Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts.

Keith Chapin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music at Cardiff University. He has served as co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Music and associate editor of Nineteenth-Century Music, as well as on the editorial boards of the Acta musicologica and the Revue de musicologie. He co-edited Musical Meaning and Human Values (with Lawrence Kramer, 2009) and Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (with Andrew Clark, 2013). David Wyn Jones is Professor of Music at Cardiff University. He has published widely on Beethoven including The Life of Beethoven (Cambridge, 1998) and The Symphony in Beethoven's Vienna (Cambridge, 2006). In 2013–2015 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and he is currently a member of the Advisory Committee for a major research project in the Institute of Musicology, University of Vienna.