[Sidenote: PASSING OF OLD FRIENDS, COMING OF NEW]
Walter Scott somewhere remarks: "It is seldom that the same circle of personages, who have surrounded an individual at his first outset in life, continue to have an interest in his career till his fate comes to a crisis. On the contrary, and more especially if the events of his life be of a varied character and worth communicating to others, or to the world, the hero's later connections are usually totally separated from those with whom he began the voyage, but whom the individual has outsailed, or who have drifted astray, or foundered on the passage."
A few years more and this will begin to be very true of Beethoven. The old familiar names will rapidly disappear and new ones take their places; some half a dozen perhaps will remain to the end. But this is not yet. The old friends, Lichnowsky, Rasoumowsky, Erdödy and that class, Streicher, Zizius, Breuning and their class, are his friends still. We see less of them, because Beethoven is no longer the great pianist performing in the saloons of the nobles, or playing his new compositions in the lodgings of his untitled admirers. His astonishing playing in the concert of December, 1808--which completed full thirty years since his appearance in Cologne as a prodigy--proved to be, as it happened, the splendid close of his career as a virtuoso. He had surely earned the right to retire and leave that field to his pupils, of whom Baroness Ertmann and Carl Czerny were preëminent as performers of his music. In the more private concerts he had already long given place to the Baroness; and now Czerny began to take it before the public, even to the extent of introducing his last new composition for pianoforte and orchestra. Theodor Körner, lately arrived in Vienna, writes home under date February 15:
On Wednesday, for the benefit of the Society of Noble Ladies for Charity, a concert and tableaux, representing three pictures by Raphael, Poussin and Troyes as described by Goethe in his "Elective Affinities," were given. The pictures offered a glorious treat, a new pianoforte concerto by Beethoven failed.
Castelli's "Thalia" gives the reason, why this noble work on this, its first public performance in Vienna, was so coldly received: