".. . immer das Ganze vor Augen": Studien zu Beethoven (review)

". . . immer das Ganze vor Augen": Studien zu Beethoven. By Peter Gülke. Stuttgart: Metzler; Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000. [v, 282 p. ISBN 3-476-01796-6 (Metzler); 3-7618-2018-6 (Bärenreiter). DM 68.]

Peter Gülke has been an indefatigable writer on Beethoven and other subjects for about thirty years, and this volume brings together eleven of his most noteworthy essays written during this period. Only one is new, and more than half of the remainder were published as long ago as the 1970s. They are somewhat disparate in nature, some having been written as detailed scholarly articles while others were intended for a more general audience--for example, as articles accompanying recordings--and in three cases they lack all footnote references. The ten articles previously published have made little impact so far, and most are rarely cited in the literature, although one has already had the benefit of a reprint ("Introduktion als Widerspruch im System: Zur Dialektik von Thema und Prozessualität," Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft 14 [1969]: 5-40; reprinted in Ludwig van Beethoven, ed. Ludwig Finscher, Wege der Forschung, 178 [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983], 338-87). Whether these articles will now, as a result of the present volume, receive increased attention remains an open question, and the purpose of the volume, except as a celebration of the author, is unclear. Gülke's most noted work on Beethoven is probably the volume he published in connection with his new edition of the Fifth Symphony (Zur Neuausgabe der Sinfonie Nr. 5 von Ludwig van Beethoven: Werk und Edition [Leipzig: Peters, 1978]), and the central portion of this is reprinted here; but this work has been largely superseded by more recent studies by Sieghard Brandenburg, Clive Brown, and Jonathan Del Mar.

Reprinting articles from several years ago always raises the question of whether they should be updated, and if so, to what extent. Gülke shows himself acutely aware of this problem, explaining in a brief afterword that ideally several of the articles should have been not merely revised but completely rewritten. Instead, however, they have been left largely as they were originally. A few citations have been added to point to more recent literature, but mainly just to reference material such as the new Beethoven-Haus edition of Beethoven's letters (Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg, 7 vols. to date [Munich: Henle, 1996-]). There has also been some occasional minor rewording, and the name of the former Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz has been changed to its present form (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin--Preussischer Kulturbesitz), but any further updating has been confined to the Nachwort. This Nachwort, however, is quite helpful, not merely citing the important literature published on each subject since Gülke wrote his articles, but briefly discussing any significant new conclusions. For example, Gülke points out that according to current thought, Beethoven's final intention for the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony was that it be a three-part structure, not a five-part one as Gülke had proposed, although the latter scheme still cannot be excluded with certainty. And whereas his original 1977 article on the Eighth Symphony had discussed the chronology of the scherzo theme in relation to the canon on which it was supposedly based, Gülke reminds us that more recent work suggests that the canon is a fabrication (though he omits to tell us that its composer is now thought to be the notorious Anton Schindler).

The sole new article is the one that confusingly provides the title for the whole volume: " '. . . immer das ganze vor Augen,' " distinguishable from the book's title by the lowercase instead of capital g. This takes as its starting point Beethoven's comment, written in 1814 when he was revising Fidelio, that even when composing instrumental music he had "always the whole in view." The context surrounding the quotation, however, is largely bypassed, as the author sets out on a discussion of the...