Since receiving an award for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation in 2010, William Kinderman has published several books while expanding his performance activities in new directions. His focus on artistic creativity is reflected in The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág (2012); in Wagner’s “Parsifal” he explores issues of genesis and aesthetics as well as political issues. His latest book, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (2020), marks the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth (University of Chicago Press; translations into German and Chinese).
For Alfred Brendel, Kinderman is “a very rare bird” as result of his combined piano performance and scholarship. Edward Rothstein, in The New York Times, has praised Kinderman’s “intellectual energy and distinctive insight”; German critic Gerd Kowa has found him “a herald of Beethoven research and interpretation . . . a sovereign artist.” Kinderman’s interpretations of Beethoven’s works have widely influenced the work of others, including Moisés Kaufman’s award-winning play 33 Variations, which reached Broadway in 2009 and many other stages since.
During 2016-17, Kinderman resided in Vienna, Austria, where he was Visiting Research Professor at the Musik und Kunst Universität and Director’s Fellow at the International Research Center for the Humanities (IFK). He was Co-Curator of Vienna’s first Beethoven Museum, and organized a major conference on Beethoven in Vienna in March 2017 that resulted in a book on Utopian Visions and Visionary Art: Beethoven’s ‘Empire of the Mind’ –Revisited. His recent lecture recitals and other presentations have taken him to Vienna, Bonn, Paris, Oslo, Barcelona, Beijing, Shanghai, New York, Boston, and other cities in Europe, Asia, and North America.
In 2019, Kinderman became Professor and inaugural Leon M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair of Performance Studies in the Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
In 2021, he lectured and performed at the conference “Beethoven’s ‘Empire of the Mind’: Artistic ‘Effigies of the Ideal’ and the Cultural Politics of Resistance” held at Bonn with support from the Humboldt Foundation.