The administrative archives of the Bonn Electoral Court, preserved today in the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen in Duisburg, Germany (D-DGla), reach back to at least the tenth century. Extensive documentation of the court's operations, however, only really exists since the late seventeenth century — after the city of Bonn was put under siege during the Nine Years' War and largely destroyed in 1689.

The Beethoven-related files in the court archives were surveyed by Alexander Wheelock Thayer for the first volume of his monumental biography, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, whose first edition appeared in 1866. Thayer cast his net wide and the biography includes an impressive array of not only materials pertaining to the Beethoven family, but also of many of their colleagues. His transcriptions, typically unabridged, were a model of accuracy for their time. They are in fact so good and so seemingly comprehensive that no later Beethoven biographer has needed to consult the original sources. After the archive's multiple reorganizations and one change of location (from Düsseldorf to Duisburg in 2014), even most Beethoven scholars would be hard-pressed to locate the modern shelf-mark of any document quoted by Thayer, much less to retrace his footsteps and search for something he might have missed.

Around a century later, Max Braubach consulted the files on court musicians for a lexicon article including basic biographical information on all known musicians who worked at court under the last four electors, which still provides a useful reference work.^[1] More recently, in the course of the two research projects "The Music Library of Elector Maximilian Franz," the project team again surveyed the musician-related files, especially with regard to opera and sacred music.

The Bonn court administrative files here represent a curated collection of documents that are especially relevant to Beethoven's family, but also offer an overview of the entire court musical establishment. Each document is presented in a new and/or revised transcription and a new English translation. The transcriptions, as with other primary texts on this website, are diplomatic, preserving the line breaks and layout of the original pages but also attempt to convey the structure of multi-page documents, since this frequently affects their interpretation. In 2022, the Landesarchiv placed digital scans of the entire sub-collection "Kurköln II" freely available online. In the transcriptions of these documents, the folio designations in square brackets function as hyperlinks to the relevant scans.

As might be expected, the process of reviewing files that were last systematically checked over half a century ago has turned up more than a few documents that previously escaped notice. More than this, however, preparing these documents for a website has offered a better understanding of how the files in different collections relate to one another, and ultimately of how they represent decision-making processes of the court.

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Notes

1. ↑ Max Braubach, "Die Mitglieder der Hofmusik unter den letzten vier Kurfürsten von Köln," in Siegfried Kross (ed.)