Duet in E flat for viola and cello, ‘with two obbligato eyeglasses’

One of the first friends Beethoven made after he arrived in Vienna in 1792 was Nikolaus Zmeskall, an official in the Hungarian Chancellery who was also an accomplished cellist and a competent composer. It was probably for their joint amusement – Beethoven enjoyed playing viola – that he wrote the Duet in E flat with “two obbligato eyeglasses.” Both of them wore glasses to read music. Unfortunately, the work was never finished and it is unlikely that they ever played it with or without obbligato. The first movement (which, Beethoven having omitted to specify a tempo, is assumed to be an Allegro) is complete as it stands in the manuscript in the British Library’s Kafka Sketchbook and, although the composer’s intentions are unclear at some points, the Menuetto has been convincingly reconstructed from the same source. There is a fragmentary beginning of a second (slow) movement but no trace of a finale.

While Beethoven’s sense of humour did not extend much beyond the title, the Allegro has a pleasing informality in design. The opening theme is not unlike that of the String Quartet Op.18 No.4 except that this E flat major version has nothing like the urgency of its C minor counterpart. At the same time, while it seems for a while that Beethoven is about to adopt the classical duo convention of systematically exchanging material between the two instruments, he apparently prefers to let them go their own way in a structure that is determined more by spontaneity than by a conscience for symmetry. There is an amusing exchange of pizzicato and bowed notes in a brief cadenza just before the start of the recapitulation. The Menuetto is similarly congenial with a startling harmonic diversion in the middle while the Trio section offers a taste of the imitative counterpoint little in evidence in the work so far.