As the year 2022 comes to a close, so does our fiscal year. As we have done every year since 2008, we reach out to our loyal supporters for a show of support to the International Beethoven Project at this time.

This Not-for-Profit organization depends almost entirely on donor support, and your participation drives our projects forward.

Our year-end goal is to raise $10,000! Luckily, we have two challenge grants of $2,000 that will kick-in if we raise just $6,000!

Any amount counts, but we typically encourage tax-deductible donations of the following amounts:

- $100
- $250
- $500
- $1,000
- $1,500
- $2,000
- $2,500
- $3,000
- $5,000
- $10,000

You may also consider donating on a recurring monthly basis, which is always very helpful to us as well over the long term.

Every donation made will receive appropriate recognition in our published work, unless otherwise noted, and every donor above the $100 level will receive a special gift. At the $1,000 level and above, you can customize your gifts if you wish. To learn more, please contact us: ibp [at] internationalbeethovenproject [dot] com.

From the very beginning, the International Beethoven Project was founded in the spirit of Beethoven's forward-thinking, fraternal and humanist approach to art. Our mission has always been to show how engaging classical music could be in a contemporary context, and to help move the needle of the classical music world forward by opening up to new ideas, to new kinds of experiences and approaches, while never losing sight of the best that classical music has had to offer over hundreds of years. IBP is modern but cognizant of the tradition that has carried the great works of classical music through history.

We work to inspire new generations of listeners, and to help musicians, programmers and administrators expand their toolkits to share this art form with the public. We have done this in many different ways already, starting with our mind-bending multidisciplinary Beethoven Festival and UnFestival editions, and continuing with our multimedia projects, including producing albums, films and experimental theater and dance. We have also participated in many other organizations’ projects, from the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival to the Beethoven House in Bonn (Beethovenhaus, Bonn) with whom we worked on the Beethoven 250th anniversary year in 2020-21.

As the world continues to evolve, so do we. The Covid pandemic has had a profound impact on society, and the latest war in Europe, along with the ensuing energy and inflationary crises, have only added to the sense that the world is changing in dramatic ways with unusual speed. For musicians, Covid was a very difficult time, interrupting projects, tours, concerts, lessons and other sources of income. In addition to this, Covid has been hard to bear psychologically, when it has not added physical ailments to those who suffered from bad cases of the virus. The return of a sense of normality has not been helped by the geopolitical situation, and the increasing frequency of climate disasters is just one other element of uncertainty that is creating more anxiety than ever, especially amongst the younger generations.

There is a sense that the classical music traditions are out of touch with current events. While it is nice to be able to escape problems for a night out at the opera or the symphony, it does not seem to speak to the current angst many are feeling deeply, and certainly not in the way that other types of contemporary art and music are perhaps better suited for.

We do not claim to have any perfect answers to these perennial issues! But we do believe that experimentation is necessary, along with wide-ranging discussions about what might work best to make classical music thrive. Our fear is that the art form becomes too much like a museum piece, something that one goes to see to educate oneself about the achievements of past eras rather than being seen as a continuous living body of work.

The happy truth is that classical music can only survive as a dynamic art form if it is constantly renewed. This is what Beethoven did in his lifetime, taking old forms and making them uniquely his and uniquely modern. This is also what we have set ourselves to do using all the tools of the modern world at our disposal. While the ways we approach these issues change and evolve year after year (that is why we are a flexible “project”), our core goals remain the same.

In the coming year we will continue to work on our Beethoven documentaries, Beethoven Sonatas recordings, as well as a new media project that will be part blog, part social media, part education.

More information on our upcoming plans will be revealed before the end of 2022, beginning on Beethoven’s 252nd birthday, December 16. So stay tuned!

We hope you will contribute generously as we round out 2022.

If you have any questions, please reach out to ibp [at] internationalbeethovenproject [dot] com

Thank you!

(Cover photo of a long-gone Beethoven monument, revitalized by Céline Oms)