Presumed Beethoven [2CD]

Quartetto Alla Maniera Italiana - Presumed Beethoven [2CD]

In 1927, at the time of the first Beethoven centenary, the celebrated French musicologist Saint-Foix drew attention to an anonymous manuscript collection of six quartets that once belonged to the publisher Domenico (III) Artaria and is today preserved at the Berlin State Library. He conjectured that these pieces could be the very first experiments of a young Beethoven, then still an adolescent, in a genre that he would properly inaugurate when he published his op. 18 set in his early thirties. On the strength of this theory, the collection was included in the Beethoven catalogue, though listed among the works of doubtful attribution, where it has remained awaiting further musicological research.