Manchester 1st International Beethoven Conference

The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, 2000

Music Analysis, 1999

Evidently disenchanted with the vein of criticism that typically greeted his music, Beethoven wrote to the music publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger in July 1825 congratulating him on his choice of Adolph Bernhard Marx as editor-inchief of the recently-founded Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In so doing he voiced the hope that Marx would 'continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of art', a process the composer of the recently-completed Ninth Symphony saw as involving infinitely more than 'the mere counting of syllables'. 1 Fifteen years earlier, as Bettina Brentano wrote to Goethe, the composer expressed a similar viewpoint when he reportedly said that 'Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses', the 'one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge … the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels'. 2 After an extended hiatus during which questions of musical meaning were viewed with scepticism if not out-and-out disdain, the position ostensibly endorsed by Beethoven is again enjoying favour. Indeed, the last two decades or so have brought with them an incredible transformation of what it means to engage in musical reflection. With the seeming force of continental plates colliding head-on, modes of understanding have shifted to the point where-in a great many quarters at least-it is no longer deemed sufficient to treat music as if it were a science whose substance is to be laid bare beneath a microscope, an isolated phenomenon where meaning is be ascertained solely within the notes. Nowadays, cultural context, gender, genre, hermeneutics and narrativity are among the near-myriad number of interdisciplinary perspectives which have found their way into a field formerly predicated on the empirically objective. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik put it almost a decade ago, 'emotion and meaning are coming out of the musicological closet'. 3 Looking back on all of these dazzling, sometimes dizzying developments, it is worth noting that Beethoven studies have almost always led the way in explorations of new critical methods; indeed, just about every analytical system from the nineteenth century to the present day has been inspired in some way by this composer. Focusing particularly on the composer's 'middle period', critics as diverse as Hoffmann, Schumann, Hanslick, Wagner, Riemann, Schenker and

Whoever walks in darkness is less lonely if they sing.

Eighteenth-Century Music, 2021

Last year Mark Evan Bonds described in these pages ‘the robust health of Beethoven research today’ (Eighteenth-Century Music 17/2 (2020), 302), and while the global health crisis affecting many scholarly and artistic events connected with Beethoven makes that description now seem inappropriate, there can hardly have been a better illustration of his assessment than the conference under discussion here. It once again showed that few other musicological topics can count on such a diversity of perspectives and methodologies, presented by scholars with a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities. Organized by the Hochschule der Künste Bern and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, and with the patronage of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, this originally three-day event was planned to be covered by Radio della Svizzera Italiana, and to feature two concerts on historical instruments. Owing to the pandemic, the entire programme took place online, and in order to minimize the number of scholars in other time zones having to participate at unreasonable hours, the sessions were shortened to three and a half hours every day, which in turn necessitated the inclusion of a fourth day in order to accommodate all the papers.

The Beethoven Journal, Vol.35, 2022

Mark Ferraguto wanted to write a book about a watershed year in Beethoven's life, he could have chosen from many. For that reason it is significant he chooses 1806, a pedestrian, albeit productive year for the composer. It turns out there is much to gain from studying this year: Beethoven 1806 is less concerned with a well-known pivotal moment than the way those pivotal moments have been enshrined as such, and have shaped the reception of his music. The Introduction recounts how the works from 1806-7 sit uncomfortably within their given stylistic period, the so-called "heroic style": "Critics have tended to view these works either as temporary regressions or, more optimistically, as evidence of Beethoven's penchant for alternative between phases of radical growth and restraint" (p. 11). Instead of nuancing the heroic style to shoehorn these works into their designated period, Ferraguto embraces them as anomalies. He considers these works within their own milieu apart from the towering works that usually overshadow them-the Fourth Symphony apart from the Third and Fifth, for example (discussed in Chapter 4). Ferraguto therefore joins a list of scholars that have critically re-examined the historical setting during Beethoven's so-called "heroic period"-he cites similar studies by Elaine Sisman,

Ninetenth-Century Music Review, 2021

2020 was a banner year for Beethoven, with several concerts and events (mostly online, due to Covid-19) celebrating his 250th birthday. It was also a banner year for Jeremy Yudkin, who published not one but two volumes on Beethoven, presumably on the occasion of that semiquincentennial. One volume he edited-The New Beethoven (a de facto festschrift for Lewis Lockwood 1); the other he authored-Beethoven's Beginnings. The otherwise curious omission of an essay by Yudkin in the former is made good by the latter, an expansive account of the various and sundry ways in which Beethovenand also Haydn and Mozart, from whom he took inspirationcommenced his works. Yudkin is a generous and versatile scholar, as evidenced both by his catalogue of books, which runs the gamut from Medieval music to jazz, and by Beethoven's Beginnings itself, which surveys a wealth of works by the Viennese-Classical triumvirate and which purveys many sensitive insights couched in lively prose. It is a testament to the author's enviable conversancy with this entire corpus and with a motley of scholarly disciplines in addition to historical musicologyto wit, the first chapter covers rhetoric, literature, literary theory, and cognitive science. Indeed, Yudkin's intellectual interests are as catholic as those of the composer he celebrates. 2 Since Yudkin's is a lengthy, diffuse tome, a précis of its most salient points might be welcome. 1 The New Beethoven: Evolution, Analysis, Interpretation (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020). 2 Yudkin usefully enumerates many of the items in Beethoven's library (p. 27), the breadth of which points to Beethoven's voracious intellectual appetite.

2018

Studia Musicologica, 2021

Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2019