Translating Beethoven

Martin Hughes`s new book on the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas bridges the gap between score and stage. Written for young pianists embarking on a solo career, the book encourages the reader to retrace the compositional process and to see these extraordinary works as if for the first time. The significance of key colour, pattern recognition, continuity and interruption, variation, pitch and texture are among the many elements that are discussed, while an extra chapter is devoted exclusively to tempo, the most important factor in the performance of Beethoven. These chapters are not piano lessons; they are an invitation to step away from convention and to think like a revolutionary composer.

It should be noted that this is a book for practicing pianists, and a copy of the score of the Beethoven piano sonatas with bar numbers is an essential companion if the reader is to follow the many references in the text.

Martin Hughes was Professor of Solo Piano at Berlin University of the Arts before moving to the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He has given concerts, lectures and masterclasses around the world and has performed complete cycles of both the Beethoven and the Schubert piano sonatas.
He first wrote about Beethoven interpretation in 1994, as a contributor to Robin Stowell's "Performing Beethoven", one of the Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice (Cambridge University Press). His chapter "Beethoven's piano music: contemporary performance issues" prompted Paul Badura-Skoda to write:
"Every pianist who is seriously interested in rendering the spirit of a Beethoven piano work ought to read it".