Political Beethoven (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism)
Cambridge University Press, 12/20/2012
EAN 9781107005891, ISBN10: 1107005892
Hardcover, 292 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
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.