"NEW" BEETHOVEN

posted by James Reel

English music professor Barry Cooper is at it again. He has pieced together a fragment of a quartet movement that Beethoven wrote but discarded while he was toiling on his Opus 18 No. 2 quartet. Cooper admits that Beethoven wrote only a single instrumental line for about half the movement, which means that Cooper has had to fill in a lot of blanks. This is underwhelming news; Cooper is the man responsible for piecing together n the 1990s a bunch of Beethoven sketches that he billed as "Beethoven's Symphony No. 10." It turned out to be one of the dullest, un-Beethovenian pastiches imaginable. Let's hope Cooper has honed his Beethoven impersonation in the interim.