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Outer Vienna Schwarzspanierhaus
He moved there on 15th October 1825, and it was there that he died, just one and a half years later, on 26th March 1827. The apartment was large, with a monumental staircase leading to the front door, which opened onto an ante-chamber.
Two days after moving in, he wrote in a letter that he had come to the apartment "like a shipwrecked person". Gerhard von Breuning, the young son of Beethoven's great friend Stephan von Breuning, writes in his memoir of Beethoven that the apartment was furnished "...in keeping with Beethoven's indifference to luxury."
The two pianos in Beethoven's bedroom were the one that was a gift from Thomas Broadwood & Son in London, and the one that the Viennese piano maker Conrad Graf loaned to Beethoven in about 1823. The Broadwood - which was later owned but never played on by Franz Liszt - is now in the Hungarian State Museum in Budapest. The Graf is now in the house in which Beethoven was born in Bonn.
The Schwarzspanierhaus was taken over by the Cistercian Order of the Holy Cross in 1843 and they vacated it sixty years later. Despite protests from artists worldwide, the building was pulled down in 1904.
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© John Suchet |
Beethoven's
final lodging in Vienna was on the second floor of a building outside
the city wall by the name of the 'Altes Schwarzspanierhaus' ('The Old
House of the Black-Robed Spaniard'.)
There
were seven further rooms - an entrance-hall, a small music room, a large
bedroom in which Beethoven installed two pianos, a composing room, a small
servant's room, a housekeeping area and a kitchen. A famous etching
(see picture below) made at the time shows Beethoven's study - and the
chaos in which he worked!
He
says that in the music room, on the floor, in disorder, were piles of
music, and that the room was hardly ever entered by anyone. Beethoven
worked on compositions - including the Quartets for Prince Galitzin
- in the composing room.
The
green door that was the entrance to the apartment is now in the 
