Archduke Rudolph – Forty Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, WoO 200 “O Hoffnung”
Archduke Rudolph of Austria – Forty Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, WoO 200 “O Hoffnung”
Ausgabe von Ludwig van Beethoven gedichet, Vierzig Mahl verändert und ihren Verfasser gewidmet von seinem Schüler R:E:H:
The texts and documents on this page are by Luigi Bellofatto.
Archduke Rudolph of Austria – A Life
Archduke Rudolph (Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainer von Österreich) was born in Florence on 9 January 1788, the youngest of sixteen children of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Princess Maria Ludovica of Spain. When his father ascended the imperial throne, the family relocated to Vienna, where the children were educated under the supervision of their elder brother Franz, who himself became Emperor of Austria in 1790. In accordance with established Habsburg custom, each imperial child received an education designed to prepare them for a military, governmental, or ecclesiastical vocation. The Habsburgs were consistently receptive to the arts, and particularly to music; Emperor Franz, a composer and patron in his own right, ensured that his children received a solid musical foundation by entrusting their instruction to the court composer Anton Teyber.
Rudolph’s uncle, Maximilian Franz—Prince-Elector of Cologne and an accomplished amateur violist—had earlier established in Bonn the court orchestra in which the young Beethoven served as a violist. Both of Rudolph’s parents died when he was only four years old, and he, together with several siblings, was placed under the guardianship of General Alois Haager von Altensteig by order of Emperor Franz.
Like his brothers, Rudolph was initially groomed for a military career. However, owing to his fragile health—he inherited the Habsburg predisposition to epilepsy and suffered seizures throughout his life—he was redirected toward the ecclesiastical path. In 1805 he received minor orders in the Catholic Church. That same year he was appointed coadjutor to the Archbishop of Olomouc (in present‑day Czech Republic), becoming Archbishop in 1819 and Cardinal‑Archbishop in 1820. During his tenure, his principal residence was the archiepiscopal palace at Kroměříž, though he spent considerable time at the Imperial Palace in Vienna’s Hofburg and in various spa towns such as Baden bei Wien, Teplitz, and Bad Ischl, where he regularly underwent treatments for his chronic ailments. It was in Baden that Archduke Rudolph died prematurely of a hemorrhage at the age of forty‑three.
Rudolph’s friendship with Beethoven is generally thought to have begun in the winter of 1803–1804, when the Archduke, having attained a degree of independence, moved into private apartments within the Hofburg accompanied by his own household. Schindler recounts this early association and confirms that the piano part of the Triple Concerto in C major, Op. 56, was written for Rudolph.
It is nonetheless striking that in 1806 Rudolph’s personal music collection contained relatively few works by Beethoven, notably lacking all the early piano sonatas and most of the variation sets. This circumstance may suggest that their relationship had not yet reached the degree of intimacy it would later attain.
A gifted pianist, the fifteen‑year‑old Rudolph performed in the music‑loving salons of the Viennese aristocracy—the very milieu frequented by Beethoven himself. According to Schindler, it was in the years 1803–1804 that Rudolph became Beethoven’s pupil, first in piano playing and, shortly thereafter, in composition.
The earliest evidence of a closer relationship dates from 1808, the year in which Beethoven dedicated to his future patron the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 58—the first in a long succession of dedications that would include many of the composer’s most significant works.
It is also noteworthy that Prince Lobkowitz held regular concerts in his palace, events in which Beethoven often participated and at which the Archduke himself frequently performed. Johann Friedrich Reichardt heard Rudolph play “mehrere der schwersten Sachen von Prinzen Louis Ferdinand und von Beethoven auf dem Fortepiano mit vieler Fertigkeit, Präzision und Zartheit” (“several of the most difficult pieces by Prince Louis Ferdinand and by Beethoven on the fortepiano with great skill, precision, and delicacy”), and he had occasion to admire a performance of demanding trios by the same composers, in which Rudolph was joined by the violinist Karl August Seidler and the cellist Anton Kraft: “Bei dem Fürsten von Lobkowitz währen die schönen Quartetten und die Abendkonzerte für den Erzherzog Rudolph noch immer fort, ungeachtet der Fürst selbst im Begriff ist, zu seinem Bataillon nach Böhmen zu gehen. Letzt haben wir da … Seidler selbst zeichnet sich bei jedem Konzert durch eigene Konzertsätze und durch seine vortreffliche Art aus, dem Erzherzoge die schweren Beethovenschen und Louis Ferdinandschen Trios zu begleiten, worin der brave Violoncellist Kraft oft auch seine alte Meisterschaft zeigt.” (Vertraute Briefe, letters of 8 January, p. 294, and 1 March 1809, pp. 467–468).
