For a few years I have had a research project on Beethoven and his cello sonatas, and I want to say a special thank you to pianist Martha Berit Belt who has been with me throughout this project in trying out all kinds of different ideas I might come up with.
This project started with a fascination of Beethoven and love for his music. I soon realised there aren’t much research done on the cello sonatas, and it was hard to find anything published about them. There are lots of research on his symphonies and piano music, but why not on the cello sonatas?
In these next articles I will question the way we as modern musicians interpret his music, and try to find out what actually comes from the composer and what comes from the cellistic tradition, as well as shed a light on some of the myths surrounding Beethoven and see what the evidence and historic sources say. My goal with this is not to show you how everyone else is wrong and I finally found the right way, but rather to make us more conscious about the musical choices we make. Do we do things because that's what we think the composer wanted, what we think makes more musical sense, or just because that's how we are used to hearing it and how everyone else does it? I suspect the last one, even if its not a conscious decision, but maybe we will think more about it after reading this?
In these articles I will discuss different topics from the research project "Interpreting Beethoven", so stay tuned to learn more about the tempi, metronome markings, bowings and interpretations of Beethoven.
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And feel free to comment below or send me a message with your ideas and thoughts or if you have any questions, I would love to hear from you
Thank you for reading,
Markus Eriksen
Markus Eriksen