The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony

The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony

Author: Nancy November

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-25

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1108529860

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Companion provides orientation for those embarking on the study of Beethoven's much-discussed Eroica Symphony, as well as providing fresh insights that will appeal to scholars, performers and listeners more generally. The book addresses the symphony in three thematic sections, on genesis, analysis and reception history, and covers key topics including political context, dedication, sources of the Symphony's inspiration, 'heroism' and the idea of a 'watershed' work. Critical studies of writings and analyses from Beethoven's day to ours are included, as well as a range of other relevant responses to the work, including compositions, recordings, images and film. The Companion draws on previous literature but also illuminates the work from new angles, based on new evidence and a range of approaches by twelve leading scholars in Beethoven research.


Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary

Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary

Author: John Clubbe

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 0393242560

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fascinating and in-depth exploration of how the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon shaped Beethoven’s political ideals and inspired his groundbreaking compositions. Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafés and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of twenty-one to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon. As Napoleon had made strides to liberate Europe from aristocratic oppression, so Beethoven desired to liberate humankind through music. He went beyond the musical forms of Haydn and Mozart, notably in the Eroica Symphony and his opera Fidelio, both inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. John Clubbe illuminates Beethoven as a lifelong revolutionary through his compositions, portraits, and writings, and by setting him alongside major cultural figures of the time—among them Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goya.


Music as Thought

Music as Thought

Author: Mark Evan Bonds

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0691168059

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. Music as Thought is a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.


Beethoven

Beethoven

Author: William Kinderman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-04-10

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0199886946

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 chamber music, his songs, his opera Fidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.


Beethoven

Beethoven

Author: Jan Swafford

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 1107

ISBN-13: 061805474X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The definitive book on the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven, written by the acclaimed biographer of Brahms and Ives.


Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration

Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration

Author: Naomi Waltham-Smith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 019066200X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How is music implicated in the politics of belonging? Provocatively fusing recent European philosophy with music theory, Music and Belonging explores the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, reveals connections between listening and constructions of community, and testifies to Classical music's enduring political significance in an age of neoliberal exclusion.


The Classical Style

The Classical Style

Author: Charles Rosen

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780393040203

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Presents a detailed analysis of the musical styles and forms developed by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven.


The Ninth

The Ninth

Author: Harvey Sachs

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0812969073

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The premier of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna on May 7, 1824, was the most significant artistic event of the year—and the work remains one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music. Described in vibrant detail by eminent musicologist Harvey Sachs, this symbol of freedom and joy was so unorthodox that it amazed and confused listeners at its unveiling—yet it became a standard for subsequent generations of creative artists, and its composer came to embody the Romantic cult of genius. In this unconventional, provocative book, Beethoven’s masterwork becomes a prism through which we may view the politics, aesthetics, and overall climate of the era. Part biography, part history, part memoir, The Ninth brilliantly explores the intricacies of Beethoven’s last symphony—how it brought forth the power of the individual while celebrating the collective spirit of humanity.