faithful amz

One of my years-old ideas about Beethoven’s piano playing is that it developed from, roughly said, “impetuous-youthful-but-rough” via “virtuosic-professional” to “stepwise declining”. First signs of that “decline” can be seen in documents from around 1800. Clear indications date from 1805 and onward.

This view is not so much based on my innate perseverance in the making of claims, but rather on the circumstance that I spent my time returning to the canonic documents about Beethoven’s playing, re-reading, re-organizing and re-interpreting their meaning (at that moment and over time). Unbelievable that a perfectly accessible passage in a very well known body of source material (the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung from Leipzig) has escaped my (and – it seems – most Beethoven scholars’) attention. It beautifully summarizes what I have tried to establish:

AMZ Zehnter Jahrgang, No. 19, 3 February 1808 p. 303. In a review of the trio Op. 2 by Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s former student, we find the following passage:

“Mr. R. is the last, and in fact perhaps the only pupil mr. v. Beethoven consented to take on, and whom he kept here in Vienna for some time also for the following reason; that he played his (Beethoven’s) piano concertos and other important works in public, which the composer himself no longer liked to do, [who has] in fact really neglected himself regarding his playing for several years.”

beethoven the pianist update

My new book Beethoven the Pianist (Cambridge University Press) is now definitely published and available at booksellers all around. There is a small pile of them on my little table at home, so I can’t be wrong about this. Previews are available on Googlebooks and at various Amazon sites.

I am announcing this only for the sake of completeness (since I mentioned the upcoming event in an earlier post) and in the hope that the community of piano and Beethoven aficionados will have patience with my style and a good time reading it.

With even more enthusiasm, I would like to direct interested harpsichordists to the tab “Skowroneck harpsichords” in the sidebar of this blog to check out a new second hand offer of a Franco-Flemish 5-octave Skowroneck harpsichord in Spain, that has reached me yesterday. This instrument is especially dear to me since I played my first series of public recitals on it in the early 80s. Judging from the pictures that I have seen, it is in very good shape.