Re: 980820 MMDigest

Rick Inzero said in MMD980820:

>Bill Kibler writes:

>> The Panharmonicon was a behemoth automated mechanical orchestral
>> machine ...  It could also be made to shoot off muskets and other
>> weaponry.

> Whoooo-eeee!  I no longer want a Wimpy Wurtitzer!
> I'm gonna get me one of these babies!
> No castanets -- cannon instead!!
> Ka-boom!    :-)

There was a short article about Beethoven's and Mozart's mechanical
music by Adrian Pearson, an extract from his own private work
"Automatic Musical Instruments", in the London Player-Piano Group
Bulletin #120 (Christmas 1991 - in fact my last as editor before
Julian Dyer so illustriously took over). On this subject Pearson,
having mentioned the "watchmaker" Count Deym who had commissioned the
famous Fantasie K608 for a clock from Mozart, went on:

  Beethoven, too, came into contact with the eccentric Count Deym and
  was persuaded to write a few pieces for one of his contraptions.
  Beethoven strangely enjoyed listening to the large cafe flute
  clocks - Cherubini's "Media" Overture was his favourite. Three
  pieces, an Adagio in F, a Scherzo in G and an Allegro in G,
  composed by him for such instruments as these were recently found
  in his autograph in the Berlin State Library.

  However, Beethoven's best-known touch with automatic music was
  through the Viennese mechanician Johann Maelzel (inventor of the
  ear trumpet, mechanical chess player and metronome, as well as
  many mechanical instruments) who persuaded the composer to embark
  on a full-scale symphonic work, the battle symphony "The Battle
  of Vittoria", destined to be applied to his Panharmonikon, a
  massive machine of automatic flutes, clarinets, trumpets, violins,
  cellos, drums, cymbals and triangle. Eventually Beethoven
  abandoned the idea and continued writing it as a full symphony
  after continuous quarrelling with Maelzel.

Pearson added a footnote that a Panharmonikon survives in the
Landesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart - but then a PPG member wrote in to
say that this was only the case until 1942, when it and the museum
were totally destroyed in a bombing raid by the USAAF. Rick is only
56 years short of being able to rescue it !

Dan Wilson, London