Biamonti 537 – Sketches for an Orchestral Work

(August 20 – mid-September 1811)

Biamonti 537 – Sketches for an orchestral work. (August 20 – mid-September 1811) They are located at the Library of the Paris Conservatoire.

Unger, who discusses them without reproducing the music, wonders whether they were originally intended for the King Stephen Overture (König Stephan, Op. 117) (Max Unger, “Die Beethovenhandschriften der Pariser Konservatoriumsbibliothek”, pp. 112/91), and describes them as follows: “Manuscript ms. 91, sketches for an orchestral work, from Beethoven’s middle years, 1 sheet.”

New information from the Beethoven Music Research Center (June 2025): The sketches for the King Stephen Overture mentioned here are written on a single horizontal-format sheet with 16 staves. This sheet was part of the manuscript labeled “1810–1811”, which has since been dismantled and dispersed across various collections. It should therefore be considered in relation to other single sheets found in libraries such as the Gallica collection [ms. 86 / ms. 88 / ms. 92] and the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn [Bsk3-51 / Bsk4-52 / Bsk18-56 / Mh83 / Mh82].

These other sheets share the same number of staves, the same number of binding holes, and also pertain to the music for King Stephen, Op. 117. In particular, sheets Mh82 and Mh83 relate directly to the drafting of its Overture.

Johnson, Tyson, and Winter, in their book The Beethoven Sketchbooks, pages 201–206, describe the contents of the entire manuscript (or at least those parts that have been recovered so far).

The sketches on sheet ms. 91 are found almost exclusively on the first of the two sides; on the reverse, there is a brief ink sketch of a few bars. The 16 staves of the sheet are divided into three sections, as if Beethoven were about to begin writing an orchestral score.