Sonate, Que Me Veux-Tu?

by Robin Stowell

The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance. Edited by Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 164pp.

Just as Max Rostal's treatise was hailed as “the first in over half a century to be devoted to a detailed analysis of the complete Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas,”1 so this volume is claimed as the first scholarly book in English devoted exclusively to those works. Its seven stimulating essays by some of the world's most distinguished Beethoven scholars derive from a festival and conference held at Boston University in October 2000, directed by Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll. Each of the ten Sonatas is discussed during the course of the volume; and their chronology is preserved throughout, thus allowing for a clear demonstration and understanding of Beethoven's compositional development in the genre from the three Sonatas of op.12 through the G-Major Sonata, op.96.