Beethoven's Conversation Books. Volume 1: Nos. 1 to 8 (February 1818 to March 1820) ed. by Theodore Albrecht, and: Beethoven's Conversation Books. Volume 2: Nos. 9 to 16 (March 1820 to September 1820) ed. by Theodore Albrecht (review)

In the lead-up to the year 2020, a veritable smorgasbord of Beethoven-themed concerts, conferences, recordings, music editions, and other publications and events were announced that sought to capitalize on the increased momentum surrounding the composer's 250th birth year. Several commentators, myself included, have questioned the utility of some of these undertakings and have criticized publications that have added little of substance. (See for instance Marten Noorduin, "What Scope Is There for Another Edition of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas?" Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 4 June 2019, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409819000053 [accessed 16 December 2019].) In that context, the appearance of the first two volumes of a new English edition of Beethoven's conversation books, which describes itself as a licensed edition of the German publication from 1972 and 1976, might seem like a symptom of the above disease. Luckily, Theodore Albrecht, the editor and translator of the planned twelve volumes, has added enough context to the material in the conversation books that this series is more than just a translation and is overall a welcome and long-awaited addition to the literature.

There is evidence that Beethoven's associates had been writing down confidential communications as early as 1816, the year in which his gradual loss of hearing forced him to withdraw from giving public concerts as a pianist. The earliest surviving conversation books date from the beginning of 1818, and Beethoven seems to have used these books until the end of his life. Nevertheless, as Albrecht shows in the general introduction and elsewhere, there are a number of books missing between 1820 and 1822 when Beethoven lost a trunk with his possessions while moving his home (Theodor Albrecht, "Anton Schindler as Destroyer and Forger of Beethoven's Conversation Books: A Case for Decriminalization," in Music's Intellectual History, ed. Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie [New York: RILM, 2009], 169–81). The conversation books in the two volumes under review here precede the incident.

The majority of the entries in the books consist of short conversational statements by Beethoven's friends and associates, who wrote what they otherwise would have had to say so loudly that they might be overheard. In most cases, Beethoven apparently answered vocally, but when discussing especially sensitive matters in public he often chose to write down his part of the conversation too. Whenever there were no other people around to overhear him, however, such as on occasions when he invited his friends over to his apartment, Beethoven seems to have preferred people to simply speak loudly, which was evidently still an option for communication during that period. Accordingly, the conversations in these first two volumes represent only a small subset of Beethoven's social interactions. The other types of content include shopping lists, arithmetic calculations, copied advertisements that interested the composer, drafts of letters, and a small number of musical extracts. Together, this material forms a picture, albeit fragmentary, of what occupied the composer on a day-to-day level during the last nine years of his life.

The only complete edition of the conversation books, produced between 1968 and 2001, contains a fairly diplomatic transcription of their contents (Ludwig van Beethovens Konversation-shefte, ed. Karl-Heinz Köhler, Grita Herre, and Dagmar Beck, 11 vols. [Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1968–2001]). The German transcription, however, is not the most...