LDV111-2

27 GARY HOFFMAN, DAVID SELIG The evolution of Beethoven’s style was also substantially affected by the ‘revolutions’ in instrument making that affected every instrument in his day. In the end, Beethoven was so keen to promote his early pieces to publishers that he specified that the sonatas could be played with either harpsichord or fortepiano . . . David Selig: The actual technique of piano playing was significantly disrupted, but so was the way composers wrote for cello – there’s a striking example of this in the Triple Concerto for piano, violin and cello (1803). The art of singing was transposed to the keyboard, the top registers of the piano were explored . . . Musicians were gradually leaving the world of Viennese Classicism for the unknown, which we define today as the transition from Classicism to Romanticism. But, at the time, people weren’t conscious of this as being a change in style. For them, it was, rather, a new way of conceiving musical composition as permanent experimentation. Beethoven clearly laid the foundations of twentieth-century musical thought.