Beethoven

Die Publikation Beethoven Visuell. Der Komponist im Spiegel bildlicher Vorstellungswelten (Wien: Hollitzer 2020), von Werner Telesko (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Susana Zapke (MUK) und Stefan Schmidl (MUK), wurde für das Jahr 2021 mit dem Claire Brook Award ausgezeichnet.

Der Preis wurde vom Graduate Center der City University of New York gestiftet und wird für herausragende Druckschriften für Musikikonografie und die Analyse der Beziehungen zwischen Musik und den visuellen Künsten verliehen. Die Jury nannte in ihrer Begründung für die Zuerkennung des Preises die innovativen Forschungsansätze der Publikation in der forschungsgeschichtlich bereits seit Längerem etablierten Beethoven-Ikonografie.

Das Werk von Telesko, Zapke und Schmidl unterscheidet sich von anderen Herangehensweisen an die Rezeption Beethovens zum einen durch die Einbeziehung unterschiedlichster visueller Medien, zum anderen durch eine Fokussierung auf die Natur, die materielle Umwelt und das Immaterielle als drei spezifische Themenbereiche der bildlichen Vorstellungswelten Ludwig van Beethovens vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart.

Beethoven Visuell. Der Komponist im Spiegel bildlicher Vorstellungswelten, Werner Telesko, Susana Zapke, Stefan Schmidl (Wien: Hollitzer, 2020), 252 p. ISBN 978-3-99012-791-9

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ihb/detail/news/the-claire-brook-award

https://brookcenter.gc.cuny.edu/2022/01/28/claire-brook-award-for-2021-bestowed-on-two-publications/

Über Claire Brook: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/brook-claire

"The committee for the Claire Brook Award has met twice over the past weeks and we have decided to award two books equally this year: Werner Telesko et al, Beethoven Visuell and Michael Burden's With a Grace Not to Be Captured (Brepols). We liked both books and thought that BOTH should be awarded equally, because each of them is innovative in its own way. We were impressed how you found in the articles an interesting new angle in the interpretation of the reception of Beethoven in the visual media, although that topic has been dealt with many times in the past. With the Burden book we thought that he and his authors have made an innovative approach to the portraiture of dancers that is often neglected."

Publishing another book on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven requires courage. Werner Telesko, Susana Zapke, and Stefan Schmidl found this courage and produced a remarkable book focusing on the reception of Beethoven in visual culture.

The three thematic complexes concern Beethoven in nature on the one hand, in his concrete material environment on the other hand, and finally in connection with immaterial values ​​and sacred ideas. Within the framework of these three categories, the authors examined many media that have contributed to the formation of a visual and textual “exaggeration” so characteristic of the Beethoven phenomenon. Even if the image documents are the focus of the publication, it should always be clear that these are to be viewed in close historical and contextual relation to the literary and philosophical discourses on Beethoven. 

In his essay, Werner Telesko deals with the broad topic of Beethoven’s connections with the natural environment and, above all, takes up the question according to the different picture types from an art-historical perspective, whereby it becomes clear that the philosophical and literary debates of the respective time influence the picture production and are thus able to explain the metaphors of nature as Beethoven’s central interpretive category. Susana Zapke focuses on locating Beethoven in the interior as a creative space of the genius that can be read allegorically in a variety of ways, which in turn functions as a complement to the outside space and to nature in the sense of the culture-nature discourse of the Enlightenment. The interior becomes a field of interpretation for the psychological physiognomy of the artist and his work, revealing bourgeois-influenced thinking and pictorial traditions of the respective cultural-historical epoch. Finally, Stefan Schmidl deals with the localization of the composer in the immaterial space and points to some little-known projections of Beethoven in the spheres of the unreal, sacred and timeless, whereby virtuality as a means of representing visualizations always pushes the boundaries of hallucination, the dream and the visionary touched again.