Threatening Clouds on the Horizon

As Beethoven may have feared several days earlier, Duport, the resident manager of the Kärntnertor Theater, must have assumed that Beethoven would give his Akademie there1 and seems to have threatened reprisals if soprano Henriette Sontag and mezzo soprano Caroline Unger sang with Beethoven if he held it at the Theater an der Wien. Probably during the afternoon of Maundy Thursday, April 15, 1824, Schindler came to Beethoven's apartment at the corner of Ungargasse and Bockgasse (today's Beatrixgasse) and reported briefly, “Unger is quite indignant about Duport. Both girls [Unger and Sontag] are going together to see him today. She doesn't doubt a successful outcome.”3 Nephew Karl commented that in public, Duport always spoke highly of Beethoven and that he was curious to learn what he would say to the girls.

But Beethoven had never felt comfortable with Count Palffy, the current owner of the Theater an der Wien. Possibly encouraged by the publishers Steiner and Haslinger, whose shop in the Paternoster Gässchen he visited frequently, the composer started exploring the feasibility of holding his Akademie on Sunday, April 25, at the relatively small Landständischer Saal, where he could employ a composite orchestra drawn from the Kärntnertor Theater, the Burgtheater, and the Theater an der Wien, all under Ignaz Schuppanzigh as concertmaster, the way he had in the Aula of the University of Vienna and the Grosser Redoutensaal in 1813–1814. Again, nephew Karl chuckled, “Count [Moritz] Lichnowsky is really an old lady. He chanced to learn from your brother your decision to give the Akademie in the Landständischer Saal. He lamented terribly about the enmity that Palffy is developing toward you.”

That evening, Count Lichnowsky arrived with a carriage and invited Beethoven, with Schindler in tow, to spend the evening at his apartment in the Bauernmarkt, basically to reason with the composer about the venue for his concert. Before leaving, through Karl, he informed Beethoven that Sontag and Preisinger could sing at the concert if it was on April 25, but that Unger could not.