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| THE BEETHOVEN SECRETAIRE
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An Exceptional Viennese Empire Mechanical Organ Secrétaire, the movement by Franz Egidius Arzt playing Beethoven’s Battle Symphony
Circa 1815
Height: 191 cm (6 ft. 3 in.)
Width: 108 cm (3 ft. 6 ½ in.)
Depth: 61 cm (2 ft.)
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Veneered in ash and ebonised wood with ormolu mounts, the arched top with a silk-backed pierced fan opening for the sound above a frieze drawer and a fall front opening to reveal a tooled leather writing surface and an internal arrangement in mahogany of three pigeonholes above a central compartment flanked by ebonised half columns and three drawers either side over an arcaded surface painted with the Four Seasons in oil, with two cupboard doors below opening to reveal a long false drawer above two opening drawers veneered in blond mahogany, the sides with hinged doors to access the clockwork organ movement signed Egittus Arzt in Winn.
On 21st June 1813 the Duke of Wellington won a resounding victory over the French forces led by Joseph Bonaparte at Vittoria in Spain. The battle led to the collapse of Napoleonic rule in Spain and the end of the Peninsular War. When news of the victory reached Vienna the celebrated mechanician Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (1772-1838), inventor of the metronome, commissioned his friend Beethoven, to whom he had supplied special ear-trumpets, to write a celebratory ‘battle piece’ to be played on his newly constructed Panharmonicon. This was a large mechanical instrument, which, in addition to a pipe organ, had a number of special effects imitating gunfire and cannon on drums. The basic mechanism was identical to that of the present organ, the musical score reproduced by means of a large pinned wooden cylinder activating a set of brass and steel keys powered by a weight driven clockwork movement.
Beethoven set to work in August 1813 and Wellington’s Victory or the Battle of Vittoria, commonly known as the ‘Battle Symphony’ was completed by the end of September. He also made an orchestral version of which the first public performance took place in Vienna on 8th December 1813, in a concert including the premiere of the Seventh Symphony, and it immediately enjoyed enormous popular acclaim, not least because of its rousing patriotic celebration of victory over the French. The inclusion of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ was specifically intended to appeal to British audiences, and Beethoven dedicated the work to the Prince Regent (later King George IV).
The secrétaire plays a shortened version of the symphony with the opening fanfare followed by Rule Britannia representing the British forces and Malbrouck the French. This is followed by a sinfonia for the battle and God Save the King celebrating the victory. The piece ends with a closing sinfonia.
The weight-driven clockwork mechanism is allied to an organ with 44 pipes in four ranks with piano and forte registration. The music is pinned onto a large wooden cylinder which revolves six times in spiral motion, giving approximately four minutes of music. The mechanism is activated by a bronze knob on the lower- right-hand drawer, inside the secrétaire, which doubles as the drawer-pull.
Franz Egidius Arzt, the maker of the mechanism, was born in Vienna in 1756, where he was recorded as a clockmaker at no.123 Laimgrube both in 1805-1808 and again in 1820. Two other organ secretaries (Flötenuhren) with movements signed by Arzt are recorded, one in the collection of the University of Leipzig and the other in the National Museum of Music Automata, Seewen, Switzerland (information kindly provided by Dr Helmut Kowar of the Audiovisiual Archive, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna). The former instrument is believed to have been ordered by Prince Joseph Johann von Schwarzenberg. The Seewen instrument is housed in a much simpler neoclassical secrétaire, with plain mahogany veneer and discreet gilt bronze mounts.
No Panharmonica have survived (an example in the Landesmuseum Stuttgart was destroyed in World War II), and this secretaire is now the only known surviving, exactly contemporary, instrument which plays Beethoven’s major work composed for mechanical organ. This makes it of unique musicological interest and significance.
The organ mechanism is in very fine state, the barrel, in particular being entirely undisturbed. The mechanism, bellows and pipes have recently been restored by Martin Wyss of Maikirch in Switzerland, recommended to Pelham Galleries by Dr Kowar, who has made the most detailed study of surviving Viennese Flötenurhen. The full technical conservation report is available on request.
The secrétaire is an archetypal example of Viennese cabinetmaking in the second decade of the nineteenth century, which marked an amalgam of traditional and emerging tendencies. The form continues in the vein of classical furniture of the 1790s in German-speaking Europe, heavily influenced by the Louis XVI style in France, while the discreet gilt bronze mounts, derived from military and Antique themes and including sunburst Apollo masks, dolphin handles and radiating arrows, are thoroughly in keeping with the Viennese interpretation of the French Empire style during the Napoleonic era. The technique of backing the gilt-bronze mounts with raised ebony veneers set on lighter-coloured veneers is a distinctive trait in Viennese Empire furniture, and appears for example on the drawer pulls of an Austrian fall-front secrétaire dated 1811 in the collection of the Dresden Museum für Kunsthandwerk, illustrated in Georg Himmelheber, Die Kunst des Deutschen Möbels (Munich 1983), Vol. III Klassizismus Historismus Jugendstil, plate 338. This latter example, however, reserves the lighter satinwood veneers for the internal drawers only, whilst the exterior exclusively employs the mahogany so favoured of the Empire period.
The simplicity of pure geometric forms in the piece prefigures the emerging pared-down Biedermeier style adopted in the next decade by Joseph Danhauser, Carl Schmidt and others. The predominant use of Hungarian ash veneer represents an early use of lighter-coloured and often highly-figured native woods that would come to incarnate the Biedermeier style, which reached its apogee in the second quarter of the 1800s and which had a strong influence on modern furniture design.
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