RESEARCH General Art

BEETHOVEN
Unraveling composer's sketchbook was like archaeological dig

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

4/1/03

Photo by Bill Wiegand William Kinderman, a music professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent the last several years exploring and transcribing the content of the sketchbook Beethoven used to draft ideas while composing two of his later masterpieces.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — By training, William Kinderman is an accomplished pianist and musicologist. But for the past several years, his research on the creative motivations of Ludwig van Beethoven has made him feel more like a detective.

Kinderman, a music professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent the last several years exploring and transcribing the content of the sketchbook Beethoven used to draft ideas while composing two of his later masterpieces. The effort, which resulted in a three-volume work published this month by the University of Illinois Press, "represents real work in the trenches, and was rather like an archaeological dig," he said. And the laborious digging, much of which took place in library archives in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere, unearthed treasure of interest not only to Beethoven scholars, but also to music lovers everywhere.

"Some of the shorter piano pieces in the sketchbook were discovered for the very first time," Kinderman said. These "musical morsels," or aphorisms, as he calls them, are something of a bonus among the pages of sketches documented in "Artaria 195: Beethoven’s Sketchbook for the ‘Missa Solemnis’ and the Piano Sonata, Opus 109." The work also includes sketches for Beethoven’s final piano trilogy, the Five Bagatelles, Opus 119, Nos. 7-11. The boxed set includes a full-color facsimile volume of pages from the sketchbook, named for publisher Domenico Artaria, who acquired the sketchbook after Beethoven’s death. Another volume features Kinderman’s annotated musical transcription; a third commentary volume features insights on Kinderman’s research and discovery processes. A sample of the sketches, transcriptions and corresponding sound files can be accessed on the Web.

Kinderman said the sketchbook reveals a great deal about the composer’s creative process and work style. "Beethoven was a creative artist who was a timeless reviser," he said. "He was never satisfied; he was always trying to make things better." In addition to the challenge of deciphering layers of scratched-out and scribbled-over notations, Kinderman had to crack the code of the composer’s unique shorthand.

"Beethoven had an idiosyncratic language and used massive abbreviations. Things like clefs and regular signals designating which sharps and flats to be used are missing. That results in a puzzle, which took a lot of detective work to solve." An added hurdle involved locating all the puzzle pieces. Some of the pages had been removed by collectors over the years, while others had been ripped out by the composer himself. "If you visited Beethoven in his studio in 1820, you’d see that while he worked in a bound sketchbook, he had piles of loose sheaves scattered around everywhere."

In conjunction with the publication of "Artaria 195," Kinderman is organizing an international conference, "Beethoven and the Creative Process," May 2-4, at the university’s Spurlock Museum. Other activities include an exhibition on Beethoven, and concerts, including a performance of the "Missa Solemnis."