Jan Caeyers

The conductor and musicologist Jan Caeyers lived, studied and worked in Vienna for many years. From 1993 to 1997 he was assistant to Claudio Abbado at the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, where he also had the opportunity to work alongside Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez.

Until 2003 Jan Caeyers was the director of the Beethoven Academy and performed in many of Europe’s major concert venues, including the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (Bozar) and the Auditorio Nacional in Madrid. As a freelance conductor he has worked at the Opera in Stuttgart, and with orchestras in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Florence and Prague. He has also conducted such leading European choral ensembles as the Arnold Schoenberg Chor in Vienna and the Nederlands Kamerkoor.

Jan Caeyers wrote down his in-depth views on Beethoven in his substantial volume which was published in Dutch in 2009 and translated into German entitled as Beethoven. Der einsame Revolutionär by C.H. Beck in Munich in 2012, with a series of translations to follow (such as the Hungarian) or expected to follow (such as the English, Chinese, Arabic, etc). Writing this book was an essential transitional stage towards the development of the new orchestra, Le Concert Olympique, with which Caeyers is able to express and study his mature views on Beethoven and Viennese classical music.

This superbly documented and elegantly written biography was given an enthusiastic reception and the original version is now already in its seventh edition. Since the book became a bestseller in Germany – the home of Beethoven research – it is now considered as the reference work on Beethoven worldwide based on the new insights that have led to a paradigm shift in the perception of the famous composer.

Jan Caeyers has always combined an artistic career with music studies in a homogeneous project, with Beethoven at its heart. His experience as a conductor has been an essential part of his academic approach as a professor at the University Leuven. Vice versa, setting up the new orchestra Le Concert Olympique enabled him to convert into sound the well-founded insights he gained while writing his Beethoven biography.

June 2021