A good many of the ideas in this book grew from talks given at conferences and seminars. I owe debts of gratitude to Stefan Litwin, whose seminar “Beethovens Spätstil. Probleme der Interpretation” at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study) in June 2004 provoked the essay on Beethoven’s Opus 109; to Richard Will and Marshall Brown for the invitation to deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, in Seattle, August 2001, from which grew the chapter on Herder and Haydn; to Annette Richards, whose memorable conference on Emanuel Bach at Cornell in 1999 inspired the chapter on Diderot and Bach; and to Hans-Werner Küthen, whose symposium at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn in 2000 provided a lively environment for the essay on Opus 90 and the ghost of Emanuel Bach. Chapter 2, an essay on Emanuel Bach’s music as conceived in escape from, if not in agon with, the music of his father, appeared in a collection of essays honoring Robert Marshall, and I profited greatly from his sage reflections on these discomforting allegations. Chapter 12 was earlier conceived for a conference at Harvard University in 1996—“Rethinking Beethoven’s Late Period”—honoring Lewis Lockwood, whose inspiring seminars at Princeton long ago set in motion many of the themes and indeed the underlying thesis of this book. Chapter 15 was written for a celebration in 1998 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York of the work of Leo Treitler, who then, predictably and to my great pleasure, subjected the essay to a penetrating inquiry of his own that only intensified the stimulation in writing it for him.
Several chapters appeared in earlier publications: chapter 2, in Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, ed. Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002); chapter 6, in C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Annette Richards (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006); chapters 9 and 14 in the journal 19th Century Music, 15 (1991): 116–131, and 21 (1997): 134–148, © 1997 by the Regents of the University of California; and chapter 12, in Beethoven Forum 7 (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 67–88, © 1999 by the University of Nebraska Press. Some paragraphs in chapter 1 appeared originally in “The Sketch Itself,” in Beethoven’s Compositional Process, ed. William Kinderman (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 3–5, ©1991 by the University of Nebraska Press. I am grateful to these presses for granting permission to publish revised versions here. An earlier version of chapter 10 appeared as “Beethovens Opus 90 und die Fenster zur Vergangenheit,” in Beethoven und die Rezeption der Alten Musik: Die hohe Schule der Überlieferung, ed. Hans-Werner Küthen (Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus Bonn, 2002), 93–120; my thanks to Michael Ladenburger and Bernhard Appel for permission to publish this revision and a return to its original language. I am grateful to Roland Schmidt-Hensel and Clemens Brenneis of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preußischer Kulturbesitz: Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn Archiv; to Eike Zimmer of the Bildarchiv d. Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek; and to Dr. Otto Biba of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, for granting permission to use, in illustration here, documents from their precious collections.
Many colleagues and friends responded to my desperate inquiries for advice and for help in securing documents. My deepest thanks to Paul Corneilson, Managing Editor of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works, at the Packard Humanities Institute; to Susan J. Clermont, of the Library of Congress, who graciously gave too much of her time to the solving of a publishing matter; to Darrell Berg, for sharing her rich store of Bach sources and an even richer wisdom about them; and to David Schulenberg, for graciously providing materials otherwise difficult of access. Blake Howe compiled the List of Works Cited deftly and swiftly, against an unfriendly deadline. Alexander Kramer expertly prepared several of the illustrations.
Scott Burnham read the entire manuscript with sympathy and searching insight, and I am profoundly indebted to him for that. Three chapters were exposed to the piercing critique of a brilliant cohort of theorists and scholars at the Mannes Theory Institute, held in New Haven in June of 2006; I shall be eternally grateful to those fifteen participants for their willingness to engage these ideas, and to Wayne Alpern, director of the Institute, for the invitation to conduct the seminar. I have profited from lively exchanges on the various ideas in this book with Siegmund Levarie, Kristina Muxfeldt, Maynard Solomon, James Hepokoski, James Webster, Alexander Rehding, Joseph Kerman, and many others in the course of the decade and more during which this book took shape. Among those others were several generations of students, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Stony Brook, who tackled these embryonic topics with bracing wit and, in the spirit of those seminars, a robust skepticism that I came to prize. I have learned from them more than they can ever know.
Trafficking in speculations regarding the obscure workings of the creative mind is not a project for the faint of heart. Undaunted, Suzanne Ryan, Senior Music Editor at Oxford University Press, offered unwavering enthusiasm from our earliest conversations. For this I shall be ever grateful, and as well for her keen, steady judgment and uncompromising support during the long haul of production.
As ever, Martha Calhoun endured with sanity and deflating humor the misanthropic moods of her reclusive husband. She listens with the musician’s ear for prose and the lawyer’s mind for argument. That this book was ever completed owes in no small measure to her cherished companionship.