The question of how Beethoven, the prophetic composer, was rooted in the musical practices and conventions of the eighteenth century began to interest some authors in the late nineteenth century. In 1881, Franz Kullak investigated the relationship between Beethoven and eighteenth-century keyboard tutors in order to establish guidelines for the performance of Beethoven's trills. In 1888, Theodor Frimmel produced a 62-page essay on Beethoven as a pianist, in which information about Beethoven's musical education and descriptions of his playing alternate with quotations from C. P. E. Bach's Versuch on the one hand, and information about Beethoven's various possible keyboard instruments on the other. Frimmel and, later, Ludwig Schiedermair were versed enough in eighteenth-century keyboard treatises to include instruments other than Thayer's ubiquitous “Pianoforte” in their analyses. In his later Beethoven-Handbuch, Frimmel gave a detailed overview of the knowledge in his time of Beethoven's various pianos.

After a strong tradition of subjective romantic Beethoven writing, this was a new tendency, in spite of a comparative lack of practical experience on the part of the authors with the performing conventions described in the tutors and with historical instruments.

It was, indeed, not until the 1980s that an increasing number of authors entered the stage who explicitly based their keyboard performance practice studies on their professional experience with historical keyboard instruments. At a time when first-rate institutions have offered complete programs in performance practices for decades, and when the performance of historical music on instruments of historical types has built many successful lifelong careers, it is not arrogant to claim that our experience helps us to understand some of the practical aspects of Beethoven's early musicianship in ways that were inaccessible to earlier scholars – even though the distance from Beethoven has more than doubled since Kullak's or Frimmel's time.