Taking place just prior to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, and sponsored by the American Beethoven Society, the University of Alabama, the University of California Los Angeles and the AMS itself, this conference attracted some fifty scholars. It reflected a wide range of current approaches to Beethoven and his music, ranging from reception history to source studies to iconography to analysis.

The opening session focused on issues of reception. Martin Nedbal (University of Kansas) drew on copious archival sources to recount the history of Fidelio in Prague over the course of the nineteenth century. He reviewed not only the surviving (and complicated) sources of the work itself but also the dramaturgical and political aspects of various productions, not all of which managed to get off the ground. Leanne Langley (Royal Philharmonic Society) turned her attention to London and gave a provocative reading of Beethoven's ‘Quartetto’, a four-voice Agnus Dei with keyboard accompaniment that appeared under his name in the short-lived English Musical Gazette in 1819. Langley traced the circumstances under which such a work might have found its way into this particular publication, which was closely connected to the Beethoven enthusiasts of the Philharmonic Society. She further suggested that a link of some kind to the composer might not be entirely out of the question, particularly given the behind-the-scenes workings there of his former pupil Ferdinand Ries, who had arrived in London in 1813.

James Parsons (Missouri State University) explored the long-standing perception of the second strophe of Schiller's ‘An die Freude’, set to music in the Ninth Symphony, as ‘exclusionary’ in its assertion that whoever has not been able to ‘call even one other soul his own’ must ‘creep away, weeping’ from the circle of joy. Parsons made a convincing case that the long line of commentators who claim to have found a fatal flaw in Schiller's utopian vision of brotherhood have misread this passage. Joy, Enlightenment philosophers like Schiller believed, was not given but rather earned, and it was earned through the experience of sympathy with and for others. Joy, moreover, remained always open to those who had not yet experienced this: the weeping withdrawal is by no means a permanent exile.

Source studies are alive and well in the hands of a generation of younger scholars. In the sketches for the String Quartet Op. 127, Francesco Fontanelli (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice) identified a fascinating sequence of transformations: what began life as a scherzo-like theme labelled ‘la gaieté’ culminated in the sombre opening of the quartet's variation movement. Elisa Novara (Beethoven-Haus Bonn) took the audience through the composer's struggles to create a four-hand piano arrangement of the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133/134. Having berated Anton Halm for a first go at this task, the composer soon discovered what Halm already knew: that an idiomatic reworking for keyboard obscured the ‘look’ of the contrapuntal lines. Because of excessive hand-crossing, performability ultimately had to sacrificed on the altar of visible counterpoint. Beethoven's copyists came under scrutiny in the presentation by Jens Dufner (Beethoven-Haus Bonn), who through a dazzling display of handwriting samples made clear the difficulty of identifying and distinguishing among so many different hands. In the case of Wenzel Schlemmer, long assumed to be the composer's principal copyist over many years, Dufner showed that we in fact know far less about Schlemmer and his work than we had previously thought. The message was sobering but needed.

Sources came to life in an unusual way when Ned Kellenberger (Illinois College) discussed and then played a Music-Minus-One version of the beginning of the recapitulation of the first movement of the Violin Concerto, Op. 61. Beethoven crossed out an extended passage for the soloist in the autograph score at this point, where the soloist had originally been called on to play virtuosic figurations against the orchestra. The composer seems to have concluded, presumably after the work's premiere, that the soloist's part was insufficiently audible against the orchestra's forceful statement of the main theme, but Kellenberger speculated on other possible reasons as well. Hearing this passage, first against a recording and then as a true solo, gave ample food for thought.

In an especially entertaining presentation, Theodore Albrecht (Kent State University) conjectured about ‘what the composer was really thinking’ when he sat for Joseph Stieler's celebrated portrait depicting Beethoven at work on the Missa solemnis. Through careful examination of the composer's correspondence and sketchbooks, Albrecht was able to ascertain the exact date and time of the sitting and proposed that what Beethoven was holding in his hand in the studio at the time was not a score or even a sketchbook, but rather a conversation book. By a process of triangulation, Albrecht aligned the sitting with an entry by the annoyed composer about an imminent court date on the matter of his nephew, Karl. Suffice it to say that the off-colour pun was not in keeping with the spirit of the Mass Ordinary.

Analysis and the premises of analysis came under scrutiny in the presentation by Nicholas Marston (University of Cambridge), ‘The Limits of Integration? Beethoven's String Quintet in C, Op. 29, and Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96’. Marston examined both sides of the debate surrounding organic unity, long the coin of the realm among music analysts. The two works in question, as Marston demonstrated, display ample of evidence of integration; yet by turning the coin over, Marston showed just as convincingly that the two works also feature passages so disruptive as to call into question the very premise of integration itself.

Influence – or lack thereof – was the focus of the presentation by John D. Wilson (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), who questioned long-standing assumptions about Mozart's stature in Bonn prior to Beethoven's departure for Vienna in 1792. Wilson pointed out that while the operas were highly esteemed, very little of Mozart's other music was actually available or had been performed in Bonn before then. In this light, the oft-claimed modelling of the three Piano Quartets WoO 36 on works by Mozart may be less compelling than others have claimed.

In her closing keynote address, ‘Reckoning and Deducing with Beethoven’, Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) revisited an issue that has long engaged Beethoven scholars: the relationship of the Contredanse in the ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Op. 43 (1801), with the ‘Eroica’ Variations for piano, Op. 35 (1802), and the finale of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Op. 55 (1802–1804). All three of these amount to variations on basically the same thematic idea. Sisman focused particular attention on the ways in which Beethoven ‘reckoned’ the number of variations in Op. 35 in correspondence with his publisher, why this numbering mattered to him, and how that reckoning throws light on the other two works. She also queried the way in which Beethoven ‘deduced’ the symphony's variations, taking a cue from an enigmatic comment in the sketches in Landsberg 6 (the ‘“Eroica” sketchbook’) next to the theme that reads ‘varie et deduce’. While the language and orthography of these words may be unclear, their implications, as Sisman showed, are rich and highly suggestive.

The International New Beethoven Research Conference, which with one exception has been held annually since 2011, will be taking the year off in 2020, and wisely so, given the plethora of events celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer's birth. But as the Boston conference made clear to all in attendance, no anniversaries are needed to demonstrate the robust health of Beethoven research today.