Commensurate with his commanding presence in concert repertories and music histories, the recognition garnered by Beethoven in special anniversary years – with or without pandemic disruption – surely exceeds that by any other composer. J. S. Bach attracts his fair share of attention, of course, as extensively documented in the four-volume collection Bach und die Nachwelt (ed. Michael Heinemann and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Laaber: Laaber, 1997–2005)). The same goes for Wagner, who, in characteristic self-fashioning manner, lastingly shaped romantic images of Beethoven hagiography, not least with his own single-authored Beethoven, the centenary festschrift published in 1870 by E. W. Fritzsch. Of which canonic composers other than Beethoven can it be said that the anniversary celebrations have themselves become a topic of significant scholarly analysis and critique?

Much of the discourse surrounding the theme of Beethoven and posterity is fraught, like Wagner reception, with political tension and controversy, whether it is the ‘deromanticizing’ efforts conducted ‘contra Wagner’ in 1927, the attempts at jingoistic co-option by the National Socialists, or the Cold War quarrels about cultural heritage in 1970. Of all the major works, it is the Ninth Symphony that has attracted by far the most extensive reception history or ‘political history’, as Esteban Buch's monograph on that monumental piece is subtitled (Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)); it is the Ninth, above all, that has served as a barometer – ‘a kind of aural fetish in the Western world’, to use Buch's expression (4) – for all manner of cultural trends.

In 2016, with an eye to 2020, German politicians voted on a bipartisan basis to declare the composer's anniversary year a ‘matter of national importance’ to the tune of twenty-seven million euros. Bipartisan, perhaps, but political nonetheless. Ubiquity, amplified by fetishizing celebration, in turn promotes reflection, even resistance. Among those compelled to reflect is Malte Böcker, the managing director of the estimable Beethoven-Haus, the German cultural institution responsible for spearheading the two hundred and fiftieth birthday commemorations, including the week-long international conference that took place in Bonn in late February (see the report by Nancy November in Eighteenth-Century Music 17/2 (2020), 305–307). ‘Do we need a Beethoven Anniversary Year?’ asked Böcker rhetorically in an interview with German Radio. ‘We made our own decision: we want to celebrate it, but not by performing even more symphonies, piano sonatas and quartets, but by placing Beethoven in a completely new context . . . With him, it's a paradox: the absolute artistry of his music and the ritual routine of its presentation’. Taking up the notion of Beethoven as barometer, the Beethoven-Haus has been at pains to question what Beethoven stood for, namely, ‘values of freedom, human solidarity’. ‘How compatible is that’, Böcker mused, ‘with recent developments of nationalism and the “fortress Europe” [Festung Europa]?’ (my translation).

The Amsterdam conference, following hard on the heels of the marathon in Bonn and attracting some of the same delegates, largely avoided issues of nationalism and other overt manifestations of political ideology by limiting itself, at least for the most part, to the conventional disciplinary epistemologies of music theory. During these two days of intense scholarly engagement and inspiring collegiality, the Ninth Symphony and its motley co-options were barely mentioned, for example. To open the conference, in a plenary session devoted to sketch studies, Thomas Posen (McGill University) discussed and performed different placements and occurrences of the first theme of the Eroica in various of the continuity sketches. Bernhard Achorner (Universität Innsbruck) then pondered questions of the creative process against the background of Dahlhaus's much-critiqued ‘Stildualismus’ and the putative downplaying of ‘inscribed corporeality’, as Achorner characterized gestural aspects of the composer's notation. A concluding plenary session, which paid tribute to Paul Scheepers, the founder of Dutch Schenkerism, focused on the Piano Sonata Op. 110 and featured a fine performance of the work by Inés Costales (Conservatorium Maastricht, Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag, Conservatorium van Amsterdam), dovetailed with an expert and theoretically ecumenical voice-leading analysis by conference organizer and host John Koslovsky (Conservatorium van Amsterdam).

Several of the papers presented in the pairs of parallel sessions between the two plenaries expanded on a central point made in Scott Burnham's Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), namely, how music theory's guiding ‘Beethoven paradigm’ began well before Heinrich Schenker, the theorist widely recognized as having taken the accomplishments of his predecessors to a new level (so to speak) of technical sophistication. (The claim that Schenker's rebarbative politics were separate – or at least separable – from his theory and analysis served as a key selling-point in his work's anglophone appropriation during the Cold War.) Indeed, the paradigm was already emerging in the wake of the composer's death, as we heard in the paper by Lea Fink (Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik, Frankfurt). In ‘Beethoven's Shadow: A Sounding Network Analysis of Paradigms of Musical Form’ Fink shared the big-data networks she has assembled that demonstrate the heavy reliance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists on Beethoven's oeuvre in their development and explication of key terms still common in theoretical discourse, such as sentence (Satz) and period (Periode). These intricate networks capture common features and, no less important, telling differences in terminological usage by bringing together the writings of some two dozen (mainly German-speaking) writers, from C. P. E. Bach and Joseph Riepel to Diether de la Motte and Clemens Kühn.

