V. Gustav Nottebohm (1817-1882)

The founding father of Beethoven sketch studies. Despite some comments by a few earlier authors, Nottebohm was the first musician to carry out close study of many sketchbooks and sketch-leaves, revealing for the first time the scope and importance of this material.
Originally from north Germany, Nottebohm studied in Berlin and Leipzig (where he knew Mendelssohn and Schumann)  before settling in Vienna in 1846, where he taught theory, was active as a composer , was a member of Brahms’s circle, and carried out scholarly projects.  Brahms, who admired his work,  wrote about him that “ it is the result of immense industry and will be of the highest interest to artists, connoisseurs, and amateurs…”

Nottebohm contributed to the first collected edition of Beethoven’s works (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1862), and later published an important thematic catalogue of Beethoven’s works (1868) as well as one of Schubert’s (1874).

Main publications on Beethoven sketchbooks and related subjects:

N 65	Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven (1865)	A monograph on the Kessler sketchbook of 1801-2.	Translated into English by Jonathan Katz, Two Beethoven Sketchbooks (London, 1979).
N I	Beethoveniana (1872)	Essays on various topics
N 80	Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven aus dem Jahre 1803 (1880)	On Landsberg 6 (“Eroica” sketchbook)	translated into English by Jonathan Katz, 1979 (See above, N 65)
N II	Zweite Beethoveniana (1887)	Nottebohm’ss major essays on sketchbooks and other topics	edited posthumously for publication by E. Mandycewski

Many of N.’s essays on sketchbooks appeared in periodicals prior to their publication in N II, and there are some differences in the transcriptions. See L. Lockwood, “Nottebohm Revisited,” in J. Grubbs, ed., Current Thought in Musicology (Austin, 1970), 139-92

Two recent studies concerning Nottebohm are:
Marie Rivers Rule, The Allure of Bethoven’s :Terzen-Ketten”: Third-Chains in Studies by Nottebohm and Music by Brahms, PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011.

Marie Rivers Rule, “Tracking Trends in Beethoven’s Compositional Style: Manuscript Materials in Nottebohm’s Nachlass,” Journal of Musicological Research 32 (2013), 132-149.