Beethoven's Cello is the ideal companion for cellists, pianists,
musicologists and chamber-music devotees desiring a comprehensive
understanding of this beloved repertoire.
Winner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
In 1796 the young Beethoven presented his first two cello sonatas, Op.
5, at the court of Frederick William II, an avid cellist and the
reigning Prussian monarch. Released in print the next year, these
revolutionary sonatas forever altered the cello repertoire by
fundamentally redefining the relationship between the cello and the
piano and promoting their parity. Beethoven continued to develop the
potential of the duo partnership in his three other cello sonatas - the
lyrical and heroic Op. 69 and the two experimental sonatas Op. 102, No.
1 and No. 2, transcendent compositions conceived on the threshold of the
composer's late style.
In Beethoven's Cello, Marc D. Moskovitz and R. Larry Todd examine these
seminal cornerstones of the cello repertoire and place them within their
historical and cultural contexts. Also addressed arethe three variation
sets and, in a series of interludes, the cellos owned by Beethoven, the
changing nature of his pianos, the cello-centric 'Triple' Concerto and
the arrangements for cello and piano of other works. Featuring a preface
by renowned cellist Steven Isserlis and concluding with the reviews of
the composer's cello music published during his lifetime, Beethoven's
Cello is the ideal companion for cellists, pianists, musicologists and
chamber-music devotees desiring a comprehensive understanding of this
beloved repertoire.
MARC D. MOSKOVITZ is principal cellist of the ProMusica Chamber
Orchestra. He has recorded the music of virtuoso cellists David
Popperand Alfredo Piatti for the VAI label, and his American premiere of
Zemlinsky's Cello Sonata was heralded by the Washington Post as 'an
impassioned performance'. Moskovitz has contributed to the New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians; and his biography, Alexander
Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2010.
Recognized as 'Mendelssohn's most authoritative biographer' (The New
Yorker), R. LARRY TODD is Arts and Sciences Professor at Duke
University. He is the author of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, named Best
Biography in 2003 by the Association of American Publishers, and Fanny
Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, awarded the ASCAP Nicholas Slonimsky
Award for outstanding biography in music. As a pianist, he has recorded
with Nancy Green the complete cello works of Mendelssohn and Fanny
Hensel for JRI Recordings.
