Political Beethoven

ISBN-13: 9781107005891 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 292 str.

Nicholas Mathew

Opis

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day."

Recenzje

In writing Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew has provided a thoroughly-researched and fascinating look at the composer's lesser-known works, giving a vivid description of the music, criticism, and theatricality of the period surrounding the Congress of Vienna.' Jane Riegel Ferencz, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

Spis treści

Introduction: political collaborations; 1. Music between myth and history; 2. Beethoven's moments; 3. The sounds of power and the power of sound; 4. The inner public; 5. After the war; Appendix: eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical sources consulted.