2020 was due to be an important year for Beethoven scholarship. Countless conferences, lectures and concerts had been scheduled to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer's birth, providing space for scholars and performers to reflect on the significance of this towering musical figure in the twenty-first century. Yet the Covid-19 outbreak has seen many of these events cancelled or postponed, all the anticipation surrounding the anniversary overshadowed by the chaos and devastation wrought by the global pandemic. Therefore it was gratifying that the symposium ‘String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe’ was still able to proceed, despite the significant (and unforeseen) obstacles faced by many other international conferences during this time.

The symposium was due to take place at the University of Auckland School of Music in May; however, New Zealand closed its borders to foreign arrivals in late March, and so – with some resourceful rearranging by the organizers, Sam Girling and Nancy November – the event was moved online. The format was partially asynchronous: presenters uploaded video presentations, which participants could view in their own time via a dedicated online platform. The symposium culminated in three live sessions held over Zoom in late July. With participants based in Japan, Italy, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, this proved an ingenious solution: the online platform was highly effective in fostering scholarly dialogue – allowing time for reflection, repeated viewing and thoughtful, detailed responses – while the live sessions allowed participants to continue these conversations face to face.

Owing to the vibrant cosmopolitanism of early nineteenth-century musical cultures (and, of course, the remarkable mobility of many early nineteenth-century composers) there was, at most, around two degrees of separation between the various composers represented in this symposium. While the spectre of Beethoven may have been in the background of many of the papers, most presenters took a ‘network-based’ approach to the string-quartet repertory of Beethoven's time, situating composers and their works within interlacing networks of musical stakeholders, including performers, publishers, audiences and patrons. Such a broadly contextual approach was, of course, encouraged by the qualifier ‘in Beethoven's Europe’ in the symposium's title; but it also reflects wider trends in Beethoven scholarship, which has sought to ground the composer's work in the wider cultural politics of early nineteenth-century Europe.

Understanding compositional labour in the early nineteenth century as the outcome of complex networks of production and consumption has significant ramifications for our understanding of musical genre. This is especially true of the string quartet. In the early nineteenth century, string-quartet subtypes often seem to have been more siloed than at any other point in history: the terms quatuor concertant, quatuor brillant, ‘connoisseur quartet’ and ‘amateur quartet’ all speak to cultures of performance that appear to have been firmly divided along geographic and stylistic lines. Yet the wide-ranging artistic and professional networks cultivated by early nineteenth-century composers often transcended national, stylistic and generic boundaries. Many papers in this symposium were concerned with rethinking genre, style and influence in light of such a complex, interconnected musical environment – either by identifying points of stylistic hybridization or by advocating more capacious definitions of quartet genres during Beethoven's lifetime.

This more expansive approach to genre was never more evident than in the keynote address, delivered by Christine Siegert, archive and publishing director of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. Siegert proposed a more inclusive definition of the string quartet itself – one that takes into account the myriad definitions and practices that characterized the genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She first turned her attention to scoring, noting that string quartets were not always understood as comprising two violins, a viola and a cello; rather, their instrumentation often overlapped with other symphonic and chamber genres in ways that challenge modern-day definitions of this repertory. For She, the widespread (and lucrative) practice of arranging quartets for other instruments further complicates the notion of a ‘standard’ string-quartet scoring. A new conception of the genre, she argued, must be broad enough to incorporate the various forms that string quartets could take in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including alternative scorings and arrangements. Nancy November (University of Auckland) also sought to nuance the boundaries between quartet genres, pinpointing moments of generic hybridity in the ‘middle-period’ quartets of Louis Spohr. She painted the composer as something of a musical all-rounder, capable of writing for learned connoisseurs, virtuoso professionals and keen amateurs alike. Noting that Spohr's quartets are often compared unfavourably (and anachronistically) to Beethoven's late quartets, November contended that Spohr's quartets are best appreciated when they are considered against the aesthetic parameters of their time. She suggested that the ‘middle-period’ quartets of Beethoven and Spohr share a similar stylistic preoccupation, namely, a propensity for outwardly ‘operatic’ lyrical writing, a product of the composers’ various theatrical commitments.

W. Dean Sutcliffe (University of Auckland) and Allan Badley (University of Auckland) also undertook significant reappraisals of composers who have long been found wanting in comparison to their more famous contemporaries. Sutcliffe analysed the Op. 2 quartets of Andreas Romberg in light of their dedication to Haydn, asking whether the knotty, ascetic counterpoint of the minuet from Romberg's Op. 2 No. 2 might have been an attempt to ‘one-up’ Haydn's ‘Witches’ Minuet’ from Op. 76 No. 2. Even if Romberg had not seen or heard Haydn's Op. 76 quartets when writing his Op. 2 set, Sutcliffe suggested that Haydn's influence may have been expressed in other ways – for example, in the ‘refunctioning’ of material associated with closing or transitional roles as an opening gambit in Op. 2 No. 1. Sutcliffe noted that Romberg's well-documented defence of traditional counterpoint had earned him a reputation as a middling, unimaginative composer and laid down the gauntlet for a reassessment of Romberg's quartets which might allow us to hear these works in all their richness and complexity. Allan Badley also sought to trace lineages of musical influence – in this case, the influence of Beethoven on his friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries. Badley juxtaposed the quartets written while Ries was a touring freelance musician with the quartets written after Ries had returned to his native Rhineland. While the former were designed to appeal to a broad concert-going public, showing the influence of the quatuor brillant, the latter suggest that the composer was attempting to grapple with the aesthetic innovations of Beethoven's middle-period quartets (in particular, the ‘Razumovsky’ quartets, Op. 59). Badley challenged Ries's reputation for pandering to the tastes of the public at the expense of artistic quality by noting that only eleven of Ries's twenty-five quartets were published, suggesting that the composer held the string quartet in high regard and was critical of his own efforts in the genre.

