Conference Report: "Rethinking Beethoven's Late Period: Sources, Aesthetics, and Interpretation," Harvard University Department of Music, November 1-3, 1996

BEETHOVEN'S THREE STYLE PERIODS - WHICH DATE BACK AT LEAST AS FAR AS Schlosser's biography of 1828 have been the focus of three conferences and festivals in the last four years. In 1993 Glenn Stanley organized a conference on early Beethoven at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; in 1994 the middle period was explored in a festival and conference in Milwaukee sponsored by the Historical Keyboard Society of Wisconsin; the late period received its due in this conference in honor of the Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood, who has taught at Harvard University since 1980. The conference was originally planned to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday in 1995 (by some rich and propitious coincidence of fate he was born on December 16, one of the two dates proposed as Beethoven's birthday), but circumstances intervened to postpone the occasion for a year. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence Professor Lockwood has exerted in his generous and rigorous manner on the development of Beethoven studies in the last twenty-five years. Dividing his scholarly energies between the Renaissance and Beethoven, he produced, beginning in 1969, a long series of seminal texts on Beethoven's compositional process. These texts, a majority of which were republished in his Beethoven / Studies in the Creative Process (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), have ranged in focus from the broadest questions to detailed and insightful exhumations and explorations of sketches for individual works. His writings are characterized by acumen, clarity, and scholarly breadth and he remains a humanizing touchstone in the microcosm of Beethoven studies. I should preface this report by explaining that it has been fashioned from my notes made at the conference, the participant's handouts, and my memory. Given the complexity of the late period and of matters under discussion, I am certain that it contains, as do all human enterprises, errors. As well, it also reflects my emphases and attention, and a selection of those matters which may be explained with some degree of clarity in this type of report. I invite those who wish to correct, append to, or further illuminate this account to send comments. I have not reviewed the three concerts which were an important part of the proceedings, nor have I included all the responses from the audience. In accordance with recent publication decisions by presses and scholars, the conference's papers will not be published as a set. Accordingly, this report is more detailed than it would be if the papers were to be published as conference proceedings. Introduction The proceedings began with a welcome from the conference's two organizers. Reinhold Brinkmann, Harvard University, took the occasion to press the point that it was only fitting to hold such a conference at Harvard since England has played the most important in establishing Beethoven's presence in the United States. Brinkmann enumerated the Beethoven contributions of New Englanders John Knowles Paine (1833-1906), John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817-1897), and Elliot Forbes (b. 1917, and in attendance) - Paine, Dwight, and Forbes all legitimately Bostonians - and the prominent role Beethoven's works have occupied in American orchestral repertory in the 1840s (28% of all works), the 1890s (20%), and even the years immediately following W.W.II (18%). Christopher Reynolds (University of California, Davis) then gave a brief history of the conference's organization, recounting that the planners has felt that Beethoven's last decade was most in need of rethinking. Professor Reynolds posed the following topics to the speakers (who had all been chosen for their personal connections to Professor Lockwood): elements of the late style which appear in earlier works, the return to Baroque and Classical traits, aesthetic ideals as they evolved over the late period, contrasts between Romanticist and Classicist styles, internal divisions within the late period, and the intersection of formal and programmatic elements. …