Reconstructing Beethoven’s Last Piano
News
2025 - 2031
Beethoven’s deafness has traditionally yielded narratives of “transformation” or “transcendence” in which the composer features as one who, because of his non-hearing, reached unprecedented heights of originality and set new standards for those who followed in his footsteps. “Late Beethoven,” or the style associated with an old and deaf composer, is often understood as having freed itself from materiality. This research posits a radically different approach. Hypothesizing that as the composer’s bodily faculties diminished, his reliance on things and technologies only grew stronger, we focus on two instruments that played a central role in the last decade of his life.
Two last pianos
During the last nine months of Beethoven’s life two pianos stood tail-to-tail in Beethoven’s living room: an English piano by John Broadwood & Sons (1817) and a Viennese one by Conrad Graf (1825). We have already built a replica of the former; the second will be reconstructed as part of this project. Two hundred years after the composer’s death, replicas of the two instruments will stand vis-à-vis each other again.
On account of Beethoven’s deafness, both pianos were outfitted with hearing machines: a horn-like zinc-metal contraption for the Broadwood and a wooden resonance box for the Graf. We will reconstruct the latter as well, to complement the already existing hearing machine for the Broadwood.
What will these two last pianos and their respective hearing machines tell us about Beethoven’s “late” piano music?
Photo: Michiel Devijver
Materializing Late Beethoven
Beethoven Vis-à-vis proposes to lay to rest the popular associations with “late Beethoven” as a composer who in the final phase of his life reached an a-material or a transcendent state of mind. On the contrary, we look at the aging and increasingly deaf composer as relying on materiality in just as enabling ways as before. Beethoven keeps responding to instrumental affordances, interacting with these instruments and their hearing machines in newly creative ways.
Thus, the Broadwood became important to Beethoven because its vibrational energy and deeper keyboard gave him much more tactile information than Viennese pianos could. As a result, Beethoven’s understanding of sound would have expanded to become more complexly multisensorial.
One intriguing feature of the Beethoven Graf is its quadruple stringing, which Graf must have assumed would suit Beethoven particularly well. Not just louder, the Graf would have yielded many more options for tone coloring—an expanded toolkit, if only intellectually, for Beethoven to work on his late string quartets.
Photo: © DeClassifying the Classics
Photo: © DeClassifying the Classics
Can we acknowledge Beethoven’s affinity for the Broadwood while still recognising him as a fundamentally Viennese pianist-composer? And what did each instrument offer that the other could not?
Our vis-à-vis project will juxtapose the newly built Graf and Broadwood, creating a dialectic space for embodied research into the last chapter of Beethoven’s career.
Entanglement and Disability
The premise of this project is to entangle ourselves with Beethoven’s objects and technologies. Will such entanglement—for performer and listener alike—bring us closer to identifying and understanding the paradoxes, ambiguities, and transformations in his “late-style” music? Will we attune ourselves to multisensorial aspects of Beethoven’s deafly composing at the piano? Finally, will the contours that keep the two instruments separate start to fade, instead yielding a two-in-one hybridity, as experienced by a single performing and composing bodymind?
Beethoven Vis-à-vis reopens a repertoire stretching from “Hammerklavier” Sonata opus 106 to Grande Fugue opus 134, inviting a renewed engagement with the ambiguities, transformations, and material conditions of Beethoven’s late style. Putting “thingness” back into some of Beethoven’s most famous piano works, this project applies theories of entanglement to music as a performing art while combining it with disability studies to unlock new insights into Beethoven as a deafly creating composer.
Completing a trilogy
With the Graf replica, the piano builder and artistic researcher tandem of Maene and Beghin takes on the third of three extant Beethoven pianos: in 2013 they completed the replica of Beethoven’s Broadwood; in 2016 they built a replica of Beethoven’s Erard, as the impetus for a multiyear research project at Orpheus Instituut.
The team
At Orpheus Instituut, in partnership with KU Leuven, the project is led by Principal Investigator Prof. Tom Beghin, with the assistance of PhD-researcher and docARTES candidate Blake Proehl.
Dr. Katharina Preller, Associate Researcher at Orpheus Instituut and post-doctoral researcher at LMU Munich (Germany), conducts the organological component of the project.
Chris Maene, Orpheus Associate Researcher and director of the Atelier Chris Maene at Pianos Maene (Ruiselede, Belgium), heads the building of the Graf piano, with the assistance of Gregoir Basyn.
The project unfolds in consultation with Dr. Julia Ronge of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn (Germany).
