Lewis Lockwood

Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music
Historical Musicology

Lockwood (b. 1930) has been called by Joseph Kerman “a leading musical scholar of the postwar generation and the leading American authority on Beethoven” (New York Review of Books). As a music historian he has worked primarily in two fields–the Italian Renaissance and the intensive study of Beethoven’s life and music, with an emphasis on the sources that amply document Beethoven’s creative process. He did his graduate work at Princeton under Oliver Strunk, and then taught at Princeton for many years before coming to Harvard in 1980. At Harvard he taught graduate seminars in both of his major fields, and also created and lectured in the Core Course on Opera for twenty years. His Renaissance scholarship culminated in his major book, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400-1505 (1984, rev. 2008), which received the Marraro Prize of the Society of Italian Historians, and in 2008 he was given the Kristeller Award by the Renaissance Society of America.

As a Beethoven scholar he published numerous studies and trained a generation of younger scholars at Princeton and Harvard. His books include Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (1992), and Inside Beethoven’s Quartets, co-authored with the Juilliard String Quartet (2008). In 1992 he founded the yearbook Beethoven Forum, which ran for fourteen years, and in 2003 he brought out his Beethoven; The Music and the Life, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography. In 2013 he co-edited the critical edition of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Sketchbook with Alan Gosman, a project on which he had worked for many years. His recent books include Beethoven’s Symphonies: An Artistic Vision (2015) and Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition (2020). In 2019 he received the Guido Adler Prize from the International Musicological Society, and in 2020 was the dedicatee of a volume of essays entitled The New Beethoven: Evolution, Analysis, Interpretation, edited by Jeremy Yudkin. He has received honorary degrees from the Universitä degli Studi di Ferrara, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Wake Forest University.