2027 marks the bicentenary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death – a major opportunity for conductors, orchestras, and instrumentalists to refresh their relationships with one of the greatest and most influential bodies of work in musical history.
Beethoven, an especially potent symbol of the spirit of musical discovery and innovation, has inspired composers since his death with an almost singular power. Composers across the Faber Music catalogue have responded to his works in diverse ways, tuning in to myriad facets of Beethoven’s unique expressive universe and using his work as a prompt to expand their own.
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Torsten Rasch – Pataphor (2024)
Premiered by Vladimir Jurowski and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2024, Pataphor was conceived as a companion work to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which provides Rasch with points of musical departure and transformation. Like the Ninth Symphony, Pataphor begins with open fifths, but at the first climax they move upwards instead of down; Rasch also borrows the double fugue of the Symphony’s finale, but places it in the percussion, alongside a slowed down and fragmented restatement of music from the symphony’s scherzo.
“My idea was to take these metaphors out of their context and place them in a new context, but to still make them recognisable” Rasch says. “I wanted to stay close to this tremendous work and yet move as far away from it as possible.” This process of transformation is embodied in the title of the 11-minute work, which describes a play of repetition and change entailed in naturally-occurring logarithmic spirals at large and small scales.
Cassandra Miller – Thanksong (2020)
Cassandra Miller’s Thanksong is for voice and string quartet. The title of the 15-minute work references the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ from Beethoven’s op.132 string quartet, summoning the opening’s prayerful and inward mood. To compose Thanksong Miller sang along – the automatic singing-in-meditation that is a cornerstone of her compositional practice – to the four individual parts of the quartet, many times in repetition, transforming the material into gentle pendulum-like repeated gestures. The quartet members play the music by ear (with the aid of simplified notation), listening in headphones to Miller’s voice – and the composition is held together by the pacing and breath of Juliet Fraser, as she sings Beethoven’s line as slowly and quietly as possible. Watch here:
It received its premiere online at the 2020 TIME:SPANS festival, from Quatuor Bozzini and Juliet Fraser, who have since performed the work at the Aldeburgh Festival (where it was programmed alongside Beethoven’s original movement), Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Wigmore Hall. It has also been taken up by Ensemble Resonanz, and Phaedra Ensemble with Rosie Middleton at London’s Café OTO.
Colin Matthews – Grand Barcarolle (2011)
Few contemporary composers can engage with music of the past in the skilful, sensitive and imaginative way that Colin Matthews does in his transcriptions, arrangements and new works inspired by classical music history. Premiered by the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly in 2011, Grand Barcarolle starts from the playful premise that Beethoven had neglected to write a true slow movement for his Eighth Symphony. To create this Barcarolle – a form chosen because Beethoven never composed one – Matthews turned to elements of the symphony, as well as the contemporaneous piano sonatas Op. 81a and 101, as well as writing a Beethoven pastiche of his own. As he wrote the piece, however, another composer began to come to the surface in the shape of Gustav Mahler – whose music, of course, is unimaginable without Beethoven.
The commission deliberately restricted Matthews to an orchestra of Beethovenian proportions, with no trombones or percussion. In 2013, the BBC Philharmonic and Clark Rundell premiered a chamber orchestra version of the 14-minute work, with reduced wind and string forces.
Grand Barcarolle was not Matthews’ first exploration of Beethoven’s music. In 1998 he arranged the Lento Assai from Beethoven’s String Quartet No.16 – his last completed major work – for string orchestra.
Anders Hillborg – Kongsgaard Variations (2006 arr. 2021)
In his Kongsgaard Variations (2006), Hillborg takes the Arietta-theme from Beethoven’s last piano-sonata, No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 as the basis for an evocative 16-minute work. Beethoven’s sublime music drifts strangely through the centuries and is warped, vaporised, and refashioned as if, in the words of Hillborg, the Arietta “is dreaming yet another variation on itself”. Composed initially for the Pražák Quartet, in 2021 Hillborg created a string orchestra version of the for the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and has been championed by Esa-Pekka Salonen with the San Francisco and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras.
