Bonn Court Administration Files
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. As the eighteenth century progressed, the court's bookkeeping became increasingly thorough and transparent, or at least these documents are better preserved.
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 materials pertaining not only 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 felt the need to consult the original sources. This has one unfortunate consequence: 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 reviewed the files on court musicians alongside Bonn parish records, resulting in a lexicon article which includes basic biographical information on all known musicians who worked at court under the last four electors, one that still provides a useful reference work.[1] Around the same time, Joseph Schmidt-Görg of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn attempted to assemble a list of documents in this archive and others in the course of a monograph on the Beethoven family, but offered little further in terms of either bibliographic information or interpretation than Thayer had.[2] More recently, in the course of the two research projects "The Music Library of Elector Maximilian Franz," the research team consulted the music- and musician-related files, with a special focus on opera and sacred music between 1784 and 1794.
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 all other primary texts on this website, are diplomatic, preserving the orthography, line breaks, and layout of the original pages but also attempt to convey the structure of multi-document sequences, 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 archival sources 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 a large cross-section of these documents for an interlinked web publication 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. For the reconstruction of events is often not possible through a single source in isolation. On its own, a petition or decree can often seem ambiguous, since it must be understood as the written starting point of a primarily oral deliberation.
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