UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mark Ferraguto, associate professor of musicology in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, was awarded the 2024 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for his project to revive two long-forgotten string quartets by Beethoven’s contemporary Franz Weiss.
The award-winning project was supported by a College of Arts and Architecture Faculty Research Grant and a research grant from the Maureen Carr Endowment for Music Theory and Musicology.
The Noah Greenberg Award, given annually, is a grant-in-aid designed to stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognizing and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices. The award was presented to Ferraguto on Nov. 16 during the society’s annual meeting in Chicago.
Ferraguto’s six-year project to bring Weiss’s "Opus 8" quartets to life began with the creation of the quartets’ first-ever modern performing edition, assembled from the original parts published in Vienna in 1814. While preparing the edition, Ferraguto contacted the Toronto-based Eybler Quartet, a leading period-instrument ensemble, to invite them to perform and record the unknown works. Over a nine-month period, Ferraguto and violist Patrick Jordan worked together to refine the edition and ready the quartets for performance. In January 2023, the Eybler Quartet gave the quartets’ modern premiere in the Penn State School of Music’s recital hall. The works’ first-ever studio recording, for which Ferraguto served as musicological consultant, will be released this November.
A virtuoso violist, Franz Weiss (1778–1830) served as a chamber musician to Andrey Razumovsky, the Ukrainian-born Russian ambassador in Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars. While Weiss’s importance as a performer has long been recognized, his compositions have never before been carefully studied, according to Ferraguto.
In preparing his edition, he identified and catalogued more than 40 authentic works by Weiss, some for the first time. Ferraguto said the edition demonstrates that Weiss, despite his relatively small output of published compositions, was a significant and innovative contributor to the early history of the string quartet.
Ferraguto’s edition was published by A-R Editions as part of its “String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe” series. "Franz Weiss: Two String Quartets Op. 8 'Razumovsky'" from the Eybler Quartet will be available at the end of November. Launch events including a presentation by Ferraguto and the Eybler Quartet, with performed selections from Franz Weiss’s String Quartets Op. 8 nos. 1 and 2, will be held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Nov. 29, and in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, on Nov. 30.