps into the problem of the lack of correspondent sketches or drafts. Several examples – such as the op. 27, no. 2 piano sonata (first and second movement) and the Introduction of the op. 53 piano sonata – are mentioned in the scientific literature with regard to this question and lead to the conclusion that a significant quantity of Beethoven’s preliminary materials is unfortunately lost. This unexceptional and unsurprising situation is observable also in the case of the Piano Sonata in A major op. 101, published in February 1817. The composer couldn’t work uninterruptedly on this sonata, probably due to other important musical projects – for instance the Cello Sonatas op. 102 and the arrangement of several airs for George Thomson – and because of the events in his private life related to the death of his brother and the resulting custody of the nephew Karl. In any case, op. 101 represents a turning point toward Beethoven’s so-called “late style,” and therefore such a long gestation could also be related to new and important compositional problems, faced probably for the first time.
A reconstruction of the genesis of this Piano Sonata op. 101 is offered by Sieghard Brandenburg in his commentary of the Facsimile-Edition of the working autograph preserved in Beethoven-Haus. According to Brandenburg’s reconstruction, the earliest surviving sketches for this work date from the summer of 1815. These sketches are located on two separate leaves and a small fragment today in private collection. All of these leaves originally formed part of the Scheide sketchbook and concern the first and the last movement of the sonata. The last section of the first movement Allegretto, ma non troppo is here in a particularly good state of completion, but the work for the main theme – probably quoted from the “Rondeau pastoral” of the Sonata op. 3, no. 2 of Henry Jean Rigel – is not traceable. A leaf preserved in Paris reveals that Beethoven wrote out at another time the entire recapitulation of the first movement. This leaf doesn’t come from the working autograph, as several characteristics of the paper and the type of draft seem to suggest; for this reason Brandenburg supposed that it reflects a stage of the composition between the sketches in Scheide sketchbook and the writing of the working autograph. The leaf should be to date from the summer of the 1815 and would be used immediately after the other sketches documented for the sonata in the same Scheide sketchbook. Beethoven would return to the Sonata again in April or May 1816, shortly after completing the song cycle op. 98, An die ferne Geliebte, and would concentrate this time on the second movement, “Vivace alla Marcia”. In this case there is no trace of continuity drafts for any part of the movement, and although Brandenburg supposed that something similar should be present in working copies outside the sketchbook itself, no material with such characteristics are preserved today. A similar situation is also recognizable for the slow introduction leading into the Allegro finale, through the Tempo del primo pezzo, and for the finale itself. Several sketches for these sections are contained in two different sketchbooks: the so-called Autograph 11/1 and a pocket sketchbook partially preserved in Cracow and in Paris. According to Brandenburg’s reconstruction, these other materials were used in autumn 1816 and precede the final phase of composition.
To sum up: in the case of the first movement of op. 101, the preliminary materials reflect a late stage of the composition, whereas the sketches for the other movements are related to the first and intermediate stages. Can we really suppose that other materials related to the missing phases were lost, or do we instead have to imagine that the strategies used by the composer permitted him to sketch only a part of his composition and to elaborate the other one directly in his working autograph? Do we have enough information about the different phases of Beethoven’s creative process to suppose that he regularly drafted the whole composition before writing the correspondent “fair copy”? Several characteristics of the sketches for op. 101 and their comparison with the work-autograph in Beethoven-Haus permit us to develop some hypothesis. Some drafts show, for instance, that Beethoven sometimes used the same materials in different stages of his work: a first time to define the melodic- horizontal profile of a particular section and a second time to define its inner vertical structure. This praxis was also used in writing the working autograph, however is still not understood how many sections were composed in this way. Other materials seem otherwise to indicate that during the composition, some bars were better defined than others and that the correspondent connections were conceived in a second moment. Also in this case, some traces of this praxis can be found in the working autograph today in Bonn. This paper explores these questions as to the precise relationship between working autograph, sketches, and other drafts in Beethoven’s composition of op. 101, in order to give a clearer understanding of the variety of working methods he could use in fashioning a completed work.