Conductor's Autobiography Devotes 200 Pages to a Single Disputed Fermata in Beethoven

Maestro Fortissimo's forthcoming autobiography, 'The Sound and the Silence,' devotes 200 of its 340 pages to a single fermata in the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a passage that in performance lasts approximately three seconds. The fermata, which occurs at bar 21 of the opening movement, instructs the orchestra to hold a note for an indeterminate duration at the conductor's discretion. Fortissimo's manuscript explores the interpretive implications of this instruction across 200 pages of close analysis, personal reflection, and what the publisher describes as 'a surprisingly emotional journey through three seconds of sustained sound.' 'How long is a fermata?' Fortissimo writes in the book's opening paragraph. 'Furtwangler held it for four beats. Karajan held it for six. Toscanini barely held it at all. Each choice is a statement about time, about authority, about what Beethoven intended when he placed that symbol above that note and asked us to decide. This book is about that decision.' The 200-page section includes a historical survey of every recorded interpretation of the fermata since 1913, a mathematical analysis of hold duration as a function of conductor nationality, and a 40-page personal essay titled 'The Three Seconds That Changed My Life,' in which Fortissimo describes a 1997 performance where he held the fermata for what he estimates was 'slightly too long' and has been thinking about ever since. The remaining 140 pages cover Fortissimo's childhood, education, career, and family life. His editor requested that these sections be expanded. Fortissimo declined, saying 'everything important is in the fermata.' The book will be published in March. Advance reviews have been polarized, with one critic describing it as 'a masterwork of obsessive specificity' and another as 'three hundred pages too long for its subject, which is a dot above a note.'