S.I. Rosenbaum, writing for The Atlantic, recounts the exploration by Nicholas Kitchen, a Boston-based violinist and co-founder of the Borromeo Quartet, of singular, mysterious markings in the manuscript scores of Ludwig van Beethoven, which never made it into published versions of his music.
In 2013, as Kitchen coached a string quartet in Beethoven’s Op. 132 – the Quartet in A minor that includes the “Heilige Dankesang” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”) – the group’s cellist noticed a dynamic marking, “ffmo,” and asked, “What’s this?” The first two letters are standard notation for fortissimo (very loud); but the added “mo?”
“As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted,” Rosenbaum writes. “[L]ater, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.”
Poring over Beethoven’s manuscripts, Kitchen kept finding non-standard markings, guiding players on dynamic levels, expressive intensity and other details of performance.
“Kitchen would eventually identify 23 degrees of dynamics (and counting), from fff – thunderous– to ppp – a whisper. He found four kinds of staccato, two kinds of dynamic swells, marks to indicate different ways of grouping notes together, marks to reinforce crescendos and diminuendos,” Rosenbaum writes. “Taken together, Kitchen argued, these marks amount to ‘living instructions from one virtuoso performer to another,’ an elaborate hidden language conveying new levels of expression – and thus emotion – in Beethoven’s music that had been lost for centuries.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/04/beethoven-code-dynamics-manuscript/677964/
The magazine identifies Rosenbaum as “a journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island, who plays the musical saw and has written for The New York Times and Slate.” Most intriguing author credit ever?
Letter V 