Prof Pans Beethoven Flick

Looking for an accurate depiction of Beethoven’s life—without having to read a book? If you’ve considered the newly released film “Copying Beethoven,” Fanny Peabody Professor of Music Emeritus Lewis H. Lockwood would probably advise you to spend your hard-earned money elsewhere.

“Historically, it’s dreadful,” Lockwood says of the film, which depicts a fabricated relationship between an irascible Beethoven—played by Ed Harris—and a fictional female copyist.

Yet Lockwood doesn’t condemn the movie entirely. “There’s a nub of psychological truth in the idea that an old and isolated artist could have been thrilled to have a young woman be his copyist,” he says. “But it’s largely a failure.”

On the topic of Beethoven, Lockwood knows his stuff. His book, “Beethoven: The Music and the Life,” was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, a volume entitled “Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood” was published. And just last year, the American Musicological Society—of which he was president from 1987-88—established the Lewis Lockwood Award for promising young music scholars.

Lockwood is as fit as any to lend his name to such an award, having made an early entrance into the music scene himself.

Born in New York to a musical family, Lockwood played cello by the age of nine. The future scholar quickly became proficient, and by his teenage years Lockwood had begun to consider playing professionally. He attended Queens College, in the City University of New York system, and was intent on keeping music in his life.

Lockwood numbers his years as an undergraduate among some of his most formative.

“I had marvelous teachers at Queens College,” Lockwood says. “It was an extraordinary place [when I was a student] in the early 1950s.”

The strong liberal arts education Lockwood received from Queens College helped him to realize that he needed to devote his life to something that sated both his intellectual and musical appetites, he says.

Although Lockwood was passionate about many periods of music history, he finished his graduate study at Princeton University with a PhD in 16th-century Italian music.

“Only later did I feel the need to make a choice,” Lockwood recalls. Over time, he became fascinated by Beethoven. “I discovered the field of Beethoven study was more wide open then people had thought,” he says.

Although there had been extensive study of the many compositional sketches and autograph manuscripts Beethoven had left behind, Lockwood found that very little academic work attempted to reconcile the two.

Piecing together his discoveries from the different types of documents, Lockwood distinguished himself among Beethoven scholars by gaining considerable insight into the composer’s complicated creative process.

While establishing himself among academics, Lockwood taught at Princeton for 22 years before transferring to Harvard, where he served as a music professor for another 22.

Since retiring in 2002, Lockwood has remained active in the music community. He has published two books as an emeritus professor: the 2003 Pulitzer-nominated Beethoven biography and more recently, “The Beethoven Violin Sonatas: History, Criticism, Performance.”

However, Lockwood refers to the performance of chamber music as his “principle avocation.” He spends much of his time behind a cello or even playing piano trios with fellow Harvard affiliates.

Lockwood admits that his comfort zone is nestled in the period between Haydn and Brahms, but he is quick to point out that all eras of music have their points of fascination.

“Every period can be interesting,” Lockwood says, “depending on what you bring to it.”