Movement of Beethoven’s tenth to be heard

Press, 16 August 1988, Page 10

Movement of Beethoven’s tenth to be heard

NZPA London The only surviving movement of Beethoven’s tenth symphony, which he was writing on his deathbed in 1827, will be played in public for the first time at a concert in London on October 18.

The "Sunday Tiroes” said the movement i -’.s been “painstakingly and brilliantly reconstructed” from fragments of Beethoven’s original manuscripts by Dr Barry Cooper, a lecturer in music at Aberdeen University in Scotland. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Walter Weller, will perform the symphony’s first movement at the Royal Festival Hall, a spokeswoman for

the South Bank Centre said.

Beethoven had promised the tenth symphony to London audiences eight days before his death and had assured a London friend that sketches of the new work were “already in my desk,” the “Sunday Times” said.

But the paper said posthumous researchers failed to find any retrievable music among Beethoven’s possessions, and biographers disregarded an account by his secretary, Karl Holz, of how the composer had sat at the piano and played him the opening of the tenth symphony. Five years ago, the “Sunday Times” said, Dr Cooper was doing

research in a West Berlin library and found a set of sketches that matched Holz’s reminiscences of the opening movement. Dr Cooper’s belief that these were from the missing tenth symphony was reinforced by the discovery of additional sketches in the Beethoven archive in Bonn, the paper said. “By combining the two sets,” Dr Cooper was quoted as saying, "I began to find what Beethoven had in mind for the first movement. I tried to keep very close to the sketches, to reconstruct the movement as Beethoven envisaged it at that time.

“I had to fill in some harmonies and compose myself a few linking sec-

tions, but I did not invent any new themes. Those are all Beethoven’s,” he said.

The “Sunday Times” said none of Beethoven’s scraps of notes contained more than 20 bars, just a few seconds of music.

The paper said that by laying the scraps end to end, Cooper assembled an entire movement lasting almost 14 minutes. While Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “shocked contemporary listeners with its unprecedented choral finale,” the “Sunday Times” said, the first movement of the tenth symphony “threatens to dissolve the traditional barriers between movements, inventing a more fluid structure for the symphony.”