Music lovers, if you’re free on Thursday, May 1, you might want to take in the last concert of the 2024-2025 season at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies in San José. These free noon concerts are just one example of how the Beethoven Center, part of San José State University and located in the King Library in San Jose, is unique among academic study centers.
“We’re a community-facing organization, not just an academic one,” said Beethoven Center Director Dr. Erica Buurman. “Our programs are community-focused. Our location in a public library makes it easy for the community to visit.
“We run several community events,” Buurman continued. “Last year we had a Beethoven Ball at the San José Women’s Club, with dance music of Beethoven’s era performed by the SJSU orchestra, and taught country dances from the time. We also have an annual exhibition from our collection, and lecture/concerts of Beethoven’s music.”
The Beethoven Center’s collection includes 365 first and 3,563 early editions of Beethoven’s compositions, manuscript scores, letters, portraits, period instruments — sometimes featured in lecture-concerts — and period “ephemera” like newspapers.
The collection also includes two pianos — at the time they were called “fortepianos” — from the 1820s, a replica of a 1795 fortepiano, a harpsichord and a clavichord (a keyboard instrument common from the late Middle Ages through the 18th century), and a modern Steinway for concerts.
The antique instruments aren’t available for the public to play, although they are sometimes played in concerts. In addition to the fragility of 200-year-old instruments, these instruments have wooden harps that go out of tune more easily and can’t take the tension that a modern piano with its iron harp can handle. (Beethoven was notorious for breaking pianos.)
The 1795 replica, however, can be played by visitors — with permission — when the Center is open to the public.
The Beethoven Center opened in 1983 when Beethoven aficionado and Arizona real estate developer Ira F. Brilliant (1922 – 2006) donated to SJSU his extensive collection of Beethoven manuscripts and first editions — a collection he had been building since 1975.
Brilliant first offered the collection to Arizona State University. Arizona declined the gift on the grounds that “professors there ‘weren’t interested in specializing,’” according to a Nov. 17, 1983 report in the San Jose Mercury. SJSU was delighted to accept the gift. And so Arizona’s loss became a gain for SJSU and South Bay music lovers.
“When I started as a collector of Beethoven materials, I felt I was a custodian, not a collector,” Brilliant told the Mercury. “The ultimate purpose of a collection is to use it.”
Beethoven Center Director Buurman, a Beethoven scholar who moved from the UK to be the Center’s director, agrees, and calls bringing Brilliant’s vision to the university and community is “a dream job.”
The Beethoven Center concert is Thursday, May 1, 2025 at noon at the Ira Brilliant Beethoven Center, on the 5th Floor of the King Library 150 E. San Fernando Street, in San José. Admission is free. For more information visit www.sjsu.edu/beethoven.
The concert features local pianists, winners of the 2025 Celia Mendez Young Pianists Beethoven Competition for high school students. Seventeen-year-old Oliver Corro from Fremont will play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Major, op. 2 no. 3. Bridget Hoang, 15, of San José will play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, op. 27 no. 1. There’s a reception after the performance with coffee and pastry, as well as an opportunity to view the collection.
During the SJSU academic year, the Center is open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10-noon. The May 1 concert will be the last time the community will be able to visit the Center until late August.
Other Arts & Entertainment:
Tearing Down Barriers to Enjoying Great Music
Image and Space: Nathan Oliveira at the Triton Museum
Breaking Tradition: “The Plague Archives” at SCU’s de Saisset Museum
