The Sixth New Beethoven Research Conference, generously sponsored by the University of Alabama School of Music and the American Beethoven Society, was held in advance of the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Vancouver. It marked an exciting moment in a crescendo of activity in Beethoven scholarship, fed by multiple lively areas of current interest in music theory and musicology. A well-balanced mix of music theorists, performers and musicologists from North America and Europe discussed the composer from multiple angles, including sketch studies, formal analysis, performance analysis and historical research. The conference was held in parallel with a meeting of the Haydn Society of North America, and the joint sessions highlighted how interest in both composers could lead to a deeper understanding of their fascinating relationship.
The conference got underway with one of these joint sessions, a series of papers exploring the nexus between Haydn and Beethoven research. Naturally, influence was a central topic of this session, and music analysis was featured, but the first paper, by Erica Buurman (Canterbury Christ Church University), was the exception. Buurman provided an illuminating glimpse into the world of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Vienna with her decoding of the musical programmes of balls held by the Fine Artists’ Pension Society (Pensionsgesellschaft bildender Künstler). Drawing upon a broad knowledge of Viennese society, she provided a window into the social contexts in which Haydn and Beethoven worked. James S. MacKay (Loyola University New Orleans) then presented an exploratory study of musical influence in the string quartet, pairing quartets from Beethoven's Op. 18 set with the Opp. 17 and 20 quartets of Haydn's in the same keys. He noted similarities of texture, tonal plan and form, such as the use of the subtonic key in first movements of Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 3 and Haydn's Op. 17 No. 6, and contrapuntal procedures in the scherzos of Haydn's Op. 20 No. 2 and Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 4. The analytical focus of James Palmer (University of British Columbia / Douglas College) was on musical humour, using theories of humour to contrast Haydn's famous musical joke in his String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2 with Beethoven's Bagatelle (also) Op. 33 No. 2, whose joke likewise involves musical endings but is more thoroughly woven into the overall plan of the piece. My own paper (Jason Yust, Boston University) showed how a method that Beethoven probably learned from Haydn of integrating a coda with the preceding part of a sonata form can be linked to the most significant formal innovations of his middle period.
Wednesday afternoon brought us recent revelations from the treasure trove of autograph scores and sketches left behind by Beethoven, delivered by four scholars from research centres in Bonn. Jens Dufner (Beethoven-Archiv Bonn) introduced the idea of doing ‘genetic criticism’ on Beethoven, that is, analysing the genesis of a work rather its final state. He applied this paradigm to added and cancelled repeats in autograph scores of the scherzos from the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. Suzanne Cox (Beethovens Werkstatt, Beethoven-Haus Bonn) offered perceptive commentary on Beethoven's compositional process in his folksong settings, WoO 158. Federica Rovelli (Beethovens Werkstatt, Beethoven-Haus Bonn) described the Beethovens Werkstatt project and considered the genesis of the Eighth Symphony, offering revelations about Beethoven's use of the autograph manuscript as a working score, his organizing of a private rehearsal to test possible alternatives in an early version of the symphony, and his initial conception of the first movement as a concerto. Finally, Christine Siegert (Beethoven-Archiv Bonn) discussed the importance of chamber-music arrangements of the composer's symphonies, the principal means, along with solo piano versions, for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicians to acquaint themselves with these works. She demonstrated the great number and wide variety of arrangements that have been acquired by the Beethoven-Haus.
The conclusion of Wednesday's proceedings left us on a high note (literally: e3), with a lecture-recital by Katharina Uhde (Valparaiso University) and R. Larry Todd (Duke University), held jointly with the Haydn Society of North America. Uhde and Todd explored the ways in which the finale of the Violin Sonata Op. 47 (‘Kreutzer’) relates to the work as a whole and to its earlier role as the finale of Op. 30 No. 1. Uhde's and Todd's performance of the latter work with the substitution of the Op. 47 finale was truly stunning, and all the more delightful for the intimate setting, the novelty of the experience, and the opportunity to ruminate on their perceptive commentary about how the preceding movements of Op. 30 No. 1 may have motivated features of this finale.
The last paper session, on Thursday morning, brought us full circle to some of the music-analytical topics that had characterized the first session. A paper by Alan Gosman (University of Michigan) took up the interesting question of Beethoven's conception of the sonata-form exposition as revealed in the sketches, specifically whether the main theme can appear in the dominant key before the beginning of the secondary theme group. Gosman showed, from Beethoven's sketches, how he tried many ways to incorporate the transposed main theme in the first movement of the Third Symphony (‘Eroica’) into transitional passages, and was ultimately satisfied by none of them. Gosman suggested that this idea, ultimately unrealized in the final version of the symphony, resurfaced in the unique first-movement form of the String Quartet Op. 130.
The other two papers on Thursday morning were impressive excavations of historical performance practices in relation to Beethoven's works, evidence of a current confluence of interest in questions of performance from the disciplines of musicology and music theory. Johannes Gebauer (Universität Bern) presented a very well-argued thesis that Joseph Joachim's definitive nineteenth-century interpretation of Beethoven's Violin Concerto was displaced by the overwhelming influence of Fritz Kreisler's 1926 recording of the work. Encouraging us to ‘shake off listening habits that we've become so fond of and look behind the curtain of the twentieth century’, Gebauer showed that Kreisler considerably slowed the tempos of all movements and in so doing affected subsequent recorded interpretations, even by performers who had previously played the concerto with faster speeds. Kreisler also displaced the technique of ‘free playing’ that Joachim taught to his students. Mark Ferraguto (Penn State University) discussed the influence of Beethoven's Erard piano on works written between 1803 and 1810, focusing on the 32 Variations in C minor, WoO80. This passacaglia-cum-‘kaleidoscope of pianistic techniques’ focuses on techniques that typify English and French etudes. Ferraguto noted that, as in contemporaneous works like the ‘Appassionata’ sonata, Beethoven's use of the Erard's registral extremes is carefully planned to coordinate with the work's formal design, and that ‘these moments are significant not because they involve very high notes but because they represent physical limits’.
The conference finale was an entertaining keynote address from the director of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Michael Ladenburger, who shared with us his centre's extensive collection of inauthentic Beethoven manuscripts. His descriptions of uncovering numerous forgeries of Beethoven autographs and sketches left us impressed not only by the diligence and ingenuity of some of the forgers (and the incompetence of others), but also by the Beethoven-Haus researchers’ skill in exposing these documents as fakes.