In that same year, 1809, Rudolph joined Princes Kinsky and Lobkowitz in establishing a lifetime annuity for Beethoven, intended to secure the composer’s permanent residence in Vienna. For the Archduke, retaining Beethoven in the Habsburg capital was not merely an act of patriotism; it also ensured the continuation of his own composition lessons with the master from Bonn.
In this connection, the scholar Gustav Nottebohm argued that the Studien (“Ludwig van Beethoven’s Studien im Generalbasse, Contrapuncte und in der Compositions‑Lehre aus dessen handschriftlichem Nachlasse gesammelt und hrsg. von Ignaz von Seyfried”), published in 1832 as Beethoven’s personal studies in composition, harmony, and counterpoint, were in fact a course prepared by Beethoven for one of his pupils—and at that time his most important pupil was indeed Archduke Rudolph. This collection of excerpts, divided into five sections, was purchased by the publisher Tobias Haslinger at the auction of Beethoven’s estate in October 1827. Haslinger passed them to Ignaz von Seyfried (1776–1841), who published them in 1832. Only in 1872 did Nottebohm, after careful study and investigation, establish that a substantial portion of these studies must have been intended as a course in musical theory for a distinguished student of Beethoven—a thesis later supported by the biographer A. W. Thayer. Moreover, since Beethoven kept these papers until his death, it is likely that he copied them as a guide or tool for correcting Rudolph’s compositional difficulties. In a letter to Haslinger in 1822, Beethoven wrote that he was then teaching counterpoint to a certain person and could not find that person’s compositions on the subject among his papers. This individual was almost certainly Archduke Rudolph (though some have suggested his nephew Karl), and the counterpoint lessons of 1822 may have served Rudolph in preparing his fugue for the variation on Diabelli’s waltz (see below).
Rudolph thus became Beethoven’s true patron. His most generous and enlightened act was his leading role in the agreement—formalized in a contract dated 1 March 1809—granting the composer an annual income of 4,000 florins in exchange for his commitment to reside in Vienna “or in some other city within the hereditary lands of His Imperial Austrian Majesty.” Of this sum, Rudolph pledged 1,500 florins, while Prince Lobkowitz contributed 700 and Prince Kinsky 1,800. Rudolph’s share was paid to Beethoven with scrupulous regularity. The composer’s financial situation improved only briefly, however, as the Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe and, with it, the incomes of the noble signatories. Within a short time both Prince Lobkowitz and Prince Kinsky had died. Yet Princess Kinsky proved herself a woman of honor and generosity, as did the Lobkowitz heirs, and despite the difficulties the payments continued for many years.
The earliest documentation of Rudolph’s lessons with Beethoven dates from 1809–1810, when, during the French siege of Vienna, the composer assembled excerpts from various theoretical works for his pupil’s instruction.
The Imperial family took refuge in Hungary, and during the long winter months Rudolph composed two of his earliest works, dated March and May 1810. At the end of that year, after the family’s return to Vienna, lessons resumed, as attested by a letter from Beethoven to Rudolph in December apologizing for having missed a scheduled lesson. This was merely the first of many such letters written over the next fourteen years. Most of the Archduke’s compositions date from the period 1810–1824, coinciding with the years of his active study with Beethoven. Their surviving correspondence comprises roughly one hundred letters.
