Un Beethoven ibérico: Dos siglos de transferencia cultural ed. by Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco (review)

Ludwig van Beethoven's legacy is not one that we associate with Spain. At least it is not immediately apparent what sort of influence he and his music might have exercised on Spanish composers, concert artists, and audiences. We associate Beethoven with the genre of the symphony, but symphonic organizations were slow to develop in Spain during the 1800s, and Beethoven's symphonies only gradually gained traction with concert audiences there. And Spanish composers themselves never cultivated the symphony with any notable results. True, they composed an abundance of orchestral music, especially tone poems, ballets, and concertos, many of which have found a secure niche in the canonical repertoire. But one strains to think of a single Spanish symphony that has achieved the stature of Isaac Albéniz's Catalonia, Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat, or Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. For whatever reason, Spanish composers were simply not drawn to the musical abstractions of the symphony—which is not to say they never composed them. Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (1806–1826) was a young composer whose promising career as a symphonist was cut short by a premature demise. And though they are far better known for their zarzuelas and operas, both Tomás Bretón and Ruperto Chapí essayed symphonic works. Joaquín Turina's Sinfonia sevillana (1920) also comes to mind, though it may be the exception that proves the rule, since it is as much a three-movement tone poem as it is a symphony.

And yet it should not come as a complete surprise that the Iberian penetration of the Austro-Germanic heritage of which Beethoven was the crowning glory is on full display here. Joseph Haydn was hugely popular in Spain, and his Die Sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze was an orchestral work commissioned by the city of Cadiz in 1786. And in the late nineteenth century, Richard Wagner's operas and operatic philosophies were adopted and adapted by many admirers, including Felipe Pedrell, Albéniz, and Enrique Granados, among others. To be sure, this heritage was not confined to symphonies and operas. As this volume makes perfectly clear, the impact of Beethoven's chamber music and piano sonatas was immense, felt first within the salons of the elite before it made its way to concert venues populated by a growing middle class.

Thus, Beethoven, a larger-than-life symbol of Viennese classicism and incipient romanticism, is not out of place in Iberian music history, and it was about time that someone undertook to examine his undoubted impact in both Spain and Portugal. That someone is Teresa Cascudo García-Villaraco, a leading musicologist in Spain and professor at the Universidad de La Rioja in Logroño. She assembled a dream team of scholars for this trailblazing collection of essays, which will be of great interest and value not only to Hispanists but also to anyone interested in the global scope of Beethoven interpretation and reception.

The editor's insightful introduction concerns issues of reception, discourses, and canonicity relative to Beethoven. As she astutely points out, "Almost two centuries after his death, Beethoven is today the most-programmed composer, an icon of practices associated with 'classical music' and one that constitutes a model for certain attitudes and behaviors, an example of an idea of emancipated humanity that was defined at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 1, my trans.). She then establishes the necessary tenor and parameters for the volume, which offers a generous collection of twenty essays, divided into nine major parts, by twenty-five scholars. This collection is the outgrowth of a 2020 conference dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth and organized by the "Música y Prensa" group of the Sociedad Española de Musicología. Yet, as the editor advises, these...