This volume of sixteen essays, nine in German and seven in English, is the product of a conference held in December 2016; for a report on the event see Eighteenth-Century Music 14/1 (2017), 149–150. Rather than a focused title, such as ‘Beethoven in Bonn’, the conference opted for one that encouraged a more contextual approach, shifting the attention from the experience of one individual to contemporary practice in general. Nine of the sixteen essays in the resultant volume deal wholly or in part with Bonn, but none deals only with Beethoven. The remaining seven essays enhance the reader's understanding of music at the Bonn court with accounts of musical life at other courts, including Berlin, Dresden, Eszterháza, Florence, Kassel, Munich, Oettingen-Wallerstein, Salzburg and Vienna. With courtly practice as the dominant perspective, this certainly has the effect of offering a new perspective on Beethoven's career, and also on that of Haydn and Mozart.

Another liberalizing aspect of the volume, outlined in the Introduction and in the very first essay by Mark Evan Bonds (‘The Court of Public Opinion: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven’), is a willingness to avoid many of the tired clichés of musical scholarship in this period, most evident in writing on Beethoven, but apparent in Haydn and Mozart scholarship too: the emancipation of the restless creative individual from the old-fashioned restrictions of court life and, a similarly unhelpful binary construct, the move from the private sphere to the public sphere. Music at court was never systematically put to one side in Beethoven's lifetime: its practices and outlooks are evident well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Arnold Jacobshagen shows in his essay ‘Kapellmeister als Opernkomponisten’, there is a steadily unfolding narrative from the late eighteenth century of someone like Peter von Winter in Munich to the early twentieth century of Richard Strauss in Berlin; in a striking footnote the author goes even further, pointing out that the exceptionally generous provision of opera houses and orchestras in modern Germany is a demonstrable legacy of older court traditions.

The volume has a wide range of methodological approaches that complement rather than compete with one another. Rita Steblin presents a series of documents on the busy careers of the Wranitzky brothers in Vienna (‘The Court Careers of Paul and Anton Wranitzky in Vienna’), Anton working for Prince Lobkowitz, Paul as a lead violinist in the court theatres as well as a prolific composer and a general animateur. On no fewer than four separate occasions (1793, 1797, 1805 and 1806), Paul applied for a vacant position in the Hofkapelle but was turned down each time, the victim of long-standing employment practices in musical courts that often favoured promotion from within rather than a disruptive appointment of a more deserving individual from outside. There are two essays on possible musical influences on Beethoven that derive from the wider repertoire at Bonn. Markus Neuwirth's essay, ‘Von Wallerstein nach Bonn’, discusses the Harmoniemusik of Joseph Reicha (Anton's uncle and adoptive father), who spent nine years at the Bonn court; Neuwirth carefully avoids claiming influence that derives from a shared common musical language, but his contention that Reicha's general example was more pertinent to Beethoven than that of Mozart's Harmoniemusik is a persuasive one. Stephen M. Whiting's essay, ‘Before the Fever Burned: Beethoven and Grétry in Bonn’, draws attention to the number of operas by Grétry that were performed in Bonn in German translation, fourteen between 1780 and 1790/1791. Unlike Neuwirth, he does seek to relate particular moments in Grétry's operas to particular moments in Beethoven's later music, a slightly tendentious approach that is countermanded in his concluding remarks, where he emphasizes instead the pervasive presence of Grétry operas within a broader operatic and theatrical culture in Bonn. It was in that sense that he was an inspiring example to Beethoven.

Several complementary essays may be categorized as social history (or historical sociology). Taken together they provide a sympathetic and illuminating view of interacting practices that permeated much of musical society in German-speaking Europe. Elisabeth Reisinger's essay, ‘Sozialisation – Interaktion – Netzwerk’, provides a musical biography of Archduke Maximilian Franz at the imperial court in Vienna that highlights practices and individuals that nurtured his musical interests, ones that he was to indulge during the Bonn years in a manner that puts him on a par with the more familiar figures of Prince Nicolaus at Eszterháza and Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna; Mozart scholars will be interested in Reisinger's statement that there is no evidence beyond the composer's letter to his father written in January 1782 that he was to be offered employment by the archduke, even though the latter's enthusiasm for Mozart's music was a real and continuing one. Silke Bettermann's focus is court life in Bonn during Maximilian Franz's time as elector (‘Mit Haarzopf und Degen’). Musical performances of all kinds together with associated protocol ensured a busy, sometimes hectic, existence for all its musicians, Beethoven included. Particularly striking is that Maximilian Franz displayed none of the reforming mindset of his elder brother, Joseph II, in Vienna; while the emperor severely curtailed ‘gala days’, ‘feast days’ and public processions, together with the role of music in church services, the elector continued all these practices. In many ways during Beethoven's teenage years as a court musician Bonn was a more conservative environment than the one Mozart was experiencing in Vienna and, dare one say it, Beethoven was also more socially compliant than Mozart. A further valuable corrective is applied to the perception, common in Beethoven biography, that there was a division in Bonn between the court and the town, with the implication that the former was inward-looking, the latter progressive. In fact they were indivisible: the town was the court and the court was the town.

Another social construct is the subject of Melanie Unseld's intriguing essay, ‘Musikerfamilien’. While families and dynasties are a well-known feature of music history, Unseld draws attention to a variant of this, the musical ‘house’ (Haus), pointing out that in eighteenth-century German the loan word Familie co-existed with Haus and did not replace it in general usage until much later. Haus signified a wider, pluralist network that included friends, lodgers, pupils, apprentices and servants as well as family members, in essence another kind of court. By a happy coincidence the next essay in the volume, ‘Opernkomponisten in der Lehre’ by Christine Siegert, gives particular evidence of Beethoven's Haus, his grandfather, father, brothers, various teachers, Neefe, Simrock and other musical colleagues. This social practice may be glimpsed in Beethoven's later life too, informing his relationship with individuals such as Lichnowsky, Schindler, Schuppanzigh, Steiner and Zmeskall, as well as his two brothers, Karl and Johann; it also helps to explain Beethoven's determination, played out over several years, to be his nephew's guardian: his Haus was a more suitable one than that of the boy's mother.

This is a volume that is rich in material and rich in its potential for Beethoven scholarship, a volume that clearly shows the composer to be a product of the eighteenth century and, more potently, invites consideration of how the practices and values of that century continued to inform the composer's behaviour, personal and professional, for the rest of his life. It is part of a wider and continuing research project that will further encourage revisionist outlooks. Led by Birgit Lodes of the Institut für Musikwissenschaft at the University of Vienna and generously supported by the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung), the project has already produced a database of the surviving operatic material in Maximilian Franz's library (www.univie.ac.at/operaticlibrary/db) and a complementary set of essays (Elisabeth Reisinger, Juliane Riepe and John D. Wilson, eds, The Operatic Library of Elector Maximilian Franz: Reconstruction, Catalogue, Contexts (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 2018)). A detailed study of Maximilian Franz's musical life by Elisabeth Reisinger is in preparation, and the ongoing study of the surviving sacred music in the court library will yield a second database together with a further volume of essays. Projects of this magnitude and significance are rare in musicology. As we approach the Beethoven year of 2020, the collective impact of two databases and four complementary volumes is certain to constitute one of the most influential achievements of the anniversary period.