Intruder In The Temple – Beethoven Our Contemporary

Beethoven Our Contemporary

Intruder in the Temple

In a nutshell

You may have guessed who the “intruder” is!  But if you have not hit the About me above, the name of this tab needs explanation.  Neither a musician nor a musicologist, I am an intruder in what had become a “temple” to Beethoven’s English language scholarship, in which only the accredited high priests can officiate … and I’m not even a native English speaker.  I was born and lived for over forty years in Communist Romania, before managing to immigrate with my family in the U.S. in 1989, taking with me the profession of software engineer and a long-time love of classical music, especially of Beethoven.  This latter devotion turned me into an amateur Beethoven scholar, and my research instilled in me the belief that I had a few interesting things to say in the field.  However, all my attempts to publish as individual articles my original findings now coalesced in the two books accessible on this website have been rejected by the music journals I submitted them to.

On the other hand, I’ve had a few articles published which can vouch for the quality of my scholarly work.  The first one, published as “Ending the Fifth” in The Beethoven Journal in 2009,answers a question that has troubled scholars and music lovers alike for two hundred years – why does the symphony end with that very long series of C major chords?  In 2020, my research paper “A Short History of the Most Famous Motive of Classical Music” was accepted for presentation at the Convention of the American Beethoven Society in September 2020.  It traces the history of the famous “da-da-da-dum” motive that opens the Fifth Symphony back in time to the beginning of Renaissance, and also forward to the middle of the twentieth century.  Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Convention has been put off for a year and then for April 2022.  You can find here,in a downloadable .pdf file, the story of the “Ending the Fifth” article (including an abridged version of the published article) and the full text of the anticipated Beethoven Convention paper. (Note, it is too soon to know if this will be included in the published transactions of the Convention.)  I hope you will agree that they fill a gap in Beethoven scholarship.

WordPress PopUp Plugin Scroll to Top