Happy 26th anniversary!

Today marks the 26th anniversary of the founding of this website, The Unheard Beethoven.

The history of this website is a long one: in the mid 1990s, Mark (from Wisconsin USA) and Willem (from the Netherlands) met on mIRC #beethoven chat channel on DALnet, and talked about Beethoven’s works, and recordings of his complete catalogue. This was long before the golden days of boxes of Beethoven’s “Complete Works,” as we have seen in deluxe editions over the years. Back then, it was a matter of tracking through the Schwann catalogues over the years and other sources, in an effort to find every Beethoven piece that had been recorded. As we found new works, we made cassette copies and shipped them across the Atlantic.

As part of this, we went through the first edition of the Kinsky/Halm catalogue. Then we discovered the Hess catalogue, with even more works, and then the Biamonti catalogue, with still more, bringing the total up to 849 works. But there were still a great many infuriating gaps. There were just a lot of things that had never been recorded, and some works that had never even been published. To us, that was just shocking and we were quite unhappy.

But then Willem hit on an idea. He had some software called Musicator, which would allow one to painstakingly type in notes from sheet music, or use a keyboard, creating a MIDI file, and then it would synthesize the musical piece and play it back on a computer. He demonstrated with a short piece. This sparked Mark to start finding unrecorded Beethoven pieces, and he got some similar software, Digital Orchestrator Plus, and started to learn it. He then went to the University of Wisconsin Mills Music Library, which has excellent holdings, and got copies of the song Erlkönig, WoO 131, and the piano version of the final unfinished String Quartet, WoO 62 (all that survives of that work). He set to making these files and sharing them in the #beethoven channel on DALnet.

The people there seemed to really enjoy this, and we made more and more sound files and swapped them back and forth. When we started doing a really large work, the piano version of The Creatures of Prometheus, Hess 90, one of our friends in the channel, the late Avishai Kallai from Israel, suggested we start up a website to share these materials more widely.

That sounded like a great idea but we didn’t know where to begin. Luckily, Mark had a former student he had coached at the University of Wisconsin College Bowl quiz team, Steve Lange, who volunteered to build us a website. Through some trial and error, we got it going and it was soon widely acclaimed for making the Unheard Beethoven heard. It was very important to us to always keep the music available for free, and we have never had any ads or costs to download our sound files, and we never will.

We improved our software, as Willem moved to Finale and Mark to Overture and then to Dorico, and we also improved our sound files, first using Soundfonts and then VSTs, so we no longer depended on the soundcard of our visitors computers to translate the MIDI files; instead we were able to make our increasingly-high quality sounds available in the form of mp3 files.

Over the years, the website grew, and we had growing needs. Steve was no longer doing freelance website building, but he suggested Kevin MacLeod, who is well known globally for his wonderful royalty-free music site at https://incompetech.com and Kevin graciously volunteered to rebuild the site with a WordPress framework, which has served us well for quite a few years. When we needed repairs a few years ago, Kevin was no longer able to make the commitment and turned over the keys to us, and currently our website is handled by the incomparable Adrienne Palmiere, and hosted by GreenGeeks.

It’s been a long and adventurous road, with some of the following highlights:

* Willem realizing a full orchestral score of the Macbeth Overture, Biamonti 454, from Beethoven’s sketches, with the work being premiered at the Kennedy Center by Maestro Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra.

* Willem and Mark’s discovery of the Beethoven song “Liebe” Hess 137, which had been lost since 1822 and only the line “Ich wiege dich in meinem Arm” was known. The song was completed by Willem and was premiered in 2013 by Dominic Armstrong and George Lepauw at the Chicago Beethoven Festival; Mark published an article in The Musical Times about the discovery of the song, which has been cited in several Beethoven books since.

*The extraordinary kindness of the late William Scheide, who let us borrow microfilms of his Beethoven sketchbook, now held at Princeton, which resulted in Willem’s realization of first movement of the unfinished Piano Trio in F minor, Biamonti 637.

*Mark and Willem have been contacted by various artists who want to record unheard Beethoven works, and we have happily provided them with scores. In addition, James F. Green, author of the New Hess Catalogue, through his record label Monument Records recorded a great many Beethoven premieres of works for piano, using our materials.

*Possibly most rewarding, the Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos labels both contacted us in advance of the 250th birthday of Beethoven in 2020, to consult on what should be included in their big “Complete” box sets of Beethoven recordings and to provide them with scores of never-before-recorded Beethoven works so that they could finally be recorded. Between them, the great majority of the Unheard Beethoven has now become heard, fulfilling our mission in great part.

But there are still Beethoven works that have not been recorded, and still Beethoven works that have not been published, so the work continues. In addition, through the kind generosity of Prof. Theodore Albrecht, who has shared his research, Mark writes the ongoing column of mostly-daily Beethoven Bicentennial Minutes, Beethoven 200 Years Ago Today, found here on the Unheard Beethoven website and on Facebook, helping expand the public knowledge of Beethoven and the minutiae of his life, just as we have examined the minutiae of his music.

We are honored to serve and hope everyone enjoys the fruits of our efforts. Thank you to all of our visitors, and a hearty thank you to Steve Lange, Kevin MacLeod, and Adrienne Palmiere, and another thank you to our longtime supporters Professor Barry Cooper, Professor Theodore Albrecht, Patricia Stroh of the Ira F. Brilliant Beethoven Center at San Jose State University, Julia Ronge of the Bonn Beethovenhaus, Armando Orlandi of the wonderful Italian Beethoven website at https://www.lvbeethoven.it/, and James F. Green, who also serves on our board of directors, all of whose generosity of spirit has made this website possible. And finally, a very warm thank you to our financial supporters, who help cover the costs of hosting and web security for us. You are greatly appreciated.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, and we look forward to the next 26 years! Why 26? We missed observing the 25th anniversary, so this was the next best thing. Whoops!