Beethoven and the Creative Process

• Approaching Beethoven's creative process. Part 1 Factors affecting Beethoven's creative process: Beethoven's artistic aims; professional pressures; extramusical factors; recurring ideas. Part 2 Beethoven's compositional methods: the sketchbooks and their use; the visual appearance of the sketches; types and relationships of sketches; the sketching of form and key; the sketching of melody; the vertical dimension and finishing touches. Part 3 Stages in the creative process: first conceptions - piano concerto in D minor, Op 31 No 2; planning the later movements - string quartet in B flat, Op 130; musical structure and vivid pictorialism - "Meeresstille", Op 112; the problem of the joins - "Egmont" overture; a creation in three phases - the late bagatelles; a long-running revision - second piano concerto.

`his new book impresses not only for the quality of some of its insights into the sketches themselves, but for the exceptional clarity of its writing which should open its findings to lay as well as professional readers'Bayan Northcott, The Independent