Beethoven S French Piano

Using a replica of Beethoven’s Erard piano, scholar and performer Tom Beghin launches a striking reinterpretation of a key period of Beethoven’s work. In 1803 Beethoven acquired a French piano from the Erard Frères workshop in Paris. The composer was “so enchanted with it,” one visitor reported, “that he regards all the pianos made here as rubbish by comparison.” While Beethoven loved its sound, the touch of the French keyboard was much heavier than that of the Viennese pianos he had been used to. Hoping to overcome this drawback, he commissioned a local technician to undertake a series of revisions, with ultimately disappointing results. Beethoven set aside the Erard piano for good in 1810. Beethoven’s French Piano returns the reader to this period of Beethoven’s enthusiasm for all things French. What traces of the Erard’s presence can be found in piano sonatas like his “Waldstein” and “Appassionata”? To answer this question, Tom Beghin worked with a team of historians and musicians to commission the making of an accurate replica of the Erard piano. As both a scholar and a recording artist, Beghin is uniquely positioned to guide us through this key period of Beethoven’s work. Whether buried in archives, investigating the output of the French pianists who so fascinated Beethoven, or seated at the keyboard of his Erard, Beghin thinks and feels his way into the mind of the composer, bringing startling new insights into some of the best-known piano compositions of all time.

"In this book, Tom Beghin examines the French piano Beethoven famously acquired from the Erard firm in Paris in 1803. The Erard piano is one of only three extant instruments belonging to Beethoven and is housed in a museum in Austria. Beghin argues that the piano sonatas Beethoven composed between 1803 and 1810-including the "Waldstein" and the "Appassionata"-show the influence of the new French style of pianism and of the Erard in particular, specifically in the uses of tremolo, legato, and the "una corda" pedal, which softens dramatically the volume. Beghin shows that Beethoven was guided by a search for new sonorities and that the specific "touch" provided by the Erard's technology helped to point him toward new compositional horizons, especially at a time when he was forced to withdraw from performance due to his increasing deafness. The book combines informed historical analysis of the musical milieus in Vienna and Paris with the author's own experiments at the keyboard in order to reconstruct the specific techniques that Beethoven was exploiting and the ways they translated into his innovative piano writing"--

A comprehensive and immersive survey of thirty-five Beethoven piano sonatas Beethoven's piano sonatas are among the iconic cornerstones of the classical music repertoire. Jan Marisse Huizing offers an in-depth study of the sonatas using available autographs, first editions, recordings, and nearly three hundred musical examples. Digging into the historical background and historical performance practice, the book provides illuminating detail on Beethoven's pianism as well as his characteristics of notation, form and content, "types of touch," articulation, beaming, pedal indications, character, rubato, meter, metric constructions, tempo, and metronome marks. Packed with anecdotes, quotations, and considerable new information, the book will inspire all involved with these masterworks, playing a fortepiano or modern Grand, giving the sense of the composer sitting beside them as he translates his inspiration and ideas into his notation.

This book offers an insight into Beethoven's career, showing in well-documented detail the rise and decline of his powers as a performer.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize Based on the German composer's own correspondence, this inventive, counterfactual work of historical fiction imagines Beethoven traveling to America to write an oratorio based on the Book of Job. It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants the composer a few extra years of life and, starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adventures and misadventures in a new world in which, great man though he is, he finds himself a new man. Relying entirely on historically attested possibilities to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou (his designated librettist), and finding a kindred spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keeping his hosts guessing as to whether he will come through with his promised composition. (And just what, the reader also wonders, will this new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?) The book that emerges is an improvisation, as virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.

Between early 1806 and early 1807, Ludwig van Beethoven completed a remarkable series of instrumental works. But critics have struggled to reconcile the music of this banner year with Beethoven's "heroic style," the paradigm through which his middle-period works have typically been understood. Drawing on theories of mediation and a wealth of primary sources, Beethoven 1806 explores the specific contexts in which the music of this year was conceived, composed, and heard. As author Mark Ferraguto argues, understanding this music depends on appreciating the relationships that it both creates and reflects. Not only did Beethoven depend on patrons, performers, publishers, critics, and audiences to earn a living, but he also tailored his compositions to suit particular sensibilities, proclivities, and technologies.

This collection features 25 popular pieces, including the Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2 ("Moonlight"); Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2 ("Tempest"); 32 Variations in C Minor; more.

Beethoven’s piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people. In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1790s through the sonatas of Beethoven’s youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812†“1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s. Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven’s sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today’s audience, Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humor of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians, or professional pianists. The book includes a CD of Rosen performing extracts from several of the sonatas, illustrating points made in the text.