• 501(c)(3) Status!

    We are pleased to announce that The Unheard Beethoven, Inc. has been recognized as a charitable organization by the Internal Revenue Service under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. This means that all donations to The Unheard Beethoven to help us with server costs and other related expenses are …

  • Complete Beethoven Editions Galore!

    UPDATE: My comprehensive review comparing all three boxes is available now at MusicWeb International. As we approach Beethoven’s 250th birthday, three (so far) massive boxes of his complete works will soon be hitting the shelves! The biggest and most expensive of the three is the New Complete Edition released by …

  • More Counterpoint Studies Live on the Site

    We are pleased to present another large grouping of previously-unheard Beethoven, being the exercises in strict and free counterpoint that Beethoven wrote during his studies with Albrechtsberger in 1794 and 1795 after Haydn departed for England. Both Beethoven’s original compositions, and the versions with the corrections and alternatives presented by …

    by an unknown artist

  • Beethoven’s Counterpoint Studies with Haydn

    One of the largest groups of Unheard Beethoven works is the counterpoint exercises that Beethoven wrote for Haydn and Albrechtsberger while he was their student in Vienna. Long inaccessible to the public, the Beethovenhaus and G.Henle recently published a transcription of these exercises. At long last, we are able to …

    by W.J.Maehler

  • The New Kinsky-Halm Catalogue

    Our friends at the Beethovenhaus have issued through Henle the long-awaited second edition of the classic Thematic Catalogue of Beethoven’s Works by Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm. The new edition, edited by Kurt Dorfmüller, Norbert Gertsch and Julia Ronge, brings much of the research up to date. The new catalogue …

    by Ferdinand Schimon

  • A New CD Offers Beethoven Premieres

    A recent CD of Beethoven piano pieces played by Tobias Koch on period instruments contains several items that will be of interest to our readers. These pieces appear to be world premiere recordings. The first of these is a familiar piece, the so-called Easy Sonata in C, WoO 51. A …

  • Was ist das Gardiverzeichnis?

    It did not take long after we embarked on The Unheard Beethoven project to recognize that, as wide-spanning as the Biamonti catalog was, there were plenty of Beethoven compositions, finished and unfinished, that lacked any sort of catalog number or other means of identification. Since we had dealt with the …

Welcome to The Unheard Beethoven!


This website endeavors to make all of Beethoven’s unrecorded music readily accessible to the public. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, composer to ever live. Most people are familiar with a few of his works, if nothing more than the beginning of the Fifth Symphony, the Finale of the Ninth Symphony and the ‘Moonlight Sonata ‘.

Beethoven of course wrote a great deal more than those well-known works; one catalog of his compositions runs to 849 separate items. While several hundred of these works have been recorded on one medium or another, there still remain literally hundreds of other works which have never been recorded at all, or which have never been published in widely available editions or in some cases, never published at all! There are thus hundreds of Beethoven works which, until now, have been available only to scholars and specialists.

Now YOU may judge for yourself as to whether these pieces deserve a wider hearing and the ability to join the repertoire. These never-before-heard works are now available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, in the form of MIDI files and mp3s. Our rule of thumb has been that if a work has been recorded and is readily available, we will not produce a recording, concentrating instead on the works which are not otherwise available. At present, over sixteen hours of Beethoven’s music is available on this website and in no other listenable format.

Enough Talk! Take Me to the Music!

What’s New After All These Years?

 

 


Or, if you don’t know where to start, just play a random unheard Beethoven work:

 

 

 

For a different random work, please refresh this page.

 

Longtime followers of this site will find that it’s now much different—we’ve entered the 21st century and you can anticipate more frequent updates and new works being brought to you. In addition, we will slowly be converting the MIDI files into mp3s, with the goal of eventually getting the entire site in mp3 format (though the MIDIs will remain available for those still suffering with bandwidth constraints). For files that are in mp3 format, we and the Surgeon General strongly advise accessing those versions unless you have a superior soundcard and specialized MIDI software.

Another new feature that we hope you will enjoy is The Unheard Blog, where Willem and Mark will hold forth on music, Beethoven, research and whatever else may intrigue them. It will also be the permanent repository for the BEETHOVEN 200 YEARS AGO TODAY posts from our Facebook feed, often with supplemental information and illustrations. Come register and join the conversation! We look forward to hearing from you. We also welcome your musical and artistic contributions.