Because of his institutional and ecclesiastical duties, Rudolph was often obliged to be absent from Vienna for extended periods; yet whenever he returned to the capital, he resumed his long and regular lessons without delay.
On 25 April 1823, Beethoven complained to Ferdinand Ries: “Der Aufenthalt des Cardinals durch 4 Wochen hier, wo ich alle Tage 2 1/2 ja 3 Stunden Lection geben musste, raubte mir viel Zeit, denn bei solchen Lectionen ist man des andern Tages kaum im Stande zu denken viel weniger zu schreiben,” (“The Cardinal’s [Archduke Rudolph’s] four‑week stay here, during which I was obliged to give him lessons of two and a half, even three hours every day, robbed me of much time. After such lessons one is scarcely able, the next day, even to think—let alone to write.”)
And in November 1824 he wrote to the publisher Schott’s Söhne: “So muß ich jetzt dafür alle Tage 2 Stunden Lekzion geben bey Sr. kaiserl. Hoheit dem Erzherzog Rudolph, dies nimmt mich so her, daß ich beinahe zu allem andern unfähig bin.” (“Now I must give His Imperial Highness Archduke Rudolph a two‑hour lesson every day. This takes so much out of me that I am almost incapable of any other work.”)
Beethoven was careful, however, never to reveal his exasperation to his noble patron. The tone of his letters to the Archduke remained uniformly formal and deferential.
Despite his monarchical position and his ecclesiastical obligations, Rudolph appears to have devoted the greater part of his free time to music—playing, composing, collecting, and meticulously cataloguing his extensive musical library. Far from being a dilettante, the Archduke pursued composition with seriousness and discipline. This is evident not only from his surviving works but also from the hundreds of pages of sketches on which he laboured, reworking his ideas much as his Master had done.
Beethoven’s involvement in Rudolph’s music is visible in the many corrections and alterations he marked on the Archduke’s manuscripts. Most of these adjustments concern small details affecting melodic contour, rhythmic articulation, or chordal voicing; yet in certain compositions—such as the present Forty Variations—the corrections include the complete rewriting of passages spanning several measures. It is noteworthy that, as a rule, Beethoven refrained from imposing his own personality upon his pupil, allowing Rudolph to express his own compositional voice.
After 1824, Archduke Rudolph appears to have ceased composing, perhaps because much of his inspiration had been bound to Beethoven’s instruction. In those final years, the Master of Bonn withdrew increasingly from the world around him. Following Beethoven’s death in March 1827, Rudolph turned his attention to other pursuits. When he drafted his will—preserved in several holograph versions—the provision of greatest significance to us is his wish to bequeath his musical collection to the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.
When this institution was founded in 1814, it was Archduke Rudolph, acting as representative of the imperial family, who became its first patron. Three years after his death, in 1834, the vast collection of musical manuscripts (including important Beethoven autographs), printed music, and books on music—assembled by the Archduke since childhood and carefully catalogued—was transferred from the palace library at Kremsier to Vienna.
In accordance with the instructions in his will, after his death the Archduke’s heart was removed and placed within the walls of St. Wenceslas Cathedral in Olmütz, the seat of his archbishopric. A small bust of Rudolph, set in a niche on one of the walls, still commemorates him today. His body rests in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna, alongside many other members of the Habsburg family.
Archduke Rudolph of Austria – His Music and His Relationship with Beethoven
The greater part of Archduke Rudolph’s compositions is preserved today in two principal locations. Most of them—including nearly all the autograph manuscripts—are housed in the archives of the Státní Zámek (State Castle) in Kroměříž, Czechoslovakia, Rudolph’s former residence; approximately twenty works (many of them copies, though some are autographs) are held in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. The Archduke’s complete oeuvre, fully described and numbered by Rudolph himself in his thematic catalogue, may be summarized as follows: twenty‑seven completed compositions (thematic catalogue nos. 1–27); thirty‑five unfinished works (nos. U 1–U 35), some lacking only one or two pages to be complete; twenty‑eight transcriptions, arrangements, or manuscript copies of works by other composers—chiefly Beethoven, Mozart, and Handel (nos. T 1–T 28); and several hundred pages of miscellaneous sketches, ranging from a few measures to multi‑page drafts.
