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 besieged 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 swept up an impressive array of materials pertaining both to the Beethoven family and some 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, making it difficult to retrace his footsteps to search for something he might have missed or to seek broader context.

Around a century later, Max Braubach systematically 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 even though he does not cite individual sources.^[1] 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. A brief overview of the Kurköln files is presented as an appendix to Volume 2 of the series "Musik am Bonner kurfürstlichen Hof."

The Bonn court administrative files here represent a curated collection of not only those documents that mention Beethoven's family, but also ones that illustrate the immediate context in which four generations of them worked. In so doing, they offer an overview of the entire court musical establishment since the late seventeenth century. Each document's contents are given a summary, and a large number are presented in a new 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, differences in Kurrent or Latin script, cancellations, emendations, and layout of the original pages; they 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, the folio designations in square brackets function as hyperlinks to the relevant scans. The account books, located in Kurköln IV, have not been digitized, but their presentation here has been optimized for easy reference.

As might be expected, the process of reviewing archival sources that were last systematically checked over half a century ago has turned up no small number of documents that have previously escaped notice, indeed several which pertain to Ludwig van Beethoven and his family. 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 and documentation of a primarily oral deliberation. In a certain sense, digital presentation of the written records is the most appropriate existing method of re-tying the cognitive threads that once linked them.

Finally, while the administrative archives in Duisburg are startlingly extensive, other sources must be considered alongside them. For the reign of Maximilian Franz (1784–1794), his own personal papers in Vienna's Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv contain many documents of relevance to court music and the court theater, as do some of his letters to Spiegel von Diesenberg in the Stadtarchiv Bonn. Finally, the lists of musicians in the court calendar (Hofkalender) often diverge from the payment records in interesting ways.

Collected Petitions and Decrees

Kurköln II, Nr. 473 (Konzertmeister)

1715–1785

• fols. 10–12 (28 June 1785): Josef Reicha's Employment Decree

Kurköln II, Nr. 474 (Kapellmeister)

1695–1783

Kurköln II, Nr. 478 (Male singers)

1694–1792

Kurköln II, Nr. 479 (Female singers)

1730–1790.

• fols. 109–112 (19 February 1790): Magdalena Willmann's employment decree

Kurköln II, Nr. 480 (Organists)

NB: Does not include Ludwig van Beethoven, 1698–1796

Kurköln II, Nr. 481 (Beethoven)

This file is a collection of most petitions and decrees that mention members of the Beethoven family.

• fols. 62–67 (c. June 1784): An evaluation of all court musicians with notes on their abilities, age, deportment, and family situation.
• fols. 69–74 (23–29 February 1784): deliberations around Ludwig van Beethoven's employment as assistant court organist (see also Kurköln II, Nr. 471, fols. 22–24)

Kurköln II, Nr. 482 (String Players)

Kurköln II, Nr. 483 (Woodwind and Brass Players)

Kurköln II, Nr. 484 (Timpanists and Timpani Carriers)

Kurköln II, Nr. 485 (Calcants)

Miscellaneous Court Music Documents

These are music-related files that for various reasons were not included in the other collections. Sometimes it is because they deal with multiple court musicians at once, such as frequently happened after the death of a musician, at which point their colleagues would collectively petition for the now-free funds to be divided among them. Other times the documents appear to have merely been separated by accident from their logical position. Four files in Nr. 471 (fols. 3–5, 22–24, 51–55) directly deal with Ludwig van Beethoven and his family, three of which were previously unknown.

Kurköln II, Nr. 468 (1717–1730)

Kurköln II, Nr. 469 (1731–1764)

Kurköln II, Nr. 470 (1765–1779)

Kurköln II, Nr. 471 (1780–1794)

• fols. 1–2 (October 1780): collective petition by nine court musicians
• fols. 3–5 (16 May 1782): collective petition by ten court musicians (including Johann van Beethoven)
• fols. 6–7 (September–October 1780): petition by widow of Tussy
• fols. 8–9 (24 March 1783): petition by Gertrud Poletnich
• fol. 10 (6 October 1783): approval for Drewer, Heller, and Ries to organize a concert
• fols. 11–12 (undated, c. June 1784): recommendations for salary adjustments
• fols. 13–14 (undated, c. 1790): Thomas Pokorny
• fols. 15–16 (undated, c. 1790): Friedrich Müller
• fols. 17–18 (August 1780): collective petition by sixteen musicians
• fols. 19–20 (12 September 1780): Peter Esch petition for raise
• fols. 20–21 (9 November 1783): Joseph Phillipart petition for full employment
• fols. 22–24 (15 February 1784): collective petition by eleven musicians (including Ludwig van Beethoven)
• fols. 25–26 (27 June 1784): final determinations of musician salary adjustments
• fol. 27 (27 June 1784): confusion about Andrea Luchesi's new salary is cleared up
• fols. 28–30 (15 August 1786): Walter
• fols. 31–32 (undated, early eighteenth century): Elenora Walter
• fol. 33 (3 May 1786): Christoph Brandt
• unnumbered (5 September 1787): Veronica Beckenkam petition for raise
• fols. 34–43 (6 October to 15 November 1788): dispute over engagement of several Bonn court musicians in Frankfurt
• fols. 44–45 (2 October 1789): employment decree for Joseph Lux
• fols. 51–55 (8 November 1793): custody of the late Franz Rovantini's children transferred from the Beethovens to Ernst Haveck

Inventories and Lists

• Kurköln II, Nr. 340: Inventory of the entire electoral palace upon Maximilian Friedrich's death, May 1784. Includes separate listings of the music collection.

Minutes of the Privy State Council

contains summaries of each petition and decree discussed between July 1784 and 1801, including some for which all other documentation is lost

• Kurköln II, Nr. 3016 (1784)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3017 (1785)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3018 (1786)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3019 (1787)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3020 (1788)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3021 (1789)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3022 (1790)
• Kurköln II, Nr. 3033 (1800)

Account Books

Notes

1. ↑ Max Braubach, "Die Mitglieder der Hofmusik unter den letzten vier Kurfürsten von Köln," in Siegfried Kross and Hans Schmidt (eds.), Colloquium Amicorum. Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum 70. Geburtstag (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1967), 26–63.