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...
Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notori...
