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The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance.

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The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance. Edited by Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. [164 p. ISBN0-252-02932-1. $45.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

Previous scholarly inquiries into Beethoven's ten sonatas for piano and violin have been dwarfed by the breadth and depth of literature about the composer's symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas. For the most part, they have been neglected for what they are not. The violin sonatas generated relatively little press in their day. As chamber music, they were not grand works of the public concert. There are no "late" Beethoven violin sonatas that "need to be explained" in light of compositions from the "early" and "middle" periods. In short, they have been largely overlooked because they are seemingly unrelated to the central priorities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Beethoven research.

The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance initiates a long-overdue critical appraisal of these works, providing an impressive argument for their significance within Beethoven scholarship. The essays comprising the collection originated in a conference at Boston University in 2000, directed by the collection's editors, Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll, and present a variety of approaches to the sonatas. Its contributors draw on perspectives from source studies, reception history, literary theory, and performance practice as they examine the sonatas in their historical contexts.

The volume suggests an overarching concern with the coherence marking Beethoven's...

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