Erik Elder (Brandeis University) added to the long list of Beethoven-centric theorists in his tracing of the evolution of ‘Réti's Beethoven’. By surveying Rudolph Réti's career as a whole, not just the book on thematic processes but also the unfinished writings on thematic patterns, Elder was able to uncover ‘a nascent theory of narrativity’ in analyses of Beethoven's music. Despite the centrality of the same music examples to their theoretical insights, Schenker and Schoenberg are commonly cast as antipodes, however much historical distance reveals neoclassical commonalities. If one had to pick sides, however, Réti's brand of organicism would qualify as more Schoenbergian than Schenkerian. Not just as a theorist, but also as a composer and performer (although he did not actually study with Schoenberg), Réti was a close ally of the Second Viennese School. None the less, significant differences emerge on closer inspection. The paper by Áine Heneghan (University of Michigan), ‘Through the Schoenbergian Lens: Beethoven and the Cultivation of Formgefühl’, described pedagogical strategies developed from Beethoven's music that Schoenberg applied in his classes at UCLA. In critical detail, she showed how a multidimensional concept of ‘motif’, so central both to Schoenberg's musical theory and to his poietics, diverges significantly from Réti's more narrowly defined diastematic cells.

Music theory's relationship with critical theory has been an uneasy one. Given his influence on critical writings about Beethoven, however, including on those by anglophone scholars such as Daniel Chua and Michael Spitzer, it would certainly have been odd if Theodor W. Adorno had not been invoked at least once in Amsterdam. The abiding challenge revolves around the question of aesthetic autonomy; more specifically, around how to turn the hermeneutics of constitutive dissociation into a coherent analytical methodology. In his paper on ‘Fractured Themes in Late Beethoven’, whose title alludes to a key adjective in Adorno's interpretations of Beethoven's ‘late style’, Diego Cubero (University of North Texas) addressed that challenge by applying the critical theorist's notion of the musical foreground as a ‘fractured landscape’ to pieces such as the Bagatelles Op. 119 No. 1 and Op. 126 No. 2. Cubero's approach is a creative one in so far as, with the technical rigour he enjoys from Schenkerian training, he constructs various hypothetical ‘levels’ from which the musical foreground could itself plausibly be construed to emerge in all of its dissociated state. Unity (or the ‘complementarity’ of themes, as Cubero calls it) is brought to bear on disunity; the classical landscape is thus explained and justified as fissured.

An engaged discussion followed, as it did after many of the presentations, in this case raising the question as to whether the incongruity of musical moments were not also reflected in the composer's copious and sometimes idiosyncratic musical markings, particularly in the late works. In other words, is it not just the themes that are fractured, but also their expressive textures and how these are both notated and juxtaposed? Not just here, but also with reference to earlier works, a number of Beethoven scholars have invoked the idea of irony, whereby music self-reflexively comments on itself as a form of what Nietzsche called ‘music about music’ – something also touched on by Nicole Biamonte (McGill University) in a paper that uncovered ‘Hidden Vernacular Quotations in Beethoven's Middle-Period Music’. Couching this topic in esthesic terms and with reference to an early middle-period piano sonata, Laura Erel (Durham University) presented on ‘The Ironic Sonata: How Musical Puzzles Investigate Composer-Listener Interaction in the First Movement of Op. 31 no. 1’. That she did so in a session entitled ‘Extra-Musical Connotations’ begged the question about the epistemological framework of music theory as a discipline, mentioned above, and also about the extent to which performance counts as a critical variable.

Talking of which, and in addition to the opening and closing plenaries, there were a number of engaging presentations on the ‘performative perspectives’ of the conference title. Leah Kang (University of Wisconsin–Madison) explored the ‘Aesthetics of Arrangement: Beethoven through the Eyes of His Close Contemporaries’, with reference to arrangements of Beethoven's works by the composer himself as well as those by his pupils and friends such as Czerny, Ries and Hummel. These arrangements, Kang argued, afford insights into how people heard Beethoven's music and, as such, present a kind of analytical instrumentation. Cecilia Oinas (Sibelius Academy, Helsinki) and Danijel Detoni (Muzička akademija, Sveučilište u Zagrebu) deconstructed the analysis–performance binary with copious demonstrations in their exploration of ‘Aspects of Analysis and Performance in Beethoven's Early Eight Variations in C Major, WoO 67, for Four Hands’, making a convincing case for the consideration of performative gestures as integral to the music's overarching dramatic narrative. David Kopp (Boston University), in the penultimate session of the conference, offered something analogous with respect to ‘Performance Issues and Formal Ambiguity in Two Sonata First Movements’ by comparing multiple recordings of the first movements of Opp. 81a and 101, including detailed charts that capture divergences in tempo contours and dynamic contrast together with his own exquisite illustrations at the piano.

Space considerations preclude mentioning all of the speakers who presented at this rewarding scholarly event. (There were also a couple of cancellations because of travel restrictions related to Covid-19.) In the concluding session, John Koslovsky explained why he had chosen to organize a theory conference on Beethoven in the anniversary year: the theme, he said, more or less suggested itself. And while, apart from its various applications of digital technology, this celebration of Beethoven by the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory did little to promote the Beethoven-Haus project of placing the composer ‘in a completely new context’, it did provide a vital reflection of Beethoven's significance two hundred and fifty years after his birth and of the diversity of theoretical approaches his music continues to attract and inspire.