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Beethoven the Pianist, by Tilman Skowroneck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x, 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-11959-7. $109.99.
Beethoven the composer continues to play a vibrant role in our musical landscape, but Beethoven the pianist (like all performers who lived before sound recording) is a relatively shadowy figure. As the abstract on the book's back cover puts it, the usual image is of "a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments." In other words, if we could hear him play, we wouldn't be impressed. On the contrary, we'd be glad to be living in a time when Beethoven's music is better served by more competent players with more advanced instruments.
Tilman Skowroneck wants to correct that picture. He reminds us that Beethoven first achieved prominence in Vienna as a performer, impressing and moving his listeners with his command of the pianos at his disposal; and that some negative reports reflect the later deterioration of Beethoven's playing caused by hearing loss. But, more importantly, he believes that - despite the long history and vast quantity of Beethoven scholarship - we are in a position today to truly reassess and reimagine Beethoven the performer because of two relatively recent developments: the increasing availability of high-quality pianos from Beethoven's time (both restored antiques and newly-built replicas) and a cohort of performer-scholars who have shown what those instruments can do.
Part I of the book (nearly half of the volume) is entitled "Beethoven, his playing, and his instruments" and begins with a chapter devoted to Beethoven's early musical studies. In the second chapter ("Beethoven the pianist") Skowroneck argues persuasively that, although his early training included performances on the clavichord and the organ, Beethoven first found his voice on fortepianos by Stein. The significance of the Stein for our understanding of Beethoven is elaborated in the third chapter ("Beethoven's first decade in Vienna"), which is based primarily on two sources: Andreas Streicher (friend to Beethoven and husband as well as business partner of Nannette Stein, who took over the Stein shop from her father), and Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld, an astute observer of Vienna's musical life. Schönfeld asserted that Vienna's pianos and pianists could be divided into two camps: instruments of the Stein style and the players who preferred them, and those...