Shortly after Beethoven’s death, several of his closest associates provided performance indications for editions of his works. Previous discussions of Carl Czerny’s and Ignaz Moscheles’s metronome marks for Beethoven’s piano sonatas have highlighted the importance of these indications for our understanding of the intended performance practice of these works. Nevertheless, the provenance and meaning of these metronome marks have remained unclear, which has led to some confusion in the literature.By presenting new evidence, including the discovery of what are most likely the metronome marks intended for the missing sonatas from the first ‘complete’ edition by Tobias Haslinger, the article presents a more complete overview of the indications in these editions, as well as their chronology. In addition, it also discusses to what degree the editors seem to have influenced each other, which indications are most likely representative of Beethoven’s intended speeds, as well as why the metronome fell out of favour later in the nineteenth century. Finally, it discusses the meaning of these metronome marks for modern performers, and how these editions give options to disentangle the author from the text.

Press, 2020). xiv + 598 pp. £135 (hb). ISBN 9781107013810 The months before the start of the global pandemic in 2020 saw, in addition to a vast range of material celebrating Ludwig van Beethoven's 250th birthday, the publication of two books in which the composer plays very different roles. The first, Mark Evan Bonds's excellent The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography (Bonds 2020), focuses largely on the period after Beethoven's death, when the paradigm of individual expression began to take hold, and describes changing trends in listening and performing over the past 200 years. Beethoven's role in enacting this paradigm shift is irrefutable and, as Bonds's title makes clear, the composer is obviously the go-to case study for this way of thinking about musical interpretation. The second, W. Dean Sutcliffe's tome under review here, examines musical forces at play in Beethoven's music as well as that of numerous earlier and contemporaneous composers working in what has been termed the 'Age of Sociability', a long-time research interest of the author.Sutcliffe is well known as the founding editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music as well as a number of influential publications on aspects of music from that century and the next. The best known of these is surely his 2009 article 'Before the Joke: Texture and Sociability in the Largo of Haydn's Op. 33, No. 2', which earned him a permanent place in almost any bibliography related to that repertoire. With frequent references to the author's earlier work (in fact, whole passages are lifted from his previous publications, as the footnotes point out), this volume should be seen as a substantial elaboration of the theme which was also the focus of his 2009 Dent Medal Address: sociability.Sociability is best defined as a syntactical aspect of eighteenth-century music which is intended to model or otherwise conjure for the listener certain aspects of human social behaviour, both normative and transgressive. One example of this which recurs throughout the book is that of the 'gracious riposte', Sutcliffe's term for a softening gesture that serves to contrast with the immediately preceding more forceful material, in the long term often steering both the music and the social encounter in a more 'positive' and sociable direction. The 'gracious riposte', therefore, is an example of a genteel mode of social behaviour -meant to soothe social conflict -modelled through textural and gestural qualities in the musical syntax. A well-known example of this can be heard in the opening bars of the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 10 No. 1, 152 Music Analysis, 42/i (2023)

Beethoven's piano sonatas have appeared in innumerable editions – most of them in more than one hundred, as the collection in the library of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn reveals. The sources for these works have also never been as readily available as they are now, as most first editions can be viewed on the Beethoven-Haus website, which also hosts scans of many important manuscript sources, as well as links to images of source materials on the websites of other archives. Thus, the question must be asked: Is there any scope for another edition of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas?

In recent years, Beethoven’s metronome marks for his Ninth Symphony have experienced a renewed relevance, with several ensembles incorporating the indicated speeds in their performances. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that some of the marks have been incorrectly transmitted, and there is the suspicion that further mistakes are still undiscovered. Focusing particularly on the second and fourth movements, this article discusses the historical sources and scholarly contexts for these markings, within a historical framework that draws on Beethoven’s general tempo principles, as well as observations from contemporaries. The article suggests that the trio of the second movement has three speeds that can be justified historically, although the most popular option, minim = 160, arguably has the least supporting evidence. The discussion also draws attention to another metronome mark for the final section of the symphony that has been often overlooked. Finally, it argues that one of the most often cited examples of an erroneously transmitted metronome mark, the dotted minim = 96 for the Schreckensfanfare found in the later sources, is consistent with Beethoven’s wider practice, and should provide an incentive for performers to experiment with historically informed tempi in this familiar repertory.