, made by
Doris Stock in April 1789 The evidence for Beethoven's travel dates were long obscure, but evidence from the publication
Regensburgische Diarium (which recorded when individual people were arriving in
Regensburg) is now taken to show that Beethoven must have arrived in Vienna in January 1787 and departed in March or April, remaining in the city about weeks. Beethoven's return to Bonn was prompted at least in part by his mother's medical condition (she died of
tuberculosis in July of that year). Beethoven's father was nearly incapacitated by alcoholism, and Beethoven had two younger brothers, so it was believed the composer may have been needed at home to support his family. Written documentation of Beethoven's initial visit to Vienna is sparse; the two composers could conceivably have met. Haberl's dates imply a period of about six weeks when this could have occurred Jahn gives no evidence of this, mentioning only that "it was communicated to me in Vienna on good authority". A contemporary of Beethoven's,
Ignaz von Seyfried, describes his encounter with Mozart as follows (although Seyfried places the visit in 1790): Beethoven made a short stay at Vienna, in the year 1790, whither he had gone for the sake of hearing Mozart, to whom he had letters of introduction. Beethoven improvised before Mozart, who listened with some indifference, believing it to be a piece learned by heart. Beethoven then demanded, with his characteristic ambition, a given theme to work out; Mozart, with a skeptical smile, gave him at once a chromatic motivo for a fugue, in which,
al rovescio, the countersubject for a double fugue lay concealed. Beethoven was not intimidated, and worked out the subject, the secret intention of which he immediately perceived, at great length and with such remarkable originality and power that Mozart's attention was riveted, and his wonder so excited that he stepped softly into the adjoining room where some friends were assembled, and whispered to them with sparkling eyes: "Don't lose sight of this young man, he will one day tell you some things that will surprise you!" Contemporary scholarship is, however, somewhat skeptical of this story.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians does not mention it; its account of the visit is as follows: In the spring of 1787 Beethoven visited Vienna. In the absence of documents, much remains uncertain about the precise aims of the journey and the extent to which they were realized; but there seems little doubt that he met Mozart and perhaps had a few lessons from him. Some historians, however, are skeptical that Mozart and Beethoven met at all.
Maynard Solomon, who has written biographies of both Mozart and Beethoven, does not mention Jahn's tale, and even puts forward the possibility that Mozart might have given Beethoven an audition and then rejected him: In Bonn, Beethoven was being groomed to be Mozart's successor by [a group of influential nobles], who sent him to Vienna ... to advance that purpose. The sixteen-year-old Beethoven, however, was not yet ready to be on his own. At his father's urging, the young virtuoso left Vienna ... and returned home in a state of despondency over his mother's consumptive condition – and perhaps over a rejection by Mozart, who was preoccupied with his own affairs, including his worrisome financial condition, and may not have been able seriously to consider taking on another pupil, even one of great talent and backed by eminent patrons. Solomon goes on to enumerate other matters that kept Mozart preoccupied at the time:
his father's declining health, a visit to
Prague, the beginnings of work on
Don Giovanni, and the writing of "a vast amount of other music". Moreover, Mozart already had a pupil living in his home, the nine-year-old
Johann Nepomuk Hummel. While it cannot be determined whether Beethoven actually met Mozart, it is more probable that he heard Mozart play. Beethoven's student
Carl Czerny told Otto Jahn that Beethoven had told him that Mozart (whom Beethoven could only have heard during his 1787 visit to Vienna) "had a fine but choppy [German
zerhacktes] way of playing, no
ligato." Regardless of whether Beethoven met Mozart in Vienna, his 1787 visit there seems to have been the start of an unhappy time for him.
The Grove Dictionary notes that his "first surviving letter, to a member of a family in
Augsburg that had befriended him on his way [to Vienna], describes the melancholy events of that summer and hints at ... ill-health [and] depression. ==Shared experiences==