Johann Nepomuk Maelzel's mechanical orchestras

Composer's Datebook...

Maelzel's Mechanical Wonders

On today's date in 1838, the crew of the American brig Otis, docked in the harbor of La Guiara, Venezuela, was about to set sail for Philadelphia, when they discovered that one of their passengers had died in his cabin. He was the German inventor and one-time business associate of Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel.

Maelzel was born in Regensburg in 1772, the son of an organ builder. Perhaps a childhood spent among the inner workings of pipe organs predisposed young Johann to become an inventor of mechanical instruments, similar to this old Viennese flute clock. At the age of 20, Maelzel came to Vienna, and if you had 3000 florins of disposable income, you could buy one of Maelzel's mechanical wonders and hear it play short tunes by Haydn and Mozart on demand.

But Maezel didn't stop there: he invented entire mechanical orchestras, and other wonders, all to be displayed in a museum he opened in Vienna in 1812. Beethoven composed a piece for Maelzel's mechanical orchestra entitled "Wellington's Victory." The two collaborators fell out over who owned what, and in any case, Beethoven re-orchestrated his piece for conventional, human performers. Maelzel took his contraptions on tour, and spent a good deal of his later life exhibiting them in the United States and even the West Indies.

Today, Maelzel's musical inventions are regarded as obsolete curios -- with one exception: he's credited with finessing and popularizing the use of the metronome.

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel [Wikipedia]

metronome [Wikipedia]

Beethoven...plumbic poisoning?

Fascinating story about Beethoven, a fellow named Ferdinand Hiller, and 582 strands of Beethoven's head hair purloined the day after Beethoven died known as the "Guevara Lock", and the Argonne National Laboratory. The event took place in 1827...the hair was given to Paul Hiller [Ferdinand Hiller' son] on his birthday in 1883...wound up in the possession of Danish Dr. Kay Alexander Fremming [for his assistance in helping fleeing Jews from Nazi Germany]...sold in 1994 at Sotheby [London] to four members of the American Beethoven Society [Ira F. Brilliant, Caroline Crummey, Alfredo Guevara, and Thomas Wendel]...donated to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies [minus 160 strands retained by Alfredo Guevara]...Dr. William J. Walsh from the Health Research Institute and Pfeiffer Treatment Center announced DNA analysis from the "Guevara Lock" lock samples...nonfiction book by Martin, Russell released worldwide. That's most of the story in thumbnail form, but what does that have to do with the Argonne National Laboratory. It was stipulated from the DNA analysis that Beethoven most likely was a victim of plumbism--lead poisoning and was a direct accumulated precipitating factor for Beethoven's illness and demise. In 2000 at the Argonne National Laboratory a hair sample was subjected to Advanced Photon Source [APS] X-ray emissions and confirmed that there was substantial lead content; that the sample contained 60ppm of lead--100 times more than normal human concentrations.


Beethoven's Hair : An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

by

Martin, Russell

ISBN: 0767903501