Inspiring Responses

by Jane R. Stevens

Hartmut Hein. Beethovens Klavierkonzerte: Gattungsnorm und individuelle Konzeption. Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, Volume 48. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001. 433pp.

As Hartmut Hein observes at the outset of his study of Beethoven's piano concertos, these works have received remarkably little scholarly attention
compared to that given to Mozart's works of the same sort, or to Beethoven's own symphonies, quartets, and sonatas. It is at least interesting, then, that two studies of these concertos should have emerged in the same year. At the same time that Hein submitted this doctoral dissertation to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, in April of 1999, Leon Plantinga's Beethoven's Concertos was being published in New York and London. Students of Beethoven and of the concerto are thus unexpectedly confronted with two serious investigations of essentially the same music, but ones sharply divergent in content and especially in approach. Hein's study is not at all a redundant survey traversing the same territory covered by Plantinga, but a largely complementary investigation of often quite different issues. Hein explains the scope of his study in his foreword: The aim of this contribution [to the study of Beethoven's concertos] is to get a picture of his Viennese piano concertos in their entirety with all their movement-types (or rather—individuals). Discussions of aspects of genre and formal history are to stand as much at the center as the analytic descriptions