Recalibrating Beethoven Reception through the Domestic Sphere

xvii + 250 pp.$340.00.Part 3, Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, and 6 Arranged for Large Ensembles, Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, vol.79 (Middleton,WI:A-R Editions, 2020), xvi + 413 pp.$480.00For many, if not most, musicologists, the words 'Beethoven', 'symphony' and 'arrangement' will evoke the four-hand piano transcriptions that were a prominent feature of middle-class music-making in the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century European home.It is a world well captured in the memoir of Henry Holiday, acclaimed painter and the owner of a London glassworks firm: When I left work, at 6 or soon after, my wife and I have nearly always played duets.We have, I fancy, the most complete library possible of four-hand arrangements: all the orchestral and chamber-music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms … The intimacy this gave us with the subject-matter of all these compositions greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them when we heard them at concerts. 1 And yet, this mode of relating to Beethoven's symphonic music, as Nancy November's book Beethoven's Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber and her critical editions of arrangements of the symphonies for chamber ensembles reveal, was only part of the story -especially in 1 Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life (London: