Gustav Nottebohm (12 November 1817 – 29 October 1882) was a musical scholar, pianist, collector, music editor, and composer.
[For last year's posts on Richard Whiting and Alexander Borodin click here.]
Sketchy Behavior
Praeludium
How does a genius conceive of their pieces?
By serious study or careless caprices?
Perhaps we can learn how their plans were refined
By reading the notebooks that they left behind.
Argumentum
Herr Gustav Nottebohm founded the field
Of looking at sketches to see what they’d yield.
He studied the scrawlings that Beethoven drafted
And hoped to discover how each note was crafted,
Deciphering piles of inscrutable pages
To follow ideas through developing stages.
Postludium
The field of “sketch studies” became for a time
The thing of the moment, a dozen a dime,
Perhaps it’s too bad that this brand of polemics
Became such a fad among young academics,
For hundreds of talented scholarly wretches
Padded their resumés writing on sketches,
And though dissertations were duly defended
The result of this labor was largely dead-ended.
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