The three works published during Rudolph’s lifetime were: these Forty Variations (S. A. Steiner & Co., Vienna, 1819); the Sonata in A major for clarinet and piano, Sonate für Pianoforte und Clarinette von R. E. H. II dem Grafen Ferdinand Troyer gewidmet (S. A. Steiner & Co., 1822); and a fugue‑variation (see illustration) contributed to the set of fifty variations commissioned by Anton Diabelli on his waltz theme and published in 1824 under the title 50 Veränderungen über einen Walzer für das Piano‑Forte … Vaterländischer Künstlerverein …, composed by the foremost composers and virtuosi of Vienna and the Austrian imperial states.
Beethoven’s corrections and suggested revisions appear in six of Rudolph’s compositions—five autograph manuscripts and one copyist’s transcription.
Rudolph composed primarily for the piano, both as a solo instrument and in combination with other instruments or voice. Among his instrumental works, those featuring wind instruments stand out, particularly pieces for clarinet, basset horn, and czakan (a walking‑stick‑shaped flute fashionable in Vienna at the time). These works were undoubtedly conceived for two highly skilled wind players, the brothers Count Ferdinand and Franz de Troyer.
It was, however, in the genre of variations that Rudolph excelled—works in which he allowed his imagination to unfold in original and often ingenious ideas. These Forty Variations are exemplary in this regard.
Beethoven dedicated a remarkable number of works—many of them major compositions—to Rudolph, who received more dedications from the composer than any other individual. The first dates from 1808: the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 58. In 1811 Beethoven dedicated to him the Fifth Piano Concerto, Op. 73, and the Piano Sonata in E‑flat major, Op. 81a. The three movements of the sonata commemorate the Archduke’s departure, absence, and return after seeking refuge with his family from the advancing French army in Ofen (Budapest) from May 1809 to January 1810. After 1811, Beethoven dedicated to Rudolph Ignaz Moscheles’s piano arrangement of the final version of Fidelio (Op. 72) (1814); in 1816, the Violin Sonata in G major (Op. 96) and the Piano Trio in B‑flat major (Op. 97), now universally known as the “Archduke”; in 1819, the Hammerklavier Sonata (Op. 106); in 1823, the Piano Sonata in C minor (Op. 111); and in 1827, the Grosse Fuge for string quartet (Op. 133) and its arrangement for piano four hands (Op. 134), as well as the Missa solemnis (Op. 123), a work intimately associated with the Archduke from its inception. It was conceived for Rudolph’s installation as Archbishop of Olmütz on 9 March 1820, though it was not completed in time. Finally, Beethoven wrote for Rudolph the canon Seiner kaiserlichen Hoheit … Alles Gute, alles Schöne (WoO 179), along with a brief musical joke (WoO 205e).
In 1827 the publisher Artaria issued a beautiful copper engraving of Beethoven by Joseph Steinmüller, after a drawing by Johann Stephan Decker, dedicated to Archduke Rudolph.
We must also recall the so‑called Rudolph Collection, now preserved at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna: sixty‑one volumes of printed music purchased by the Archduke in 1823. The Rudolph Collection was the result of a remarkable collaborative project between Beethoven and the publisher Haslinger between 1817 and 1821. Haslinger conceived the idea of producing a deluxe handwritten edition of Beethoven’s works, prepared by Mathias Schwarz and Friedrich Warsow—Schwarz copying the music, Warsow engraving the titles. At the time, the edition comprised fifty‑one volumes. When England expressed interest in acquiring the set, Archduke Rudolph purchased it in September 1823 for 4,000 florins. In the following years he had the collection completed, bringing the total to sixty‑one volumes.
