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Transcendent Mastery: Studies in the Music of Beethoven. By Bathia Churgin. (North American Beethoven Studies, no. 4.) Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008. [xvii, 413 p. ISBN 9781576471227. $58.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, indexes.

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It is always fascinating to read works of eminent scholars who have studied a certain repertoire over many years, as their writings reflect a vast knowledge of the field. Bathia Churgin has taught us much about the music of Sammartini, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the history of sonata form, and a host of other areas throughout her career. Her recent work on Beethoven includes the upcoming critical editions of Symphonies nos. 3 ("Eroica") and 4 with Sieghard Brandenburg. In the present volume, the fourth in the North American Beethoven Studies series, Churgin gives a close reading of four of the composer's works rather than a sweeping overview of his life and compositions. Her purpose, according to the preface, is "to consider widely and deeply four of Beethoven's most excellent works," helping readers "become acquainted with the special character of each genre as well as the overall development of Beethoven's style" (p. ix).

Churgin further notes that the book's emphasis is analysis, largely basing her discussions on the second edition of Jan LaRue's Guidelines for Style Analysis (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), and Leonard G. Ratner's Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980). As such, her analyses employ LaRue's terminology, with many sections of the book exploring musical elements following his classifications: sound, melody, harmony, rhythm and growth. As the approach is heavily dependent on the reader's knowledge of LaRue's analytical symbols and Ratner's topoi, Churgin includes a list of these, along with other symbols and terms (some of her own creation), in a table of abbreviations.

The four works under consideration in this volume are the Violin Concerto op. 61; the Piano Sonata in D major op. 10, no. 3; the final Violin Sonata op. 96, and the String Quartet in A minor op. 132. Its four chapters are organized in a similar fashion, presenting the work's background and context first, followed by a detailed analysis of each movement, a discussion of sketches and/or autograph, and other issues associated with the individual work. Chapters are illustrated with tables, figures, music examples, and several plates of sketchbook and autograph pages. The author's rich and nuanced command of the era's music is clear, as she provides numerous comparisons of Beethoven's musical characteristics with works of his predecessors and contemporaries.

In chapter 1, Churgin addresses scholarly issues associated with the Violin Concerto, such as Owen Jander's labeling of the slow movement as a Romance ("Romantic Form and Content in the Slow Movement of Beetho ven's Violin Concerto," Musical Quarterly 69, no. 2 [Spring 1983]: 159–79), a thesis she finds not entirely convincing. The discussion of the work's surviving autograph details the many corrections and cross-outs contained in the score, most especially in the solo line. Churgin ends with a comparison between editions and a brief discussion of performance practice.

Consideration of "the sharp expressive contrasts of the movements" (p. 96) is one of Churgin's chief concerns when describing previous analyses of the Piano Sonata op. 10, no. 3 in chapter 2, including those of Adolf Bernhard Marx, Lenz, Czerny, and Carl Reinecke. Her discussion of metronome markings and early critical reception of the work will interest performers and listeners alike (this is the first of Beethoven's piano sonatas to garner a review in Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, in October 1799).

In her examination of surviving sketches and the autograph of the Violin Sonata op. 96 (chap. 3), Churgin provides readers with a detailed compendium of the various choices Beethoven made while composing this work. She does an admirable job of making the discussion readable and relevant for those interested in the composer's creative process—no small feat, as descriptions of sketches, compositional choices, and variant readings can be daunting even to the expert.

The book's final chapter fully addresses an issue Churgin alludes to elsewhere in Transcendent Mastery: Beethoven's composition of multi-movement cycles throughout his life. The op. 132 String Quartet is the first of the composer's extended late works in the genre (followed soon after by opp. 130 and 131), and its Lydian slow movement ("Heiliger Dankgesang") has elicited praise since the work's earliest readings. Churgin's discussion of the quartet is a tour de force: an almost overwhelming [End Page 547] presentation of historical, textual, and critical materials, interwoven with her own analyses.

