Hess 116 – Vocal Part of the Ritterballet

Thayer I, p. 308, states that the Ritterballett also contained vocal pieces, which have been lost. In a footnote on the same page, Hugo Riemann suggested that a sheet sold at auction in London around 1910, cataloged as “Beethoven Autograph. Four-voice a cappella song from the Bonn period,” may have contained the Minnelied from the Ritterballett. Perhaps future discoveries will clarify the matter.

[Riemann’s footnote provides much more information than Hess reports. The auction took place “around” 1910, not “in” 1910 as Hess claims. For this edition, Rob Ritchie of London conducted extensive research in the British Library microfilms to locate any documentation of the auction. He was, however, unable to find any trace of an item matching the description being sold in a London auction between mid-1909 and early 1911. Hess does not mention that Riemann, in fact, never saw the “four-voice a cappella song.” According to Riemann, the song was examined and copied by Edward Speyer (collector of musical manuscripts, born in Born, Frankfurt-am-Main, 14 May 1839 – died Shenley, Herts, 8 January 1934), who informed Riemann of his findings. See the reference to Edward Speyer at number 133 of this catalog.]

Both a text and a couplet exist. The text reads:

Doch liebt geichwohl Amynt und spricht, dass nichts so süss wäre.
Voli Ungeunssheitfieli3 ich dir, geib du o Liebe, selber mir Verstand, zu entscheiden.

The couplet is given as:

Bringt Liebe, Lust, bringt sie Gefahr,
Sagt der Amynt der Mutter wahr.

Riemann suggested that the text was intended for the Minnelied (Romance No. 4) and that the couplet, which fits the melody metrically very well, could have been used as a refrain for the Deutscher Gesang (German Song No. 2), repeated several times during the ballet.

In 1927, the Beethoven-Haus published the piano reduction of the piece as Musik zu einem Ritterballett mit Gesang, without any explanation of how or in what form it contained vocal parts. See Das Beethoven-Haus in Bonn und seine Sammlungen, by F.A. Schmidt and Fr. Knickenberg, Bonn 1927, p. 94 (see number 89 of this catalog).