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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1978
Theorists, analysts and popular writers continue to look more closely at Beethoven's music – and at more of it – than at that of any other composer; and it is his music, more often than not, that lies at the basis of theoretical formulations that are the most significant for our time. So, for instance, we agree with Joseph Kerman when he asserts that Tovey's contribution to tonal analysis and theory is inseparable from Beethoven's contribution to the musical repertory; but the association is equally valid for the contributions of many theorists of the past hundred years, including Heinrich Schenker, whose work on the Piano Sonata op. 111 shall be reviewing shortly, and Rudolph Reti, who invented the phrase ‘thematic process’ to describe a method of analysis by which an entire composition can be reduced to one or a few ‘prime cells’. In the first of Reti's two books on the subject, the Ninth Symphony is made the lead batsman in an impressive line-up of musical masterpieces from the sixteenth century to the twentieth; the second of his books is devoted entirely to the piano sonatas of Beethoven.
1 Joseph Kerman, Tovey's Beethoven', Beethoven Studies 2, ed. Alan Tyson (London, 1977), 182.Google Scholar
2 Rudolph Reti, The Thematic Process in Music (New York, 1951); Thematic Patterns in the Sonatas of Beethoven (London, 1967).Google Scholar
3 Gustav Nottebohm, preface to Ein Skzzenbuch von Beethoven (Leipzig, 1865). An English translation of this monograph and its ‘companion volume’, on the ‘Eroica’ sketchbook, has recently been published as Two Beethoven Sketchbooks (London, 1979).Google Scholar
4 Paul Mies, Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethovens zur Erkenntnis seines Stils (Leipzig, 1985, reprinted 1969; English translation, New York, 1929, reprinted 1969 and 1974).Google Scholar
5 Heinrich Schenker, Die letzten Sonaten von Beethoven: kritische Ausgabe mit Einführung und Eriäuterung (Vienna, 1913–1911; revised edition prepared by Oswald Jonas, Vienna, 1971–2). For the earliest volume in the series, on op. 109, Schenker did not study any of Beethoven's sketches. Subsequent page references to the volume on op. 111 apply to Jonas's revised version, currently the only edition available in print.Google Scholar
6 Oswald Jonas, ‘Beethoven's Skizzen und ihre Gestaltung zum Werk’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, xvi (1934), 449–59 (includes a discussion of op. 96); Allen Forte, The Compositional Matrix (Baldwin, N.Y., 1961) (on op. 109); Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 312–31 (on the slow movement of op. 127).Google Scholar
7 Robert Winter, ‘Plans for the Structure of the String Quartet in C Sharp Minor, op. 131’, Beethoven Studies 2, ed. Alan Tyson (London, 1977), 106–37.Google Scholar
8 Philip Gossett, ‘Beethoven's Sixth Symphony: Sketches for the First Movement’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xxvii (1974), 248–84.Google Scholar
9 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, mus. ms. autogr. Artatia 201. This manuscript, commonly referred to as Artaria 201, consists of 128 pages of manuscript paper in sixteen-stave oblong format. It is the only sketchbook from Beethoven's later years which survives in the form in which the composer used it, i.e. with its pages in the correct order and without any leaves missing. It was begun as a sketchbook for op. 111 towards the end of 1821 and used for about a year.Google Scholar
10 Schenker, Erläuterungsausgabe of op. 111, p. 23.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., pp. 24–5.Google Scholar
12 There is actually a sketch for the development section (Artaria 201, p. 12, staves 13–14) in which Beethoven changed the B♭ in bar 77 to C in order to make the ‘real answer’ into a tonal one.Google Scholar
13 See the very important study by Douglas Johnson, ‘Beethoven : Scholars and Beethoven's Sketches’, 19th-century Music, ii (1978), 3–17; replies to this article by the present writer and by Sieghard Brandenburg of the Beethoven-Archiv (Bonn) were published in a subsequent issue: ii (1979), 270–9. See also Gossett, op. cit., especially pp. 261ff., and Richard Kramer, The Sketches for Beethoven's Violin Sonatas Opus 30 (Ph.d. dissertation, Princeton University, 1974), especially pp. 5–8.Google Scholar