It is a great pleasure to write here briefly about my friend and colleague Lewis Lockwood, for whom, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, this book was conceived, planned, organized, edited, and produced over the last many years, and to whom it is dedicated. I have known Lewis since 1982, when he was at Harvard, and I arrived to take up a position at Boston University. Since then our paths have become much closer. While I was serving as chair of the Musicology and Ethnomusicology Department, I invited Lewis—after his retirement from Harvard—to assume the honorary position of Distinguished Senior Scholar at Boston University, a position he graciously accepted. He taught seminars for us and advised graduate students, and in 2014 he and I founded the Boston University Center for Beethoven Research, for which he continues to serve as Co-Director.

A formal review of his life so far would include the following facts. He was born on what was most probably the same day as Beethoven's birthday in 1930 and educated at the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where he studied the cello, an instrument that he still plays and for which he has a special fondness. He attended Queens College as an undergraduate and studied with one of the best-known scholars of Renaissance music, Edward Lowinsky. For graduate school he also had as teachers the leading lights of musicology at Princeton University—legends in the field, such as Arthur Mendel, Nino Pirrotta, and Oliver Strunk—and completed his dissertation on the sixteenth-century composer, Vincenzo Ruffo. (This was later published as The Counter-Reformation and the Masses of Vincenzo Ruffo [1970]). He played with the Seventh Army Symphony, also known as “Uncle Sam's Orchestra,” overseas for a year and a half during the mid-1950s and then returned to the United States to take up his own appointment at Princeton, where he taught from 1958 to 1980. He edited the Journal of the American Musicological Society from 1964 to 1967 and served as president of the American Musicological Society from 1987 to 1988. In 1980 he was appointed to the Department of Music at Harvard University, where he was later named Fanny Peabody Research Professor. He was appointed an emeritus professor in 2002.

I have called this book The New Beethoven, because, as the commemoration of the composer's birth reaches and then surpasses 250 years, we continue to find new things to say about the man, his life, and his remarkable works. For a couple of decades at the end of the twentieth century, it was assumed, naively, that everything about Beethoven had already been discovered, that commentary about his music had been exhausted, and that no further insights were possible. Over the past few years, however, with a burgeoning of further analysis and discussion, the establishment of a new international research group, and the founding of the new Center for Beethoven Research in Boston, Massachusetts, the future of Beethoven studies seems not just promising but bright with promise. Established scholars are publishing important new research, and young scholars are finding in Beethoven studies a vast landscape of intellectual and artistic opportunity.

Since 1770 few other composers in the Western musical tradition have encompassed such a wide range of human experience. And Beethoven's music was regarded as a touchstone by composers who came after him, from Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Brahms to Webern, Bartók, and Ornette Coleman. This inspiration has continued into modern times. The play 33 Variations by Moisés Kaufman, inspired by Beethoven's “Diabelli” Variations, received its premiere in 2007. In 2015 the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra commissioned five contemporary composers each to write a piano concerto inspired by one of Beethoven's five. The series ran for five years from 2015 to 2020. In 2016 the Pulitzer Prize-winning young composer Caroline Shaw premiered her Blueprint, a work for string quartet modeled on Beethoven's String Quartet, op. 18, no. 6. Also in 2020 a global partnership was created, with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and pieces of new music performed on six continents and involving ten different orchestras. (And this is not to mention the recurring presence of Beethoven, and snippets of his music, in popular culture: Schroeder's obsession in Peanuts cartoons; Walter Murphy's “A Fifth of Beethoven” [1976], memorably interpolated into the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever; the 1991 video game Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp; and a 2015 episode of the science-fiction series Doctor Who.)