HEROISM IN THE AGE OF BEETHOVEN: STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 22 FEBRUARY 2013

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Communications: Conferences As part of the events commemorating the inaugural season of Stanford University's new Bing Concert Hall, the Stanford Arts Institute and Stanford Humanities Center Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution organized a one-day conference on the role of heroism in the music of Beethoven and its reception. The transformation of musical material accomplished in the theme and variations of the last movement - already richly suggestive when considered in the context of Promethean constructions of human creativity - is even more compelling when coupled with Meredith's 'Westerby-Meredith' hypothesis: that the theme of the Prometheus finale and the 'Eroica' Variations was originally derived by Beethoven from the cello part of the Piano Quintet Op. 28 No. 2 - turned upside down! - by his one-time pianistic rival Daniel Gottlieb Steibelt in the course of an acrimonious musical encounter before an audience of aristocratic patrons. Building on his earlier efforts to close the stylistic and perceptual gap between the composer's 'master' works and the type of 'occasional' work exemplified by the battle piece Wellingtons Sieg, Mathew considered the ways in which musical procedures and narrative strategies in the Eroica, such as the presentation of its opening material in rapidly succeeding heroic and pastoral registers, may be interpreted as actively directing the listener's attention away from 'external' connotations and explicit meanings by creating the circumstances in which later critics could claim to focus on an 'internal' musical-technical dimension.