Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Sketchbook: A Critical Edition Transcribed, ed. and commentary by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman (review)

The publishing of Beethoven sketchbook editions has of late become a tale of two cities. As long ago as 1952 the Beethovenhaus in Bonn inaugurated what was intended to be a Gesamtausgabe of the surviving corpus of sketches; but that initiative preceded by some decades the groundbreaking work of Alan Tyson and others on the original physical structure of the sketchbooks, most of which had been partially or (in some cases) totally dismembered at the hands of nineteenth-century owners. In any case, the pace of production of the Bonn edition has been cripplingly slow, and any pretence to future completeness was long ago dropped: the most recent production, William Drabkin’s edition of Artaria 197, appeared in 2010 and is only the third Bonn edition to have come out since the 1990s.

Meanwhile, on another continent, William Kinderman launched his own Beethoven Sketchbook Series in Urbana-Champaign, at the University of Illinois. Inaugurated in 2003—fully a half-century after the Bonn launch—with a handsome three-volume edition of Artaria 195, a sketchbook principally for the Credo and Benedictus of the Missa Solemnis and the Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109, Kinderman’s series is now continued by the appearance of this edition of Landsberg 6, transcribed and edited by the doyen of Beethoven scholars, Lewis Lockwood, and his younger colleague Alan Gosman.

Even if it were admitted that what Michael Broyles has recently dubbed ‘The Warm Tropical Summer of Sketch Research’ (Beethoven in America (Bloomington, Ind., 2011) ch. 5) has now passed into history, the appearance of these volumes is a signal event. Retaining ninety-one of its original ninety-six leaves, Landsberg 6 is one of the largest and best known of all the Beethoven sketchbooks. Gustav Nottebohm’s 1880 monograph study (Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven aus dem Jahre 1803 (Leipzig: Peters)) achieved a new lease on life upon its translation into English in 1979 (one of Two Beethoven Sketchbooks, trans. Jonathan Katz (London: Gollancz)), two years after Rachel Wade had published an important article (‘Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook’, Fontes Artis Musicae, 24 (1977), 254–89); and Lockwood’s own series of studies of the sketches for the ‘Eroica’ commenced in the early 1980s. Add to this mix the fact that Landsberg 6 was one of the large number of Beethoven manuscripts ‘lost’ to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek after 1945 and inaccessible until the early 1980s at their new home in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków, and one gets some sense of the importance of this publication to Beethoven scholarship. For Lockwood himself it must be reckoned the crowning achievement of a highly distinguished career that is even yet not over.

The earliest Bonn editions were ‘diplomatic’ transcriptions, without facsimiles, which sought to reproduce the appearance of the original as faithfully as possible, eschewing editorial intervention. Ironically, this rendered them largely useless since Beethoven’s customarily haphazard and approximate placing of notes on staves resulted in musical nonsense if no interpretative activity mediated the rendering. Facsimile volumes began to appear subsequently, and Sieghard Brandenburg’s edition, in facsimile and transcription, of the ‘Kessler’ Sketchbook set new standards in the late 1970s for transcriptions that sought to render the meaning and not merely the appearance of Beethoven’s notation. Lockwood’s and Gosman’s work is fully in this tradition, while they admit also that ‘to a great extent, we have attempted to format the transcription similarly to the original manuscript’ (Vol. 1, p. 92), an attempt that extends to the retention of Beethoven’s own stem directions.

A useful advantage of the overall formatting is that the 18216- and 18-stave pages of the transcription align exactly with those of the facsimile, making the location of any given entry in both sources considerably easier than is sometimes the case in editions emanating from Bonn. The quality of...