Appendix B - The Ludlamshöhle Petition, Late February, 1824

Summary

To Herr Ludwig van Beethoven.

Out of the wide circle of reverent admirers that surrounds your genius in this, your second native city [Vienna], a small number of disciples and lovers of art approach you today to express long-felt wishes, and humbly to proffer a long-suppressed request.

But, since the number of spokesmen is only a small portion of the many who joyfully acknowledge your worth and your significance for both the present time and the future, then the wishes and the requests are by no means restricted to the number of those who speak for others of like mind and who, in the name of all to whom art and the realization of their ideals are more than the means and objects of leisure, assert that their wish is also the wish of an innumerable multitude, their request is echoed aloud or in silence by everyone whose breast is animated by a sense of the divine in music.

Above all, the wishes of those of our countrymen who venerate art are those that we desire to express here; for although Beethoven's name and his creations belong to all of today's humanity and every country that opens a sensitive heart to art, it is Austria that is first entitled to claim him as her own. Among her inhabitants, appreciation for the great and immortal works that Mozart and Haydn created for all time within the bosom of their homeland has not died. With joyous pride, these inhabitants are conscious that the holy triumvirate, in which these names and yours glow as the symbol of the highest within the spiritual realm of tones, sprang from the soil of the fatherland.

It must be all the more painful for them [Austrians] to feel that a foreign power [Italian music] has invaded this royal citadel of its noblest ideas [Vienna], that above the graves of the departed [Mozart and Haydn] and around the dwelling places of the only member of that band who remains to us [Beethoven], phantoms who can boast no kinship with the princely spirits of those houses are leading the dance; that shallowness [Rossinian opera] is abusing the name and identity of art, and, in an unworthy dalliance with sacred things, is beclouding and dissipating appreciation for the pure and eternally beautiful.