MARCH 1827
TIMEPIECE This month in history
When Beethoven wrote the last notes of the alternative finale for his Op. 130 String Quartet in the autumn of 1826 – the original ‘Grosse Fuge’ had been deemed outlandishly difficult by audiences and critics – he could not possibly have imagined it would be the final piece of music he completed. Soon after finishing it, the composer hitched a ride on a milk cart from his brother’s country residence to his home in Vienna. Overnighting in an unheated inn room in freezing weather, he contracted a hacking cough with pains in his side, and a doctor was immediately summoned when he arrived back at his apartment in Schwarzspanierstrasse.
Though concerning, news of Beethoven’s indisposition would not necessarily have alarmed his friends and associates – he had prevailed over numerous illnesses in the past three decades, many of them abdominal. But this new one quickly became more serious, with lung inflammation, spitting blood, jaundice, vomiting and diarrhoea among the symptoms.
By March 1827, the doctors despaired of a recovery and Beethoven himself knew that the end was near. ‘Pity, pity, too late,’ he whispered, when a case of his favourite wine arrived belatedly from his publisher Schott. Beethoven died on 26 March, aged 56, by one account raising his clenched fist skyward in a final defiant gesture. Speculation about the cause of death has proliferated since his passing, the most recent medical evidence identifying liver disease and hepatitis B as likely culprits.
Although in life Beethoven had railed angrily about a lack of support for himself and for his music, his death produced an outpouring of grief and respectful recognition. A steady stream of visitors arrived at the Schwarzspanierstrasse apartment to view Beethoven in an oak coffin flanked by burning candles, his head crowned by a garland of white roses, his hands clasping a cross and a white lily.
The funeral itself took place on the afternoon of 29 March and was, according to one Beethoven biographer, ‘one of the grandest Vienna ever put on for a commoner’. When the coffin was shifted to the courtyard of Beethoven’s building, crowds thronged around it, making progress difficult. Beethoven’s fellow composers Czerny, Hummel and Schubert (a torchbeare
