Arthur Friedheim, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and the Liszt Tradition

This week I'm excited to be presenting at the Musicological Society of Australia, WA Chapter Conference 2022 held at the University of Western Australia. It's wonderful to see the diverse scope of music research happening in Western Australia!

My paper is entitled: "Arthur Friedheim, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” and the Liszt Tradition"

Here is the abstract:

Many pianists today take pride in a musical lineage tracing back directly to Beethoven. Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny taught Franz Liszt, who taught many famous pianists of the early twentieth century—and to some, this lineage implies an unbroken tradition of the interpretation of Beethoven’s works. But do the modern-day descendants of this pedagogical line still play like Beethoven? This paper will examine the interpretative tradition surrounding Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, and how approaches may have changed across the generations. At the centre of the study is the pianist Arthur Friedheim (1859-1932). Around the turn of the twentieth century, Friedheim was seen as an authoritative exponent of the Liszt tradition of performance, and in 1912 he recorded the first and third movements of Beethoven’s “Moonlight.” How does Friedheim’s recorded performance compare with what we know about Czerny’s and Liszt’s interpretations? Moreover, how does this recording compare with the recordings by Friedheim’s pupil Reginald Stewart (1900-1984), and the second-generation Friedheim pupil Van Cliburn (1934-2013)?