This epic five-day, two-stream international congress was convened by Christine Siegert, Archive Director of the Beethoven-Haus. Each day featured one of five main symposia on the following provocative themes: ‘The Political Beethoven’, ‘A Global Beethoven?’, ‘The Bonn Beethoven’, ‘The Creative Beethoven’ and ‘Beethoven as Recipient of Others’ Music’. These symposia were each organized by pairs of scholars – one from Bonn, the other from elsewhere – who delivered thought-provoking introductions to the respective topics and panels of speakers each morning.
As if this did not already provide enough food for thought, an open call for papers was issued, and this allowed for further topics and approaches. The call for papers resulted in the submission of some ninety proposals; thirty-six were selected for the programme, and these focused on diverse topics that both deepened and reflected those of the main symposia. In these presentations, scholars uncovered new sources or gave new interpretations of sources; they also devoted themselves to aesthetic, music-theoretical and analytical questions, and dealt with the multifaceted reception of Beethoven reception from Beethoven's day to our own, in both European and global contexts. With this twofold approach of themed symposia and free papers, the congress was able to represent diverse themes, various research traditions and different generations of researchers.
The congress was complemented by two fascinating exhibitions. One, entitled ‘Beethoven: Welt.Bürger.Musik’, was held at the Bundeskunsthalle and curated by Julia Ronge (Beethoven-Haus). This placed the famous painting of Beethoven by Joseph Stieler in a wider context, using other paintings and archival material both to illuminate the genesis of this particular artwork and to set it within the tradition of representing famous people from German politics, society and culture of the nineteenth century. The other exhibition, ‘The Beethoven-Haus Bonn International – Events, Aspects, Perspectives’, directed by Maria Rößner-Richarz (Beethoven-Haus), portrayed fascinating events in this institution's history. Among the events illustrated were those relating to the Cold War and a divided Germany after 1945, when the Beethoven-Haus took custody of autographs stolen from the (East) Berlin State Library, including Beethoven's conversation books. In addition to these exhibitions, four evening panels – broadcast by German Radio – built on the themes of each day and extended the reach of the conference. These events were entirely in German (whereas the conference was bilingual) and included, for instance, a concert with an arrangement for chamber ensemble of Beethoven's Egmont Overture by Jan Müller Wieland and a percussion improvisation on it by Christian Felix Benning. This overture was a work that cropped up in many contexts within the congress.
The congress functioned as a review of current Beethoven research, showing a particular concern with ‘placing’ Beethoven in a variety of contexts: then and now, politically, geographically, culturally and aesthetically. Particularly relevant to eighteenth-century scholarship was the symposium devoted to ‘The Bonn Beethoven’, led by Birgit Lodes (Universität Wien) and Ingrid Bodsch (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn), exploring the significance of the composer's native city for his life and work. Lodes opened the day with her paper ‘Ad Fontes: Beethoven in Bonn’, an intriguing perspective on Beethoven myth-making, concerning the portrayal of his childhood. There is no contemporary portrait of Beethoven as a child; nevertheless, the biographical and documentary gap was filled in the nineteenth century, for example by idealized images depicting Beethoven's birth as a nativity scene. Part of the mission of this particular symposium was to leave behind the later myths and anecdotes about the Bonn years and instead tackle questions of what could be established from surviving documents, in order to build up a more accurate picture of the effect of these formative years on Beethoven's later life. There were many insights into Beethoven's Bonn connections, including the publisher Nikolaus Simrock, with whom Beethoven had much to do during his Vienna years. Joanna Biermann (University of Alabama) contributed new insights on Simrock as a political activist within the Freemason movement.
At the other end of the historical spectrum were numerous papers dealing with Beethoven's significance today, with a symposium dedicated to the composer's presence in the globalized world, organized by Federico Celestini (Universität Innsbruck) and Tobias Janz (Universität Bonn). This was a particularly contentious area, and the discussion was lively. Striking among the papers presented in this particular symposium was that by Daniel K. L. Chua (University of Hong Kong), who maintained that ‘global Beethoven’ would soon (as soon as the anniversary year of 2027) become a thing of the past, and ‘universal Beethoven’ would return again. With humour and eloquence, Chua mapped out a timeline of Beethoven anniversaries, noting that although Boulez maintained at the 1970 Beethoven anniversary that ‘Universal Beethoven’ was dead, absolute music – on which the ideal of Beethoven as ‘universal’ was founded – was actually very much still alive in today's society, resurfacing to block out trauma whenever human crises occur.
