Lena Katharina Alfter

My doctoral project — supervised by Prof. Nicholas Marston — focuses on Beethoven’s sketches for the trios and quartets of his only opera ‘Leonore’/‘Fidelio’. Beethoven famously struggled with vocal ensemble writing and consequently took lessons in vocal music composition. He also studied operas by Salieri, Cherubini and Mozart, copying passages from them. The vast corpus of surviving compositional sketches by Beethoven provides manifold evidence of his working methods and traces of his musical thinking. I seek to uncover deeper insights into Beethoven’s modus operandi, difficulties, and solutions in composing the vocal ensembles for his opera with regard to any effect his preliminary studies might have had. Hitherto unedited sketches will be made accessible through transcriptions. Ideally, I hope to also draw inferences about the opera as a whole, its conception, its biographical and compositional context.

I received both my BA and MA degree in Musicology/Piano from Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen, Germany.

My OOC AHRC DTP studentship is co-funded by Churchill College.