A first version, consisting of only five bars, not fully orchestrated, can be found on page 52 of the symphony’s autograph (SBB, page 53, a sketch that includes 42 bars). We present the orchestrated piece with a blank line between the viola part and the cello part.

The last four bars also appear in a first violin part, of which a single sheet has survived, MS. 19 from the Gallica section of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in the recent list of Beethoven autographs once held by the Paris Conservatory. This single sheet, dated from early 1814, is written only on the first page. It comes from the Charles Malherbe Collection and contains the first violin part (measures 332-373) of the first movement of Symphony VIII Op. 93, intended to replace the original part.

Max Unger notes that “auf der Rückseite ein kurzer Plan in Worten zum letzte Teil einer Siegeskantate”; it is probably a draft for the final movement of a cantata celebrating the liberation of Germany and the peace to come (this is not necessarily the cantata “Europens Befreyungsstunde” Hess 317); the inscription reads: “(im letzten Stück) Felder blühende Saaten angenehme Wälder niedergeschmettert ist der Feinde dazwischen – lebe – lebe von neuem Deutschland!” and in pencil, “Versprechung des Friedens” [Promise of Peace]. The sheet is in portrait format and contains 14 lines.

This movement was initially shorter by about 34 bars; later, Beethoven removed the last ten (or perhaps eight) bars and replaced them with the current final section. Nottebohm I, on page 25, provides the original timpani part. See Alfred Orel, Der ursprüngliche Schluss des ersten Satzes in Beethovens achter Symphonie, Schweizerische Musikzeitung, XC (February 1950), pp. 50-53, where on page 51, the full final section is presented in score. Both the rests shown by Orel are missing in Nottebohm, though this may be a copying error by Nottebohm. Orel argues that the MS. 19 from the Paris Conservatory (a piece of the first violin part — at the end of the first movement — of the Eighth Symphony) also belongs to this first version. Today, the autograph is located in two different places. The first, second, and fourth movements are at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, while the third movement is at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, Poland. In the Bodmer Collection at the Beethoven-Haus, HCB BMh 8/48, there is a single sheet containing the original ten-bar finale (see the photo below). Hess published only the original finale of the first movement in SBG, Vol. IV, 1961, p. 70.