21 To the Beethoven Committee at Bonn
[Printed in L. Ramann’s Biography of Liszt, vol. 1]
Gentlemen,
As the subscription for Beethoven’s monument is only getting on slowly, and as the carrying out of this undertaking seems to be rather far distant, I venture to make a proposal to you, the acceptance of which would make me very happy. [In Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace, a committee had been formed to erect a Beethoven monument. Yet, in spite of the assent which met the proposal, the contributions flowed in so meagrely—Paris, for example, contributed only 424 francs 90 centimes—that Liszt, on reading this in a paper, immediately formed the noble resolution mentioned in the above letter. “Such a niggardly almsgiving, got together with such trouble and sending round the hat, must not be allowed to help towards building our Beethoven’s monument!” he wrote to Berlioz. Thus the German nation has in great measure to thank Franz Liszt for the monument erected to its greatest composer at Bonn.]
I offer myself to make up, from my own means, the sum still wanting for the erection of the monument, and ask no other privilege than that of naming the artist who shall execute the work. That artist is Bartolini of Florence, who is universally considered the first sculptor in Italy.
I have spoken to him about the matter provisionally, and he assures me that a monument in marble (which would cost about fifty to sixty thousand francs) could be finished in two years, and he is ready to begin the work at once. I have the honor to be, etc.,
Franz Liszt
Pisa, October 3rd, 1839