Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets

Nancy November lectures in musicology at the University of Auckland. Her research and teaching interests centre on the music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her recent publications include essays on the early performance of Beethoven's string quartets and their performance history in the recording age. She has also published aesthetic and analytical studies of Haydn's music, considering contexts of musical melancholy (Eighteenth-Century Music, 2007), the use of register in his string quartets (Music Analysis, 2008) and conceptions of 'voice' in his early string quartets (Music and Letters, 2008). Her edition of Adalbert Gyrowetz's String Quartets Op. 29 is forthcoming, and an edition of six sextets by Paul Wranitzky was published in 2012. Her awards include an Edison Fellowship from the British Library, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and a Marsden grant from the New Zealand Royal Society. She is currently editing a three-volume set of fifteen string quartets by Beethoven's contemporary Emmanuel Aloys Förster.

'The book, which considers Beethoven's string quartets of the middle period through numerous lenses, not only fills a previously existing gap in research, but also breaks new ground in terms of presentation and methods: questions of aesthetics, performance practice and analysis are all covered, as well as the reception history and narrative poetics of the string quartets. This bringing together of multiple perspectives leads to significant gains in knowledge.' Bernhard Appel, Director, Beethoven-Archiv and Beethoven-Haus Publishers, Bonn

• Introduction; 1. Setting the scene: theories, practices, and the early nineteenth-century string quartet; 2. Curtain up: performing the middle-period quartets in Beethoven's time; 3. 'Not generally comprehensible': Op. 59 No. 1 and the drama of becoming; 4. 'With much feeling': song, sensibility, and rhapsody in Op. 59 No. 2; 5. 'Helden-Quartett': genre, innovation, and 'heroic' voices in Op. 59 No. 3; 6. Freudvoll und leidvoll: songful impetus and dualistic voice in the 'Harp' Quartet; 7. 'The quick-witted brevity of the genuine dramatist': Op. 95 and the idea of the fragment; 8. A tale of heroic emancipation? Reception narratives for the middle-period string quartets.