January 13, 2020—Emanuel Ax plays Beethoven—CAMA's Masterseries—Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, California

ally proposed marriage to Malfatti in 1810,
when he was 40 and she not quite half that
age. Perhaps for this reason, Nohl believed
that Für Elise was composed in 1810.
The manuscript then mysteriously and
suspiciously vanished, leading to speculation
in two directions. One was that Nohl
had misread the inscription, which actually
said “Für Therese,” although it is hard to
imagine anyone misreading Beethoven’s
handwriting quite that badly. More likely
there was an actual Elise, which a common
German diminutive for Elisabeth. A likely
candidate is Elisabeth Röckel, an aspiring
singer who left Vienna in 1810 and married
the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel
in 1813.
Another is that Nohl was as much the
composer as Beethoven, assembling the
piece from unfinished sketches and then
making up a story about the lost manuscript.
This last is belied by the existence
of another manuscript of a different, untitled
version of the piece (the principal
difference being that the left hand doesn’t
play on the downbeat of each measure,
but comes in a note later, making the music
less flowing and more lurching) which
Beethoven was working on in 1822.
So apparently, Beethoven created two
versions of Für Elise and didn’t like either
of them enough to publish it. If so, would
he reconsider his judgment if he knew how
popular it would become? Maybe. Told
in 1801 that his Septet was being played
everywhere, he retorted that it should be
burned instead.
The Beethoven Monument on the Munsterplatz in
Bonn, Germany
If “not for publication” was the bottom of
the scale, the top was “published with an
opus number.”
Opus numbers originated in the 17th
century, and were originally given to collections
of instrumental music, usually sets
of six or twelve trios or concertos. Since
these were typically sold by subscription or
otherwise bought sight unseen, opus numbers
told potential buyers that they weren’t
buying something they already had.
Opus numbers gradually acquired a
different meaning. Beethoven gave opus
numbers to music that he considered significant
in his output. Much of his music,
even if published, did not a number, including
everything he composed before he
was 23. There is rather a lot of such music,
which over the years has been given
“Werke ohne opus” (“work without opus”)
numbers. The Beethoven catalog includes
138 opus numbers and 205 WoO numbers,
among them three piano sonatas published
in 1783, when he was 12 years old.
Beethoven was in his mid-20’s and
MASTERSERIES AT THE LOBERO THEATRE • EMANUEL AX
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