OBITUARY: Joseph Kerman

(London, April 23, 1924 - Berkeley, California, March 17, 2014)Beethoven lay at the center ofjoseph Kerman's musical experience. His early essay on Beethoven: the Single Journey that appeared in the Hudson Review in 1952 launched what became Joe's own sustained journey to explore Beethoven's life and music, supported by his serious scrutiny of the vast documentary sources left by the great composer. Beethoven is conspicuously mentioned in Joe's bold essay A Profile for American Musicology from 1965, anticipating the longer survey of Beethoven scholarship contained in his later book Contemplating Music. Joe's 1966 study of The Beethoven Quartets remains one of his most read books. His most substantial contribution to fundamental research is surely the handsome, voluminous two-volume edition of Beethoven's Kafka Sketchbook issued in the bicentennial year 1970. Joe's fascination with Beethoven never abated, as is reflected in later studies such as his book Concerto Conversations or his searching essay on Opus 131 and the Uncanny, which appeared in 2006, four decades after his book on the quartets.Just two years ago, I called Joe to enlist his support and scholarly input as long-awaited project approached publication: the critical edition of the Eroica Sketchbook by Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman that appeared in my Beethoven Sketchbook Series with the University of Illinois Press. With characteristic generosity, Joe responded swiftly and insightfully, just as he had years before in supplying input for my own three-volume study of Beethoven's creative process in composing his Missa solemnis and late fortepiano works.His experience with Beethoven helped inspire Joe's convictions about the proper goals of criticism and the need for a keen awareness of the... centrality of the work of art, as he put it at the end of his book on the quartets. Joe was as impatient with abstract theorizing as he was with murky prose. His own writings are invariably probing, direct, and often provocative, while acknowledging the provisional nature of scholarship. As Joe wrote on that last page of his quartet volume, the critic counts himself lucky to make an occasional penetration or illumination... [and] hopes ... to see his work put aside as having served as means to an end, and not as an end in itself.In Joe's critical writings, one admires the balance between historical and aesthetic dimensions, as an unfolding narrative is conveyed through sharply etched prose. One thinks fondly for instance of his concise article on Schubert's remarkable Heine setting, Her Picture.1 Another musicological masterpiece in this regard is Joe's essay on Beethoven's song cycled« die feme Geliebte that he wrote for the first volume of the Beethoven Studies series edited by his friend Alan Tyson, from 1975. This was one of his favorite essays. Joe interrogated Beethoven's cycle with exquisite sensitivity, weighing its personal significance for the composer in relation to the mystery of the Immortal Beloved. At the same time Joe offered original perspectives based on the suggestive sketches as well as the surpassing lyrical thrust of the whole cycle, which downplays artifice in favor of moving directness of expression. In penetrating insight Joe indicated how Beethoven himself intervened in revisingthe text, thereby connecting the last song with the first while underscoring that yearn ing toward genuine interpersonal communication that was so characteristic both of the composer and of this remarkable musicologist.What is the lasting legacy ofjoseph Kerman and its importance to our understanding of Beethoven and to ongoing research on the composer's music? We may seek an answer to this question through Joe's commentary on Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio, in his study Opera as Drama, book first published in 1956 but reissued in revised edition in 1988. Beethoven is granted no separate chapter in Opera as Drama, and most of Joe's commentary is tucked in rather inconspicuously at the end of his discussion of Action and the Musical Continuity preceding the chapter devoted to Mozart. …