For all of its many virtues, several matters make reading this book and following all of the author's arguments challenging for the reader. First is its reliance on LaRue's (and Churgin's) symbolic language of letters and numbers. Those for whom this language is foreign may find a number of passages difficult to understand (I found myself needing to consult the table of abbreviations and analysis tables frequently to remember the meaning of symbols such as "Pay" and "1Po," for example). One wonders if setting off the analytical symbols from the sentence through use of a different font or italics would have solved the problem (an excellent and successful example of this approach is found in volume 2 [The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony] of A. Peter Brown's The Symphonic Repertoire [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002]). Churgin presents detailed timeline analyses as tables for each work's movements, but also continues to employ LaRue's symbols within the descriptive prose, often without including measure numbers for the passage, making for some awkward reading and confusion. A better strategy would have been a consistent inclusion of measure numbers to accompany the symbols in these instances. A reader armed with a score (as suggested by the author in the preface) may then refer to passages immediately instead of having to search for the explanatory table, allowing for a better understanding of Churgin's observation or insight. An excellent instance of the successful combination of symbols and measure numbers may be found in the discussion of the first movement of the op. 96 Violin Sonata:

Many subtleties mark the treatment of phrase structure throughout the movement. Peter Cahn points out the three-measure phrases in mm. 17–25 (end of 2P–1Ta) and the three–measure slur bridging the subphrases 1Px and y (mm. 4–6) reflecting 'the rhythmic-metric variety' in the movement. We can add the three-measure slur in mm. 10–12, bridging 1P and 2P, and several later examples such as 2K, in addition to its hemiolas. The elision of phrases also contracts some four-measure phrases into three measures, as 1Tb1 elides with 2T (mm. 30–32) and 1Ka1 elides with 2K (mm. 76– 81), itself composed of three-measure phrases.

(p. 218)

The inclusion of measure numbers would also be useful when the author compares Beethoven's works with those of another composer. The reader may be confused by a passage in which the works referenced are not included in an analytical table; for example: "1P and 1S, as well as *Na on the phrase level, are 'classic' examples of the parallel period, a format that became more common in the later 18th century and that we may know from such examples as 1P of Mozart's Symphony No. 41/I and Haydn's Symphony No. 104/I" (pp. 29–30). Most readers of this volume will likely know the Mozart and Haydn passages in this example without needing to consult a score, but measure numbers would make the passage even more clear, especially in instances where the author references lesser-known works. The later chapters use this format more consistently. The numerous analytical tables, descriptive charts, and sectional divisions are useful for the reader, but they frequently interrupt the discussion. Some of this information could doubtless have been absorbed into the prose or organized in a slightly different fashion, making the book a more grateful read.

Although the author praises the individuals who assisted with this volume in her preface, one wonders if it went through an additional iteration after the author's own editing, as Churgin was badly served by those who proofread this book. The work is filled with unfortunate mistakes, numerous typographical errors, and inconsistencies of style (a number of the mistakes could have been prevented simply by running a spell-checking program). The typeface seems a bit large for the page and the layout could have been more elegant. An example of editorial inconsistency is the symbol employed for the pitch Binline graphic, which is presented in at least three different ways throughout the book, sometimes on a single page (see, for example, pp. 10, 11, and 33; those on pp. 10 and 11 are clearly editing mistakes). Although most plates are clear and easily read, several of the included sketch pages are badly reproduced scans and useless for [End Page 548] the reader (the worst of these is the page from the Landsberg 10 sketchbook found on p. 71).

Bathia Churgin has written an impressively detailed book that will reward readers with much information about the four works and about Beethoven himself. The amount of information included in Transcendent Mastery is breathtaking. In praising the volume, Walter Frisch notes the author's "gift for integrating analysis, history, and sketch and manuscript studies in close readings of some of Beethoven's greatest works." It is unfortunate that poor proofreading and formatting, editing mistakes, and a sometimes thorny analytical system get in the way of an otherwise admirable work.

Jane Riegel Ferencz
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

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