The symposium ‘The Creative Beethoven’ (‘Der schaffende Beethoven’), curated by Jeremy Yudkin (Boston University) and Jens Dufner (Beethoven-Haus), offered a wide-ranging treatment of a topic that has long been central to Beethoven research. The idea was to capture senses of the word ‘creative’ as both product and process (as in the German noun/verb pair Schaffen/schaffen). A particularly illuminating presentation under this rubric was given by Andreas Münzmay (Universität Paderborn), who spoke on behalf of a research team from his own institution and the Beethoven-Haus. Part of the team's project ‘Beethovens-Werkstatt’ (Beethoven's Workshop) involves developing methods for visualizing the difference between Beethoven's original works and arrangements that the composer himself carried out (see https://beethovens-werkstatt.de/projekt/, Modul 2).
The topic of arrangements in general is a new and fast developing area in Beethoven studies, which shifts the (long-time) emphasis from genesis towards the reception or afterlife of Beethoven's music. Three of the free papers explored this area. My own presentation, ‘Rearranging Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in the Nineteenth-Century Home’ (Nancy November, University of Auckland), examined how the work became popularized, canonized and also ‘domesticated’ in the hands of various nineteenth-century arrangers. Leah Kang (University of Wisconsin Madison), in ‘Aesthetics of Arrangement: Beethoven through the Eyes of His Close Contemporaries’, considered various works as arranged by figures such as Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Ferdinand Ries. Moving into twentieth-century reception, Małgorzata Grajter (The Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź) sought a framework for analysing types of arrangement by drawing on recent translation theory, in her paper ‘Beethoven Reinterpreted: Transcriptions, Arrangements and Modern Adaptation of His Work’. Among her fascinating examples of recent Beethoven arrangements was Joachim Horsley's performance of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in a Cuban Rumba style (‘Beethoven in Havana’), which was viewed over ten million times on YouTube within the first six months of its release.
In other instances, the free papers and symposia offered fresh insights on well-established topics of interest. Among these was a discussion by Frithjof Vollmer (Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Stuttgart) of interwar violin performance practice as evidenced by a comparison of three strikingly different recordings of Beethoven's ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, Op. 47, by Yehudi Menhuin, Fritz Kreisler and Georg Kulenkampff. Vollmer gave a detailed discussion of Kreisler's use of portamenti, which was particularly useful in light of the notion that portamento largely died out earlier in the century as an expressive device in violin performance practice. This interwar period was in fact a great melting pot of various performing traditions and schools of violin technique. Another oft-discussed topic in connection with Beethoven is that of key characteristics. Petra Weber (Universität Koblenz-Landau) offered thought-provoking comments on the subject of F major, and how it manifests itself as a key in various Beethoven works throughout his career. For her, F major might be characterized by its transitory qualities. Discussions in the question time pursued the matter of how this transitory quality of the key could be interpreted. How, for instance, might Florestan's F major aria ‘In des Lebens Frühlingstagen’ from Fidelio throw light on the affective properties of this key as used by Beethoven, given that they are very variously described by theorists of his time? On the subject of F major's relative, D minor, Jeremy Yudkin made some tantalizing comments on the slow movement of the String Quartet Op. 18 No. 1 (‘Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato’) and the seeming superfluity of the opening bars. He moved then to the Ninth Symphony, which plays out the difficulty of ‘getting started’ on a much larger canvas when its finale rehearses excerpts of the first three movements before actually offering any new material.
As has long been typical of Beethoven studies, scholars at this congress gravitated towards the late works. Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) provided a beautifully woven argument concerning connections between late Haydn and late Beethoven. The aesthetics of constriction and oppression (Beklemmung) in Haydn's The Seasons – in ‘Winter’ and ‘Summer’, when extreme temperatures place the body under stress – can be related to the aesthetics of the cavatina slow movement in Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. The approach of Erica Buurman (San José State University) to the same symposium theme (‘Beethoven as Recipient of Others’ Music’) was different: she was not primarily concerned with Beethoven's reception of his famous colleagues from the past, but more with Beethoven's reception of contemporary music of his day (and his Vienna), notably in contexts of dance.
This brief survey has touched on just a few of the highlights and themes in what was an almost overwhelming week of intensive thinking about Beethoven. Needless to say, plans for 2027, the two hundredth anniversary of Beethoven's death, are already being laid. Certainly Beethoven's status as ‘global’ and ‘universal’ will be debated, late works will make frequent appearances and the creative process will be high on the agenda. Personally, I would like to see wider cross-disciplinary representation, along the lines of the wonderfully humorous and enlightening paper by Thomas Tolley (University of Edinburgh), ‘“Stamp of Genius”: Beethoven as Satire in Regency Britain’, which explored in delightful detail a sequence of satirical vignettes, hitherto unknown to Beethoven scholarship, by the composer and artist Edward Burney. In an artwork in which Weber's Die Freischütz is reduced to ‘fried shoes’, and Paganini to ‘A pagan ninny’, one knows precisely what to think when ‘BEAT-OFTEN’ appears on the cover of a book.
