Beethoven and His World (review)

Beethoven and His World. Edited by Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg. (Bard Music Festival Series.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. [x, 383 p. ISBN 0-691-07072-5 (cloth); 0-691-07073-3 (pbk.). $55 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

In recent decades, musicological journals have not been able to cope with the increasing volume of scholarship from all research specialties, few as rich as Beethoven studies. In response, many worthy essays have been published in collections whose contents are sometimes difficult to ascertain using conventional research tools. Among the best of these are The Creative World of Beethoven, edited by Paul H. Lang (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Beethoven Studies, edited by Alan Tyson (3 vols. [imprint varies, 1973-]); and more recently, Beethoven Forum, edited by Christopher Reynolds (7 vols. to date [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992- ]).

The present compilation follows this tradition and is the result of the cooperative efforts of the annual Bard Music Festival in New York and the music department of Princeton University. Its research reflects numerous individual projects and conferences, including a conference on Beethoven's late period held in honor of Lewis Lockwood at Harvard University in 1996. The eleven essays here were written by at least three generations of academic specialists in the history of music, art, and culture, and they represent the current views of mostly North American, English, and German scholarship.

The book is divided into four large topics. Part 1, "Heroic Beethoven," comprises essays by Reinhold Brinkmann and Lewis Lockwood that explore the context and manifestations of the "heroic" in Beethoven's life and works. Part 2, "Late Beethoven," presents new analyses of An die ferne Geliebte, Cello Sonata op. 102, no. 1, and Piano Sonata op. 109 by Elaine Sisman, Glenn Stanley, and Nicholas Marston, respectively. Part 3, "Beethoven in the Workshop," contains an essay by Tilman Skowroneck on how the capabilities and limitations of Beethoven's contemporary pianos affected his early keyboard compositions. William Kinderman analyses the composer's creative process in relation to nineteenth-century aesthetics of "fantasy" and lessons Beethoven learned from previous compositions. Part 4, "Beethoven in the World," begins with Christopher Gibbs's study of the literary and musical commemorations of Beethoven at the time of his death and in the year following. The last three essays focus on his image and reception history. Alessandra Comini critiques the traditional portrayal of Beethoven's scowl in his life and death masks and other portraiture. Sanna Pederson discusses his gendered biography and the implied interpretations of his compositions based on his German contemporaries' concept of masculinity. Leon Botstein aptly summarizes the various biases of Beethoven's biographies and musical interpretations and how they were used to support different artistic causes and political views from Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche through National Socialism.

This collection, although understandably uneven in its writing style, is noteworthy for its breadth of new topics in a crowded research field. Unusual also is the attention given to music analysis, aimed at a musically literate, but not necessarily specialized, audience. Laudable too, considering the still evolving, computerized systems of article indexes, is the work's inclusion of copious footnotes, which clearly trace the history of past research and also cite modern, interdisciplinary, and archival resources. The high level of scholarship and the freshness of ideas used to analyze so many of Beethoven's most venerable works make this collection particularly valuable.

Alice M. Hanson
St. Olaf College

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