Beginnings

Since when have composers’ working documents been preserved and examined in ways related to what we now call sketch studies? The answer to this question will depend on who you read. In the early 1980s, Joseph Kerman cited an academic conference organised by the International Musicological Society in 1970 as an important marker for the development of sketch studies. He referred specifically to a session entitled ‘Problèmes de la Création Musicale au XIXe siècle’ and described the participants as pioneers. The choice of words is unfortunate. To be sure, the Colloquium session did signal the arrival of young American scholars to a burgeoning field of study that had been dominated by Europeans. However, the term also suggests that everything before that time constitutes a kind of ‘pre’-history. After all, pioneers often have little sense of the inhabitants or the culture of the territory they are exploring. Neither Louis Lockwood, Philip Gossett (both of whom presented at the Colloquium), nor Kerman himself can properly be described as pioneers. On the contrary, all three were able to make significant contributions because they were sitting on the shoulders of giants.

When pressed to provide a terminus post quem for sketch studies, Beethoven scholars will normally point to 1865. In that year, Gustav Nottebohm published his study of the Kessler Sketchbook, Alexander Wheelock Thayer published his Chronological catalogue of Ludwig von Beethoven’s work, and this was only the beginning. The following year Breitkopf & Härtel began publishing the first complete edition of Beethoven’s work (1866–8) and Thayer published the first volume of his biography (the second appeared in 1872). Thus, to suggest that 1865 marks a point of departure for sketch studies is not entirely wrong, but it is misleading. If the detailed studies of Beethoven’s sketches undertaken by Nottebohm and Thayer were unprecedented, neither was working in a vacuum.