In December 1828 Tobias Haslinger announced the publication of an edition of Beethoven’s works dedicated to the Archduke. The dedication appeared in the first fascicle (reproduced here), but only several series—some incomplete—were issued between 1828 and 1845 before the project was abandoned. Series I comprises the piano sonatas; Series II various piano pieces; Series V the (not entirely complete) sonatas for piano and violin; Series VI the sonatas for piano and cello; Series VII the piano trios; Series VIII the quartets and quintets with piano; Series X the string trios; Series XI the string quartets; and Series XII the piano concertos.
Archduke Rudolph of Austria – Forty Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, WoO 200 “O Hoffnung”
The theme of the Forty Variations is a very brief four‑bar Lied, O Hoffnung (WoO 200), composed by Beethoven for the Archduke in the spring of 1818. The autograph of O Hoffnung is preserved today in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (Mus. Beethoven 52). The short text—“O Hoffnung, o Hoffnung! Du stahlst die Herzen, vertreibst die Schmerzen” (“O Hope, O Hope! You steal the heart, you banish sorrow”)—is likewise preserved in autograph form in the archives of the Státní Zámek.
The autograph sketches and drafts of the Forty Variations held in the Kroměříž archive include two versions of the work and six pages of Rudolph’s autograph sketches containing Beethoven’s corrections. Both versions were revised in detail by Beethoven, sometimes directly on Rudolph’s manuscript, sometimes in the nearest margin.
After receiving the theme, the Archduke set to work composing the variations and sent a draft to Beethoven in the autumn of 1818. Beethoven wrote his suggestions for minor alterations on five sheets, which are still preserved in the Státní Zámek archives. Several letters in the correspondence between the Archduke and Beethoven describe Rudolph’s work on the variations in detail. Beethoven was pleasantly impressed by the composition, and in the spring of 1819 he suggested that it be published. He described the variations as “masterly,” referred to Rudolph as “favoured of the Muses” and “the spirit of Apollo,” and arranged with S. A. Steiner, his publisher at the time, to bring the work to print. He even proposed a title: “Theme or exercise set by L. v. Beeth[oven], upon which forty variations have been written and dedicated to his teacher by His Excellency the composer.”
When the variations appeared in print at the end of 1819, the title page read: Aufgabe von Ludwig van Beethoven gedichtet, vierzig Mahl verändert und ihrem Verfasser gewidmet von seinem Schüler R: E: H: (“Exercise composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, varied forty times and dedicated to its author by his student R.E.H. [Rudolph Erzherzog]”).
Two highly laudatory reviews of the publication appeared in major musical journals in 1820: one in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 19 January 1820, and the other in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 10 June 1820, which described Rudolph as a person of high rank known to the musical world as a great patron and benefactor of the arts.
In its final and definitive form, the Forty Variations is a work of considerable interest, despite the fact that thirty‑five of the variations follow the four‑bar structure of the theme with strict fidelity. The work opens with an eighty‑eight‑bar introduction in G minor marked Adagio. In the first four variations Rudolph adopts a procedure similar to that used by Beethoven in the Eroica Variations, Op. 35: beginning with a single melodic line and adding contrapuntal voices one by one, until by Variation 4 all four voices appear in the chorale‑like style of the original theme.
With Variation 5—marked by a change of tempo and a departure from the chorale texture—Rudolph employs an imaginative and resourceful range of stylistic and technical devices to produce continuous variety while remaining faithful to the four‑bar foundation. He adopts diverse rhythmic patterns such as triplets, syncopations, and more.
The final five variations expand in length and complexity, following a traditional pattern that includes a slow variation (Var. 36, in an improvisatory style), a march (Var. 37), and a minuet (Var. 39). Variation 40, the finale, is the longest and most complex: a kind of rondo with two contrasting sections, followed by a fugue of roughly ninety bars. Owing to the contrapuntal writing, some passages of the fugue are rather challenging to play, yet overall Rudolph’s piano writing is idiomatic and of moderate difficulty.
50 Veränderungen über einen Walzer für das Piano-Forte
Wien, bey A. Diabelli et Comp.
S.R.D. Var. 40 -Fuga Allegro (pagg. 63 / 65).
