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.
Of the three themes of the conference mentioned in the title, the last was perhaps the most ubiquitous. Organological issues were a frequent point of discussion, at least in part because of the performances featuring historical instruments played by Olga Pashchenko and conference organizer Leonardo Miucci (Hochschule der Künste Bern) in concert with Ensemble Zefiro. Although not announced as such and of shorter duration, the contribution by Tom Beghin (Orpheus Instituut) also featured a concert performance, albeit recorded in advance, of the Waldstein Sonata, Op. 53, the artistic and historical motivations for which were the focus of his paper. These generally relied on uncovering the ‘Frenchness’ of the Érard piano for which Beethoven wrote by taking account of the specific qualities of French instruments, as well as the sketches and early drafts of the sonata. Martin Skamletz (Hochschule der Künste Bern) showed how the extended range of the Érard was anticipated in some of the composer's earlier works, and Robert Adelson (Conservatoire de Nice) argued that the instrument had been a gift, rather than a purchase that Beethoven had refused to pay for. Similarly focused on musical hardware were Tilman Skowroneck (Göteborgs universitet), who discussed the split damper pedal that Beethoven explicitly did not want used in Op. 53 but did employ in earlier works, and Michael Ladenburger (Beethoven-Haus Bonn), who described several early keyboards with unusual designs that the composer had encountered in Bonn.
A second running theme of the conference, also present in many of the aforementioned papers, was the understanding of hidden aspects of Beethoven's notation. Christine Siegert (Beethoven-Haus Bonn) laid the groundwork for this discussion by giving an overview of the diversity of the composer's piano writing throughout his career. Susanne Cox (Beethoven-Haus Bonn) followed this with a discussion of what can be learned from comparing multiple autograph versions of the same piece, which brought up textual issues as well as questions regarding Beethoven's creative process.
Several papers, however, took an approach explicitly focused on changing and improving current performance practices by appealing to historical sources. Clive Brown (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) discussed textual and subtextual issues in the Violin Sonatas Opp. 47 and 96, pieces that had appeared in the recent Bärenreiter edition of the violin sonatas that he edited with Neal Peres da Costa. Using a piano transcription of Op. 47 made by Beethoven's student Carl Czerny during the composer's lifetime, Brown showed how the transcription makes explicit various interpretations of dynamics that would otherwise be difficult to justify. Peres da Costa (University of Sydney), co-author of the extensive material on historical performance practice in the above edition, furthermore argued on the basis of editions by contemporaries that Beethoven's piano chords were generally meant to be arpeggiated.
There were also several papers on specific details of Beethoven's notation. Dorian Bandy (McGill University) explored the aesthetic functions of Beethoven's melodic embellishments; Leonardo Miucci, focusing on some of the features consistently found in Beethoven's early works, discussed the implications of their dynamic indications, a point also covered by Yew Choong Cheong (UCSI University Institute of Music, Kuala Lumpur). My paper (Marten Noorduin, University of Oxford) took a broader view of Beethoven's oeuvre, and examined his uses of the expressive indications dolce, espressivo and cantabile, as they appear both in the piano works and in other genres. Finally, Siân Derry (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) approached the problematic tied-note notation found most famously in the piano part of the second movement of the Cello Sonata Op. 69 by contextualizing it within a body of similar types of notation that occur in string music with which Beethoven was familiar.
One of the papers that tied all of the themes together was given by Sandra Rosenblum (Concord Academy). Her paper focused on the Quintet for Piano and Winds, Op. 16, a work in which Czerny performed in 1816 while taking great liberties, for which he was publicly rebuked by the composer. Rosenblum presented an annotated piano part of the quintet, probably from the early part of the nineteenth century, that showed added pedal markings and other textual alterations, which raised the tantalizing possibility that such practices were more common at the time than is often realized. Furthermore, this discovery recasts the narrative of Czerny's rebuke from a story about youthful arrogance to one in which Beethoven struggled against a widespread practice of musicians making substantial changes to his works.
The relationship between Beethoven and his own historical context, however, was also at times the source of epistemological disagreement. Much of this focused on the value of Czerny's testimony, and though few doubted that the transcriptions he published during the composer's lifetime contained much with which the composer was unhappy, the extent to which his instructions in the fourth volume (1846) of his Pianoforte-Schule, Op. 500, actually represented Beethoven's style of playing was much contested. The most notable example of the latter occurred in the contribution by Barry Cooper (University of Manchester), which took the form of a response to Leonardo Miucci's recent article on Beethoven's pedal markings (‘Beethoven's Pianoforte Damper Pedalling: A Case of Double Notational Style’, Early Music 47/3 (2019), 371–392), and which in part drew on the work of Cooper's PhD student Chi-fang Cheng. But it is a testament to the integrity of this scholarly community that these questions were able to be explored in detail without animosity or offence, and the discussion after each session remained fruitful, without ever losing focus.
A final overarching theme was the state of Beethoven publishing, which was explored in several of the papers covered above, but most directly by Claudio Bacciagaluppi (Hochschule der Künste Bern), who focused on the troubled relationship between the composer and the publisher Hans Nägeli, and by Mario Aschauer (Sam Houston State University). Exploring the debate over the often-reviled term ‘Urtext’, Aschauer argued that the editor of a new edition should ‘intelligently present’ the ambiguities in the sources, and demonstrated this with reference to examples from his own work on the new Bärenreiter edition of Diabelli's Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. The final panel on publishing, chaired by Douglas Woodfull-Harris (Bärenreiter), brought up different strategies through which editors can include material on performance practice in a way that is most helpful to current performers and scholars.
Some critics have questioned the extent to which the Beethoven scholarly community still has the ability to produce new and stimulating research, given the intense interest that the composer has enjoyed over the past century and more. This conference has shown that Beethoven's relation to the piano remains fertile ground for scholarship, and there is no end in sight. The conference proceedings will be published by Edition Argus.
