Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination

Forside
University of California Press, 14. mai 2003 - 327 sider
In a series of powerful strokes, the music of Beethoven’s last years redefined his legacy and enlarged the realm of experience accessible to the creative imagination. Maynard Solomon’s Late Beethoven investigates the phenomenon of the final phase, focusing especially on the striking metamorphosis in Beethoven’s system of beliefs that began early in his fifth decade and eventually amounted to a sweeping realignment of his views of nature, antiquity, divinity, and human purpose.

Using the composer’s letters, diaries, and conversation books, Solomon traces Beethoven’s attraction to a constellation of heterogeneous ideas, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative religion, Eastern initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and contemporary thought. Through these often arcane sources, Beethoven gained access to a vast reservoir of imagery and ideas with the potential to expand music’s expressive and communicative reach. This "multitude of productive images," writes Solomon, "provided kindling for the blaze of his imagination."

Late Beethoven is a rich tapestry of original perspectives on Beethoven’s music. Solomon sees the Seventh Symphony as a deployment of the rhythms of antiquity in an effort to revalidate the premises of the Classical world; the Ninth as an essay on the prospects and limits of affirmative, monumental endings; and the "Diabelli" Variations as a doorway to the universe of metaphoric significances that attach to beginnings. In the Violin Sonata in G, op. 96, Solomon finds a restoration of the full range of pastoral experience that the ancient poets had known. In the Grosse Fuge he locates issues of fragmentation and reassembly, and he suggests that pivotal passages of the last sonatas evoke sacred states of being.

These stimulating perspectives illuminate the inner world within which Beethoven dwelled during his last fifteen years and the ways in which his thought and music may be interrelated. Written in accessible and eloquent prose, and with numerous music examples, Late Beethoven is a serious contribution to understanding this miraculous quantum leap in Beethoven’s creative evolution.

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Innhold

The End of a Beginning The Diabelli Variations
11
Beyond Classicism
27
Some Romantic Images
42
Pastoral Rhetoric Structure The Violin Sonata in G op
71
Reason and Imagination The Aesthetic Dimension
92
The Seventh Symphony and the Rhythms of Antiquity
102
The Masonic Thread
135
The Masonic Imagination
159
Intimations of the Sacred
198
The Sense of an Ending The Ninth Symphony
213
The Healing Power of Music
229
Abbreviations
243
Notes
245
Index of Composition
301
General Index
307
Opphavsrett

The Shape of a Journey The Diabelli Variations
179

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Om forfatteren (2003)

Maynard Solomon is on the Graduate Faculty at the Juilliard School. He is author of Mozart: A Life (1995), Beethoven Essays (1988), and Beethoven (1977, second edition 1998).

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