Theodore Albrecht, professor of musicology at Kent State University, was awarded the Beethoven Medal by the Austrian city of Baden at the end of last summer in recognition of his contributions to Beethoven studies.
The Medal was awarded during the International Beethoven Days 2017, a weeklong festival and conference held in Baden, Bad Vöslau, and Vienna. Previous recipients included the pianists Paul Badura-Skoda and Jörg Demus.
As part of the 2017 festival, Albrecht presented a paper in German titled “Miscellaneous Bagatelles about Beethoven,” detailing the later years of the composer’s life.
Albrecht, who joined the Kent State faculty in 1992, is currently preparing an English translation of Beethoven’s “Conversation Books,” notebooks in which one side of the deaf composer’s conversations are preserved. The first of 12 volumes to be published by the British house of Boydell & Brewer will appear in late Spring of 2018. His three-volume publication, Letters to Beethoven, received an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1997.
Theodore Albrecht maintains an interest in several areas of music history, including music of the classical and romantic eras, the early 20th century, and American music. The Beethoven expert also specializes in the music of ragtime composer Scott Joplin and country-Western singer and satirist Kinky Friedman. He received a Distinguished Faculty Award from KSU’s College of the Arts in 2016. — Daniel Hathaway
Photos by Robert Christy courtesy of Kent State University.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 28, 2017.
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