Lisa Illean – Sonata in ten parts (2024)
Commissioned by Wigmore Hall and premiered by Cédric Tiberghien, Sonata in ten parts is Illean’s first work for solo piano. It sits alongside and speaks to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Each of its sections began as an improvisation on a pattern derived from a moment – often little more than a bar – in Beethoven’s set of 33 variations. Following the spirit of this form, Illean transformed the patterns while also drawing disparate starting points into a common nocturnal atmosphere across 20 minutes. This mood is explored in movements of preternatural stillness and delicacy, while others feature darting, quicksilver figuration with a more animated character.
Each of the ten parts belongs to and illuminates the others; there are explicit recollections of material but also recurring sound images that are continuously renewed and reimagined - patterns often reaching or grasping, cascades like sudden vistas of light, and sonorities grounded in major and minor seconds. Occasionally direct allusions to the Beethoven surface like an iceberg, but mostly these partially dissolved, “coiling and uncoiling, altering, aqueous, lightening”, as Illean puts it.
Peter Sculthorpe – Beethoven Variations (2006)
Sculthorpe’s 18-minute work for orchestra with optional didjeridu is an antipodean twist on one of the most famous melodies in musical history. Premiered by the West Australian Symphony, its starting point is the An die Freude from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with Sculthorpe noting that Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay in the same year of Beethoven’s birth. Beethoven’s music is also hybridised with the bass line of Hoagy Carmichael’s Heart and Soul – the result of a schoolboy experiment from Sculthorpe.
Three variations follow a statement of the theme above this bass, with the work introduced theatrically by the didjeridu player wandering through the auditorium. A ‘Colonial Dance’ presents a spirited variation, whilst ‘Chorale’ recalls the sounds of seagulls and other birds from the Botany Bay coastline where Cook landed, alongside solo didjeridu. ‘Colonial Song’ features declamatory sixths that refer to the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s symphony.
David Matthews – String Quartet No.11 (2007-8)
David Matthews’ String Quartet No.11 was premiered by the Carducci Quartet. The 20-minute work is a set of 13 variations, whose scale – at twenty minutes duration – is itself an homage to Beethoven’s own sets in the Op.130 and Op.131 quartets, or the late, vast Diabelli Variations (saluted in Matthews’ own Variations for Piano from 1997). Their starting point is the eighth of Beethoven’s Eleven Bagatelles Op.119, subject to a remarkable musical journey. Matthews transfigures the theme into a ferocious Tango, boisterous Mazurka, and a luminous, serialist-flavoured Misterioso movement, hinting at Anton Webern. A penultimate variation is a searching, anguished 6-minute Cavatina, especially redolent of Beethoven’s own late quartets, before a vigorous Beethovenian Fugue draws the work to a close.
The Observer called Matthews’ quartet “a tremendous achievement; revering Beethoven while taking him gently by the hand and leading him into the 21st century.” Each variation, The Telegraph noted, “was as vivid and mysterious as a slide in a magic lantern show”.
Derek Bermel – Passing Through (2007)
Bermel’s 7-minute Passing Through was written for the Guarneri String Quartet. It opens with a six-bar quotation from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Op.135, and borrows its tempo marking. His movement is a meditation on Beethoven's cantabile theme, delving deep into the chromatic and dramatic potential of that one gesture.
"I imagined viewing this incredible work through a kaleidoscope”, Bermel writes, “then shaking it after the first few measures; all the tiny pieces of plastic remain constant, but their placement has shifted, and a different image appears.” Bermel gradually transforms Beethoven's theme. Episodes accelerate it to an angry pitch, disturbing its sublime tranquillity. Yet the gentle persuasion of the Beethoven reasserts itself, sweet and sturdy in the face of urgent atonal challenge. Its ambiguous ending suggests a complex relationship with the Beethovenian legacy, and multifaceted relationships composers of today might have with such a titanic figure.