Accompanied by a booklet of music examples (108 p.: ill.; 21 cm.).

Complete scores of five great Beethoven piano concertos, with all cadenzas as he wrote them, reproduced from authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel edition. Includes new table of contents.

First published in 1996, this volume counters the attitude of paying more attention to the performer than to the piece. Too often, Anthony Hopkins argues, music is simply regarded as a pleasant background noise to accompany our other activities, whereas Beethoven offers much more than that. Hopkins aim to promote hearing, rather than listening. He examines Beethoven’s piano concertos numbers 1 through 5, along with the violin concerto in D Major, Op. 61, and the Triple Concerto, Op. 56.

“[Beethoven’s] music never grows old— and, enjoyed alongside Mr. Lockwood’s expert commentary, it sparkles with fresh magic.”—Wall Street Journal More than any other composer, Beethoven left to posterity a vast body of material that documents the early stages of almost everything he wrote. From this trove of sketchbooks, Lewis Lockwood draws us into the composer’s mind, unveiling a creative process of astonishing scope and originality. For musicians and nonmusicians alike, Beethoven’s symphonies stand at the summit of artistic achievement, loved today as they were two hundred years ago for their emotional cogency, variety, and unprecedented individuality. Beethoven labored to complete nine of them over his lifetime—a quarter of Mozart’s output and a tenth of Haydn’s—yet no musical works are more iconic, more indelibly stamped on the memory of anyone who has heard them. They are the products of an imagination that drove the composer to build out of the highest musical traditions of the past something startlingly new. Lockwood brings to bear a long career of studying the surviving sources that yield insight into Beethoven’s creative work, including concept sketches for symphonies that were never finished. From these, Lockwood offers fascinating revelations into the historical and biographical circumstances in which the symphonies were composed. In this compelling story of Beethoven’s singular ambition, Lockwood introduces readers to the symphonies as individual artworks, broadly tracing their genesis against the backdrop of political upheavals, concert life, and their relationship to his major works in other genres. From the first symphonies, written during his emerging deafness, to the monumental Ninth, Lockwood brings to life Beethoven’s lifelong passion to compose works of unsurpassed beauty.

The three selections in this edition of quartet arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies are chosen to represent the diversity of quartets as a medium for arrangement in the early nineteenth century. Only the arrangement by Carl Zulehner, of Beethoven’s first symphony, is a string quartet. The arrangement by Johann Nepomuk Hummel of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, for pianoforte, flute, violin, and violoncello (or pianoforte alone), is part of an extensive collection of arrangements that he made for that grouping, while the arrangement for piano quartet by Ferdinand Ries of the Eroica Symphony represents the particular popularity of chamber groupings involving stringed instruments and piano.

Reveals the importance of arrangements of Beethoven's works for nineteenth-century domestic music-making to the history of the classical symphony.

Three important works by conductor Felix Weingartner (1863–1942) include a detailed account of performing difficulties and interpretation questions involved in each of Beethoven's symphonies, plus the essays "On Conducting" and "The Symphony Since Beethoven."