(b Regensburg, 15 Aug 1772; d at sea, 21 July 1838). German inventor. The son of an organ builder, he settled in Vienna in 1792 and devoted himself to teaching music and to constructing various mechanical devices, including a chronometer, and an automatic instrument of organ pipes imitating flutes and trumpets, and drums, cymbals and a triangle struck by hammers, which played music by Haydn, Mozart and Crescentini. In 1804 Maelzel began touring with his mechanical devices, and as an added attraction he bought a mechanical chessplayer. He also constructed an automatic Trumpeter, which played Austrian and French Cavalry marches and signals, as well as allegros by Weigl, Dussek and Pleyel. In 1805 Maelzel displayed the mechanical orchestra and the chessplayer in Paris; later both were sold there, the orchestra to a Mr Irving of Aberdeen, and the chessplayer to Eugène Beauharnais. Irving shipped the orchestra to Boston in 1811, where it was exhibited throughout the eastern states. Eventually it was sent to Cuba, where it was lost at sea. An American copy of the orchestra was made by a Mr Savage and W.M. Goodrich, and exhibited in Boston in 1824.
In 1808 Maelzel was appointed court mechanician in Vienna, and he and his younger brother Leonhard began manufacturing ear trumpets, one of which was used by Beethoven. Maelzel also constructed another mechanical orchestra, the Panharmonicon. While the first orchestra he created was patterned after a Turkish (Janissary) band, the second resembled a chamber orchestra consisting of trumpets, clarinets, violins, violas and cellos and probably percussion instruments. It was worked by descending weights acting upon pinned barrels. In 1812 Maelzel opened his Kunstkabinett, which had among its attractions the Trumpeter and a new and enlarged Panharmonicon; soon afterwards he made public a musical chronometer, an improvement of a machine by Stöckel, for which he obtained certificates from Beethoven and other leading musicians.
At this time Maelzel and Beethoven were on friendly terms. They arranged to visit London together, proposing to take the Panharmonicon with them, and Maelzel eased Beethoven’s financial straits by urging on him the loan of 50 ducats in gold. For the Panharmonicon Beethoven composed the ‘Battle Symphony’, commemorating the Battle of Vitoria (21 June 1813). Maelzel suggested using patriotic themes, Rule, Britannia and God Save the King; he also provided the overall compositional plan and sketched in detail the drum marches and trumpet calls of the French and English armies. Maelzel further induced Beethoven to score the piece for orchestra, with a view to obtaining funds for the journey; thus scored, it was performed at a concert in Vienna on 8 December 1813 in a programme that also included Beethoven’s Symphony no.7, and the marches by Dussek and Pleyel (by the Trumpeter). The concert was repeated on 12 December, and the two yielded a profit of over 4000 florins. But Beethoven took offence at Maelzel’s having announced the battle-piece as his property, broke completely with him, rejected the Trumpeter and its marches and held a third concert (2 January 1814) for his sole benefit. Maelzel departed for Munich with his Panharmonicon, including the battle-piece arranged on its barrel, and also with a full orchestral score of it, which he had obtained from compiling the instrumental parts without Beethoven’s concurrence. When Maelzel had the orchestral piece performed at Munich, Beethoven entered an action against him in the Vienna courts. Beethoven also addressed a statement to the musicians of London, entreating them not to support Maelzel, who arrived there in 1814 and performed the Battle Symphony the following year. That same year, Maelzel travelled to Amsterdam, where from the inventor Diederich Nikolaus Winkel he appropriated the idea of using a balanced, double-ended pendulum as a chronometer. He soon perfected the instrument by adding scale divisions behind the pendulum which indicate the number of beats per minute. After examining many musical compositions, Maelzel gave numerical values to all of the common tempo terms.
In 1815 Maelzel patented the Metronome, both in London and Paris, and the following year began manufacturing it in Paris, as Mälzl & Cie. He issued two promotional guides to its use, in French and German (1816). The word ‘metronome’ does not appear before 1815, and although there is a long history of musical timekeepers before him the familiar wooden-box metronome remains to this day almost exactly like his later models (for a further account of Maelzel’s invention, see Metronome (i)).
With this new venture he no longer needed his Panharmonicon, so he sold it to the Abbé Larroque. Although the remains were later found and reassembled in Stuttgart in 1935, only 12 of its barrels survived the bombing of that city during World War II.
Wishing to repurchase the chessplayer and to promote his metronome, Maelzel returned to Munich and then Vienna in 1817. Beethoven’s lawsuit was abandoned and the costs divided equally between them. Maelzel obtained the chessplayer on easy terms, but was soon unable to pay the Beauharnais estate, and hastily sailed for the USA, landing in New York on 3 February 1826. He exhibited his inventions at the National Hotel in New York until June, when he fled to Boston, pursued by the agents of the Beauharnais estate. They located him and he apparently paid them a final settlement of 4000 francs.
For the next ten years Maelzel toured various large cities in the USA. In 1837 he sailed to Havana, Cuba; the venture was financially disastrous, so he left for Philadelphia on 14 July 1838 on the brig Otis. He was found dead in his berth on 21 July, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Ironically his first mechanical orchestra had been lost at sea in the same region.
Maelzel was evidently a shrewd and energetic businessman, and as well as an inventor he was considered a good composer and pianist. He certainly built on the ideas of others, but his genius lay in the ability to recognize a marketable invention, improve it, and then present and promote it with such skill that even the most resistent composer could be persuaded to try one of his products, such as the metronome, or to compose music for one of his musical machines, such as the Panharmonicon.
WurzbachL
A.W. Thayer: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Leben, iii (Berlin, 1866–79, rev. 2/1911; Eng. trans., 1921), 382ff
M. Reinitz: Beethoven im Kampf mit dem Schicksal (Vienna, 1924)
T. Frimmel: Beethoven-Handbuch, i (Leipzig, 1926/R), 378–81
E. Wittenberg: ‘Échec!’, American Heritage, xi/2 (1960), 34–71
P. Stadlen: ‘Beethoven and the Metronome’, ML, xlviii (1967), 330–49
M.S. Selden: ‘Henri Berton as Critic’, JAMS, xxiv (1971), 291–4
S. Howell: ‘Beethoven’s Maelzel Canon: another Schindler Forgery?’, MT, cxx (1979), 987–90
R.W. Sterl: ‘Johann Nepomuk Mälzel und seine Erfindungen’, Musik in Bayern, xxii (1981), 139–50
R.W. Sterl: ‘Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, ein Regensburger: Genie oder Scharlatan?’, Regensburger Almanach (1983), 40–44
H. Leonhardt: Der Takt messer: Johann Nepomuk Mälzel: ein lückenhafter Lebenslauf (Hamburg, 1990)
For further bibliography see Metronome (i).
ALEXANDER WHEELOCK THAYER/DIXIE HARVEY