They would stage improvisation contests. Shootouts, I'd like to call them, where each nobleman, aristocrat would sponsor a piano virtuoso and they would set them against each other, one would improvise then the other would have to imitate the tune, improvise on it, then the second one would set a new tune and the first would have to improvise on it. And Beethoven, arrived from Bonn, ill-kempt with this funny Rhineland accent, hair all over the place and he would take on these bewigged befrogged virtuosos and just ram them out of town.

 

Without the support of his patrons, without the kind of material and public relations, tasks that they carried out on his behalf, he would not have been able to compose as he did, ah he could well have composed, but it's questionable whether he'd have been able to find venues for performances, whether he’d been able to enlist musicians, whether he would have been heard, whether he would have been published, and therefore whether his music would survive today.

 

With his Opus. 18 set of String Quartets, Beethoven now 28, began to organize his musical ideas more systematically.

 

Right from the early stage, he used to make rough draft to his works. And he jotted these down on various scraps of paper, and then he found these scraps of paper getting so muddily and disorganized, that he really needed to start using a proper manuscript book for jotting these ideas down. And so he started using what are known as sketch books, which have lots of musical fragments all over the place. He used to wander around the countryside, with a little bit of manuscript paper in his hand, and the pencil and if he got an odd idea, he promptly jotted it down. People very often think that Beethoven was very slow at composing. It took a long time, whilst Mozart could dash off a piece very quickly. Obviously improvisation has demonstrated, he could invent music extraordinary rapidly. His music was more complex than Mozart's. And it gets more complex as he goes on and this is partly through the sketching process.