Scrivono Douglas Johnson, Alan Thayson e Robert Winter su “The Beethoven Sketchbooks”:

Boldrini
location: lost (formerly in the Artaria collection) present size: 64 leaves (?)

date: fall 1817 to spring 1818 edition: none
This sketchbook, the largest of all the pocket books, has been lost since the end of the nineteenth century. Its only known owners were the Artaria family. The book appears as Taschen Notirungsbuch A in the Graffer-Fischhof catalogue of 1844 and again as entry 75 in the Adler catalogue of 1890. It must have left the collection sometime between 1890 and 1893, however, for it is missing from August Artaria’s catalogue in the latter year, and it was not part of the Artaria collection that came to the Berlin Royal Library in 1901. The book takes its name from Carlo Boldrini, who was employed by Artaria in the years from 1807 to about 1824; an inscription inside the front cover reads “Poldrini/1817/Mit inniger Empfindung, doch entschlossen, wohl/accentuirt u. sprechen vorgetr.” The latter part of the inscription is a performance indication published with the song “Resignation, ” WoO 149, which is sketched in the book, and 1817 is the year in which Beethoven began to use the book. The significance of Boldrini’s name, which Beethoven spells here and elsewhere with a “P,” is not clear. But it seems unlikely, in view of the composer’s jealous attachment to his sketchbooks, that this one left his possession during his lifetime. More probably, Boldrini’s name was a memorandum of some sort and the book entered the Artaria collection at the Nachlass auction of 1827.

Virtually all we know about this sketchbook comes from Nottebohm and Nohl, both of whom examined it in Artaria’s shop and wrote about it in the 1870s. Nohl’s description, in the third volume of his biography (pp. 97-104), appeared first and is one of his longest. But in nearly every particular it is superseded by Nottebohm’s account, which was published in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt in 1879 and later reprinted in Zweite Beethoveniana. It is to Nottebohm that we must turn for a description of the sketchbook’s physical appearance (N II, 349):

The sketchbook is bound like a book [buchbindermassig gebunden], has an old colored cover, is trimmed, is approximately 16 centimeters high and 13 centimeters wide, and consists of 128 mostly filled pages. The small format and the fact that almost all the sketches and notes were made originally in pencil, with a small number later gone over [nachgezogen] in ink, leads to the conclusion that it was meant to be carried about in a pocket and was used mostly away from home.

The size of the leaves, after trimming, is unusually small for an upright book assembled in the normal way. In fact, it approximates that of the gathering that included Paris Ms 78 and Ms 103 (about 17 x 13.5 cm), and the latter, as we have seen, was made up from larger-than-normal original sheets that had been folded an additional time, so that each pocket bifolium represented one-eighth rather than one-fourth of a sheet. If this was indeed the case, the 64 leaves in the Boldrini sketchbook would have come from four (rather than eight) original sheets. As usual, Nottebohm says nothing about the gathering structure. Forty leaves was the largest number that Beethoven himself combined into a single pocket gathering, and a 64-leaf gathering might have been a bit awkward in a book of these small dimensions. A series of smaller gatherings is more likely (cf. Mendelssohn i), and this would have been the normal procedure if the book had been professionally assembled and sewn, as Nottebohm’s description indicates. Since the Artarias did not supply professional bindings for any of the sketchbooks they bought in 1827, this must have been the only one of the pocket sketchbooks that Beethoven acquired ready-made. Perhaps it was a gift to him from Boldrini, as Nottebohm suggests elsewhere in his article. The round number of leaves indicates that it was probably intact when Nottebohm described it.

In the article already cited and two others, Nottebohm surveys the contents of the Boldrini sketchbook and quotes liberally from them (cf. N II, chapters 16, 20, and 36). The one work sketched at great length was the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Opus 106, which occupies much of the book from page 18 through page 127. Preceding the Sonata there are sketches for the Fugue in D major, Opus 137, and the song “Resignation,” WoO 149, and interspersed on several pages toward the end of the book are the first substantial sketches for the first movement of the Ninth Symphony.

Several pieces of evidence point to the winter of 1817/1818 as the time in which Beethoven was using this sketchbook. The last four measures of Opus 137 were written out in score on page 5, and Nottebohm thought them to be contemporary with the Reinschriji of the work, which Beethoven inscribed “Vien am 28ten November.” In an odd bit of reasoning, Nottebohm went on to suggest that the first sketches in the book might have been made as early as September,1 but that seems too early. The song WoO 149, sketched on pages 10-16, was published in the Wiener Zeitschrift fur Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode on 31 March 1818. And on the inside of the back cover are several memoranda copied from advertisements that appeared in the Wiener Zeitung on various days between 9 and 17 December 1817; these confirm only that the book was in use at that time, without indicating how much of it had been filled.

A date for the end of the sketchbook must be extrapolated from two external pieces of evidence. Inscriptions on folio 25 of the following pocket sketchbook, Vienna A 45, indicate that Beethoven was in Modling; these must have been entered after 19 May 1818, when he arrived there (see the discussion of A 45, which follows). And a year later, in a letter to Archduke Rudolph (Anderson 948), Beethoven indicates that the first two movements of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Opus 106, had been written out prior to Rudolph’s name-day in 1818. This was 17 April. Since sketches for the second movement extend to the very end of the Boldrini sketchbook and do not appear on the first pages of A 45, it seems reasonable to conclude that Beethoven had filled Boldrini at some point in April, a conclusion that fits comfortably with a date following 19 May for the inscriptions on folio 25 of A 45. Nottebohm had rejected this interpretation on the evidence of a belated sketch for Opus 106 II on that same folio (25r-v) of A 45, arguing that the first two movements of the Sonata could not therefore have been ready on 17 April 1818. But this is probably too literal a reading of Beethoven’s words. Nottebohm saw only the end of the letter, which read “To the two pieces in my handwriting composed for Y.I.H.’s name-day, I have added two more . . and concluded that the name-day in question must have been 17 April 1819 (problematical, certainly, since the entire Sonata had been completed well before that time). But the letter survives in two fragments, and in the earlier portion, which Nottebohm did not see, Beethoven says specifically, “I enclose two pieces on which I have written that I had in fact composed them last year [i.e., 1818] before Your Imperial Highness’s name-day.”2 We may therefore suggest that the Boldrini sketchbook was in use from the fall of 1817 to April of 1818.

As a postscript to this discussion, it is worth noting that Nohl arrived at an earlier date for the book. Using faulty evidence based on a change of apartments in early 1817 and a mistaken association of the cover inscription with the song “Das Geheim-nis,” WoO 145, rather than “Resignation,” he insisted that the sketchbook had been filled in 1816. It is typical of Nohl that in doing so he drew attention to some of Nottebohm’s earlier remarks on the date of Opus 106, adopting a supercilious tone that is characteristic of much of his writing (Nohl III, 835). Equally characteristic is Nottebohm’s failure to mention Nohl in his own subsequent (and essentially correct) review of the chronology of the sketchbook.