“A moving and inspirational tour de force!Affecting, beautifully written, it drives home the intimate horrors and ironies and the difficulty of living with the knowledge of suffering.Compelling, it takes you on a fulfilling and engaging journey.”?(The Classical Musicologist)That Beethoven's famous Letter to the "Immortal Beloved" was to Josephine Brunsvik, his one and only Beloved, is now a fact, so obvious that one wonders why – especially in America – the truth had been veiled behind so much fantastic speculation and even denunciation.Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, musician, musicologist, historian and a Beethoven scholar of international repute, not only clears aside all this debris, but, based on many years of meticulous research, shows that Beethoven's love of Josephine was not only reflected in his letters and diary, but left traces in his music that speak in notes what words cannot express.With explanations, annotations and amendments by the translator, John E Klapproth (author of "Beethoven's Only Beloved: Josephine!").
Who was Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'? After Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer’s lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth? Becoming Beethoven’s pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister Josephine followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society’s flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. While Therese sought liberation, Josephine found the odds stacked against even the most unquenchable of passions...
In 1812, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote three letters to an unnamed woman, whom he called "Immortal Beloved." The letters were discovered after Beethoven's death and ever since their discovery, there has been speculation regarding whom that Immortal Beloved might have been. In Beethoven's Immortal Beloved: Solving the Mystery, Edward Walden carefully and meticulously presents his case that the woman who Beethoven loved was Bettina Brentano, an artistic and talented musician in her own right. Setting the foundation for his argument, Walden begins the book with a general historical and sequential narrative that interweaves the lives of the three principle protagonists: Beethoven, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Bettina Brentano. Walden explores in detail the key elements of the factual narrative and shows how those elements support his claim that Bettina was the Immortal Beloved. In addition, Walden addresses the attacks other Beethoven scholars have made against Bettina and reveals how such attacks were mistaken or unjustified. Thoroughly and rigorously researched, yet presented in a clear and engaging style, Beethoven's Immortal Beloved will appeal to Beethoven scholars, music lovers, and general readers alike, who will be captivated by the solving of this fascinating mystery.
Many books have been written about Beethoven. But it is rare to find one that seeks an alternative between the fragmentation found in most specialized studies and the superficial overview typical of popular biography. In this volume, Carl Dahlhaus, one of the century's leading musicologists, combines interpretations of individual works that focus on issues of composition and musical history, with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800; an age that was not only a "classical" period in the history of the arts but also one in that aesthetics carved itself a place in the center of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's "musical thinking" from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas.
The day after Beethoven’s death on March 26, 1827, his friends found, in a secret drawer of his desk, together with his will and two miniature portraits of two young women, a ten-page letter dated “July 6 in the morning,” that began with the intriguing incantation “My angel, my all, myself.” It included no address and no name of the addressee, except for the now famous my immortal beloved hyperbole, containing passionate declarations of love and was signed, “L., forever yours, forever mine, forever us.” Thus was born a biographical mystery of the artistic canon of the Western World, second only in tantalizing appeal to the identity of the person signing as William Shakespeare. Two hundred years later, biographers still have not come to a consensus on the mystery. Of the many candidates advanced in the meantime, only a few have survived in biographical literature. Stefan Romanó’s book brings the controversy to a close. It clarifies the existing evidence that has often been muddled, and at times reached the absurd, during almost two centuries of scholarly speculations. He also adds some new insights into the analysis of the evidence, thus making it easier for readers to draw their own conclusions, hopefully not different from his, namely, that only one of the candidates proposed so far fits the evidence. He also provides a substantially modified scenario from the one advanced by her proponents. Born in Romania during WWII and immigrated to the U.S.A. in 1989, Stefan Romanó is not a musician nor a musicologist. He is an engineer by formation, a man of exactitude and clear and logical thinking, qualities that served him thoroughly when he became an amateur Beethoven scholar. A long-time member of American Beethoven Society and of its French counterpart, Association Beethoven France et Francophonie, he has published in their professional journals, bringing valuable contributions to understanding Beethoven’s life and creation. His “Ending the Fifth” article answered a question that had puzzled musicians, scholars and music lovers alike for two hundred years: why does Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony end with that apparently interminable series of C major chords? He took up the pen by force of circumstance for his Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved when he realized that all the proposed solutions to the mystery relied on wild speculation and sometimes even falsifying the existing evidence.
Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the world's greatest composers, died on March 26, 1827. Until now, his dying wish, that his memory and honor remain untarnished, has never been fulfilled. Book jacket.
If for no other reasons than because of the long time and monumental patience expended upon its preparation, the vicissitudes through which it has passed and the varied and arduous labors bestowed upon it by the author and his editors, the history of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s Life of Beethoven deserves to be set forth as an introduction to this work. His work it is, and his monument, though others have labored long and painstakingly upon it. There has been no considerable time since the middle of the last century when it has not occupied the minds of the author and those who have been associated with him in its creation. Between the conception of its plan and its execution there lies a period of more than two generations. Four men have labored zealously and affectionately upon its pages, and the fruits of more than four score men, stimulated to investigation by the first revelations made by the author, have been conserved in the ultimate form of the biography. It was seventeen years after Mr. Thayer entered upon what proved to be his life-task before he gave the first volume to the world—and then in a foreign tongue; it was thirteen more before the third volume came from the press. This volume, moreover, left the work unfinished, and thirty-two years more had to elapse before it was completed. When this was done the patient and self-sacrificing investigator was dead; he did not live to finish it himself nor to see it finished by his faithful collaborator of many years, Dr. Deiters; neither did he live to look upon a single printed page in the language in which he had written that portion of the work published in his lifetime. It was left for another hand to prepare the English edition of an American writer’s history of Germany’s greatest tone-poet, and to write its concluding chapters, as he believes, in the spirit of the original author. Under these circumstances there can be no vainglory in asserting that the appearance of this edition of Thayer’s Life of Beethoven deserves to be set down as a significant occurrence in musical history. In it is told for the first time in the language of the great biographer the true story of the man Beethoven—his history stripped of the silly sentimental romance with which early writers and their later imitators and copyists invested it so thickly that the real humanity, the humanliness, of the composer has never been presented to the world. In this biography there appears the veritable Beethoven set down in his true environment of men and things—the man as he actually was, the man as he himself, like Cromwell, asked to be shown for the information of posterity. It is doubtful if any other great man’s history has been so encrusted with fiction as Beethoven’s. Except Thayer’s, no biography of him has been written which presents him in his true light. The majority of the books which have been written of late years repeat many of the errors and falsehoods made current in the first books which were written about him. A great many of these errors and falsehoods are in the account of the composer’s last sickness and death, and were either inventions or exaggerations designed by their utterers to add pathos to a narrative which in unadorned truth is a hundredfold more pathetic than any tale of fiction could possibly be. Other errors have concealed the truth in the story of Beethoven’s guardianship of his nephew, his relations with his brothers, the origin and nature of his fatal illness, his dealings with his publishers and patrons, the generous attempt of the Philharmonic Society of London to extend help to him when upon his deathbed.
"With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.
From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Features 457 letters to fellow musicians, friends, greats, patrons, and literary men. Reveals musical thoughts, quirks of personality, insights, and daily events. Includes 15 plates.
