Image
Tilman Skowroneck spelar på en cembalo
Photo: Victor Gavenda
Breadcrumb

Tilman Skowroneck co-author of award-winning book

Published

The book Beethoven's French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration, co-authored by Tilman Skowroneck, is awarded this year's Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize.

Between 2015 and 2021, Tilman Skowroneck, senior lecturer at the Academy of Music and Drama, was part of the research cluster “Declassifying the Classics” at the Orpheus Institute in Gent, Belgium. His special focus was on Beethoven and his “foreign” pianos.

The project’s most recent book, Beethoven’s French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration (University of Chicago Press, 2022), has now received the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize for 2024 from the American Musical Instrument Society.

The jury writes that the book is:
“… engagingly written and superbly illustrated. At the heart of this book is the story […] of Beethoven’s complicated relationship to his 1803 Erard Frères piano and [the] project to replicate the instrument. Bringing together meticulous attention to organological detail with musical insights gleaned from the instrument, Beethoven’s French Piano opens our ears anew to the early nineteenth-century piano."

Beethoven’s French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration

Project leader: Tom Beghin

Co-authors: Robin Blanton, Chris Maene, Michael Pecak and Tilman Skowroneck