The stylistic flexibility of composers like Ries, Romberg and Spohr – clearly evinced in the papers outlined above – speaks to a time when public concert series were beginning to rival private salons as important venues for string-quartet performance. Mark Ferraguto (Pennsylvania State University) teased apart the nuances of this cultural shift, analysing Franz Weiss's Op. 8 quartets, one of four sets dedicated to the illustrious patron Andrey Razumovsky, published eight years after Beethoven's Op. 59. Ferraguto painted Weiss's Op. 8 – which were performed for both connoisseurs and the wider public – as transitional works, mediating between Weiss's privately oriented Op. 1 quartets and his publicly oriented late quartets (published when Weiss had more or less left Razumovsky's service). Ferraguto demonstrated some remarkable features of Weiss's Op. 8 No. 2, including a tendency towards learnedness, highly virtuosic violin writing, colourful timbral effects and a homotonal structure reminiscent of Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 4. A paper by Yoko Maruyama (Tokyo University of the Arts) showed that Beethoven himself was not immune to the need to appeal to a broad concert-going public. She argued that Beethoven cultivated surprising aural and visual effects in his string quartets in order to entertain an ever-widening audience. For Maruyama, unexpected pauses, sudden outbursts, the dramatization of register and figures passed between instruments – all of which create distinct optical and auditory effects – prove that Beethoven was increasingly concerned with holding the attention of audiences during public performance.

A constellation of papers plumbed the reception of Beethoven's quartets among audiences, performers and critics over the course of the nineteenth century. Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau) considered a passage from the 1803 Musikalisches Taschenbuch, a rudimentary guide to the string-quartet repertory that positioned Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets in relation to the quartets of various other composers. For Speck, this passage serves as evidence that the canonization of the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven triad was well and truly underway even comparatively early in Beethoven's career. Fabio Morabito (University of Oxford) analysed marginalia in the parts used by Pierre Baillot and his ensemble when performing Beethoven's late quartets in Paris in the late 1820s, arguing that these quartets fostered a new culture of rehearsal amongst nineteenth-century string players. These markings, Morabito argued, were uniquely concerned with the interactions between players, implying that these quartets, with their fragmented, highly changeable textures, forced Baillot and his ensemble to find new ways of engineering ensemble dynamics. This new method of rehearsal stood in stark contrast to efforts made by Beethoven's Parisian publisher, Maurice Schlesinger, to obscure the difficulty and individuality of Beethoven's late quartets. Paolo Munaò (Florence) examined the various organizations and individuals who performed and promoted Beethoven's string quartets in nineteenth-century Florence, focusing primarily on the first Italian società del quartetto and its publication, the Boccherini journal.

Many papers, including Sutcliffe's paper discussed above, were concerned with the role of counterpoint in early nineteenth-century string-quartet aesthetics – not merely as a technical device, but as a dynamic and polyvalent cultural signifier. Mai Koshikakezawa (Tokyo University of the Arts, Showa University of Music and Senzoku College of Music) focused on Antoine Reicha's Quatuor scientifique, an experimental twelve-movement quartet consisting mainly of four-voice fugues, written while the composer was living in Vienna. Lucy Turner (Columbia University) identified various improvisatory gestures and topoi in Beethoven's middle-period chamber works, which, she argued, derived from Beethoven's own practice of keyboard improvisation. She pointed to a proliferation of fugato and fantasia-like passages in the middle-period works which seem to gesture towards various cultures of keyboard improvisation. For Turner, these topoi, when played by a chamber ensemble (the ‘impossible improviser’), evince a ‘collaborative subjectivity’, presaging aspects of romantic musical aesthetics.

In keeping with the wider European focus of the symposium, three presentations were concerned with the role of style and genre in French string-quartet aesthetics – particularly with regard to those nebulous monikers quatuor concertant and quatuor brillant. Examining the quartets of Viotti, Rode and Reicha, Michael B. Ward (University of Colorado Boulder) highlighted the importance of texture in delineating form in the French brillant and concertant types, arguing that these quartets hybridized elements of sonata form with the textural interchanges of the concerto form. Sam Girling (University of Auckland) also examined the quartets of Pierre Rode, mapping a trajectory from Rode's early Viotti-inspired quatuors concertants to the distinctive quatuors brillants for which the composer is best known. My own paper (Callum Blackmore, Columbia University) situated the quartets of Hyacinthe Jadin, often considered to be anomalous among French string quartets in their adoption of Viennese musical conventions, within the cultural, political and economic changes brought about by the French Revolution. I argued that certain aspects of Jadin's style – sudden chromatic shifts, striking dissonances and mercurial textures – were derived from the public musical institutions where Jadin found employment.

Although much is lost in moving academic events online (this symposium, for example, was due to include a significant performance component, which was not able to proceed on the digital platform), ‘String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe’ proved that, even in times of isolation and crisis, online conferences can still foster meaningful musicological conversations and forge vibrant scholarly communities.