Inside Beethoven's Mind (FREE EVENT)

Beethoven composed his Piano Sonata no. 9 in 1798 for his patron Baroness Josefa von Braun. In 1801, Beethoven arranged the entire work for string quartet in the key of F major. According to musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, the instrumentation of this sonata for string quartet is “one of the most interesting documents in the history of Beethoven’s art… There is hardly a bar of the quartet-version that does not shed some light on the nature of the pianoforte, of quartet-writing and of the general structure of music… he takes one his smallest sonatas and shows that hardly a bar of pianoforte music can be turned into good quartet-writing without quantities of new material besides drastic transformation of the old.” Another key event of 1801 was the publication of his first Piano Concerto in C major. Today’s performance features a chamber music version of the concerto arranged by German composer Vinzenz Lachner. The arrangement was published in 1881, 54 years after Beethoven’s death.