These were the words that were spoken by the grave of one of classical music’s greatest composers.

Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austria’s foremost poet and dramatist, was personally acquainted with the composer and had written a libretto (Melusine) for him, though, regrettably, he never set it to music. Grillparzer also wrote My Recollections of Beethoven, an important and revealing document by a contemporary. Anton Schindler had immediately approached Grillparzer on Beethoven’s death to write the funeral oration: this was to be read at the graveside by the Burgtheater actor Anschuetz. The text had first to be submitted to the official censor, since in the Metternich era political surveillance was strictly enforced. As the archbishop of Vienna did not permit a layman to speak at the graveside, Anschuetz delivered the oration beside the coffin outside the graveyard gates at Waehring. Some twenty thousand mourners were in attendance.

As we stand here by the grave of the deceased, we are, as it were the representatives of a whole nation, of the entire German people, mourning over the fall of that single far-famed portion of the vanished splendour of our native art, that indigenous flowering of the spirit. As yet there lives...