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In "Deconstructing Periodization," Tia DeNora examines how historical depictions of Beethoven's work in late eighteenth-century Vienna. K. M. Knittel have tended to impose patterns rather than reveal them. When perceived through modern sociological and ethnographic methods, Beethoven's early career is neither as neat nor as evolutionary as often supposed. K. M. Knittel also looks critically at traditional assumptions in "Imitation, Individuality, and Illness: Behind Beethoven's Three Styles." Two of Beethoven's most beloved piano sonatas are placed in wider cultural contexts by Janet Schmalfeldt and Thomas Sipe. Schmalfeldt examines "Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tr...
Compiled here are reviews, reports, notes, and essays found in German-language periodicals published between 1783 and 1830. The documents are translated into English with copious notes and annotations, an introductory essay, and indexes of names, subjects, and works. This volume contains a general section and documents on specific opus numbers up to opus 54, with musical examples redrawn from the original publications. ΓΈ The collection brings to light contemporary perceptions of Beethoven?s music, including matters such as audience, setting, facilities, orchestra, instruments, and performers as well as the relationship of Beethoven?s music to theoretical and critical ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These documents, most of which appear in English for the first time, present a wide spectrum of insights into the perceptions that Beethoven?s contemporaries had of his monumental music.
"We do not understand music--it understands us." This aphorism by Theodor W. Adorno expresses the quandary and the fascination many listeners have felt in approaching Beethoven's late quartets. No group of compositions occupies a more central position in chamber music, yet the meaning of these works continues to stimulate debate. William Kinderman's The String Quartets of Beethoven stands as the most detailed and comprehensive exploration of the subject. It collects new work by leading international scholars who draw on a variety of historical sources and analytical approaches to offer fresh insights into the aesthetics of the quartets, probing expressive and structural features that have hitherto received little attention. This volume also includes an appendix with updated information on the chronology and sources of the quartets and a detailed bibliography.
Marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, this volume presents twenty-one completely new essays on aspects of Beethoven's personal life, his composing process, his manuscripts, and his greatest works.
This Companion, first published in 2000, provides a comprehensive view of Beethoven and his work. The first part of the book presents the composer as a private individual, as a professional, and at the work-place, discussing biographical problems, Beethoven's professional activities when not composing and his methods as a composer. In the heart of the book, individual chapters are devoted to all the major genres cultivated by Beethoven and to the elements of style and structure that cross all genres. The book concludes by looking at the ways that Beethoven and his music have been interpreted by performers, writers on music, and in the arts, literature, and philosophy. The essays in this volume, written by leading Beethoven specialists, maintain traditional emphases in Beethoven studies while incorporating other developments in musicology and theory.
Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life. In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early c...
Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him. The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality...
Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.
Hailed as a masterpiece for its original interpretations of Beethoven's life and music. This edition takes into account the latest information and literature. Includes a 30-page bibliographical essay, numerous illustrations, and a full-color pictorial biography of the composer.
Over the last two centuries, Beethoven's music has been synonymous with the idea of freedom, in particular a freedom embodied in the heroic figure of Prometheus. This image arises from a relatively small circle of heroic works from the composer's middle period, most notably the Eroica Symphony. However, the freedom associated with the Promethean hero has also come under considerably critique by philosophers, theologians and political theorists; its promise of autonomy easily inverts into various forms of authoritarianism, and the sovereign will it champions is not merely a liberating force but a discriminatory one. Beethoven's freedom, then, appears to be increasingly problematic; yet his mu...