Download or read book Beethoven and His World written by Scott Burnham and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-27 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him. The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality, memory, and voice in works at the threshold of Beethoven's late style, such as An die Ferne Geliebte, the Cello Sonata op. 102, no. 1, and the somewhat later Piano Sonata op. 109. Peering behind the scenes into Beethoven's workshop, Tilman Skowroneck explains how the young Beethoven chose his pianos, and William Kinderman shows Beethoven in the process of sketching and revising his compositions. The volume concludes with four essays engaging the broader question of reception of Beethoven's impact on his world and ours. Christopher Gibbs' study of Beethoven's funeral and its aftermath features documentary material appearing in English for the first time; art historian Alessandra Comini offers an illustrated discussion of Beethoven's ubiquitous and iconic frown; Sanna Pederson takes up the theme of masculinity in critical representations of Beethoven; and Leon Botstein examines the aesthetics and politics of hearing extramusical narratives and plots in Beethoven's music. Bringing together varied and fresh approaches to the West's most celebrated composer, this collection of essays provides music lovers with an enriched understanding of Beethoven--as man, musician, and phenomenon.
Download or read book The Ninth written by Harvey Sachs and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mozart written by Jan Swafford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Download or read book Beethoven s World written by Jennifer Viegas and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles the famous Austrian composer and discusses his legacy and style.
Download or read book Beethoven s Skull written by Tim Rayborn and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beethoven’s Skull is an unusual and often humorous survey of the many strange happenings in the history of Western classical music. Proving that good music and shocking tabloid-style stories make excellent bedfellows, it presents tales of revenge, murder, curious accidents, and strange fates that span more than two thousand years. Highlights include: A cursed song that kills those who hear it A composer who lovingly cradles the head of Beethoven’s corpse when his remains are exhumed half a century after his death A fifteenth-century German poet who sings of the real-life Dracula A dream of the devil that inspires a virtuoso violin piece Unlike many music books that begin their histories with the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, Beethoven’s Skull takes the reader back to the world of ancient Greece and Rome, progressing through the Middle Ages and all the way into the twentieth century. It also looks at myths and legends, superstitions, and musical mysteries, detailing the ways that musicians and their peers have been rather horrible to one another over the centuries.
Download or read book Beethoven s World written by Jennifer Viegas and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book celebrates one of historys most brilliant and renowned composers. Readers will explore what made Beethoven who he was, how religion shaped his music, and how his compositions reflected the sweeping historical and philosophical changes that were taking place in the early nineteenth century.
Download or read book Brahms and His World written by Peter Clive and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2006-10-02 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an influential and well-connected composer, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) had encountered, befriended, and collaborated with hundreds of people over his significant career. In Brahms and His World: A Biographical Dictionary, author Peter Clive provides extensive and up-to-date information on the composer's personal and professional association with some 430 persons. These persons include relatives, friends, acquaintances, and physicians; fellow musicians and composers whom Brahms particularly admired and in the editions of whose works he was involved; conductors, instrumentalists, and singers who took part in notable or first performances of his works; poets whose texts he set to music; publishers and artists; and even the rulers of certain German states with whom he had significant contact. Offering information not usually available in Brahms biographies, this volume combines findings from both primary and secondary sources, giving insights into Brahms' character, his life, and his career, and shedding light on the educated middle and upper class culture of the nineteenth century. A comprehensive chronology of Brahms' life, a bibliography, and two indexes round out this important reference guide.
Download or read book Mr Beethoven written by Paul Griffiths and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize Based on the German composer's own correspondence, this inventive, counterfactual work of historical fiction imagines Beethoven traveling to America to write an oratorio based on the Book of Job. It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants the composer a few extra years of life and, starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adventures and misadventures in a new world in which, great man though he is, he finds himself a new man. Relying entirely on historically attested possibilities to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou (his designated librettist), and finding a kindred spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keeping his hosts guessing as to whether he will come through with his promised composition. (And just what, the reader also wonders, will this new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?) The book that emerges is an improvisation, as virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.
Download or read book Beethoven and His World written by H. P. Clive and published by Oxford : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the author's acclaimed biographical dictionaries on Schubert and Mozart, 'Beethoven and His World' offers an extremely comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the composer's relations with a multitude of persons with whom he associated on a personal or professional basis: relatives,friends, acquaintances, librettists, poets, publishers, artists, patrons, and musicians. With more than 450 entries, the dictionary is the result of a wide-ranging examination of primary and secondary sources, and critically assesses the use which scholars have made of the considerabledocumentation now available. In particular, there are numerous references to Beethoven's correspondence and conversation books, which have recently been published in excellent new editions. The book places the composer and his music in a fuller context and a wider perspective than might bepossible in a traditional biography; it will appeal to all music lovers, both the scholar and the non-specilaist alike.
Download or read book Beethoven A Life written by Jan Caeyers and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, ... Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers ... weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven--his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the 'immortal beloved, ' and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven's music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist"--Publisher marketing.
Download or read book Beethoven and the Construction of Genius written by Tia DeNora and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was high time that someone tried to explain more fully, and on the basis of the known documents, the course of Beethoven's meteoric rise to fame in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century. . . . I would consider this cleverly written and authoritative book to be the most important about Beethoven in twenty-five years. No one considering the subject will be able to overlook DeNora's research."—H.C. Robbins Landon, author of Beethoven: His Life, Work, and World "This is a study with the power to reshape our perceptions of Beethoven's first decade in Vienna and substantially refine our notions of the creation and foundations of Beethoven's career."—William Meredith, Ira Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State University "Professor DeNora's achievement in placing Beethoven, and the reception of Beethoven's music, in social context is all the more impressive because it goes so much against the grain of conventional habits of thought. In illuminating how changing social institutions created opportunities for Beethoven to gain contemporary and posthumous recognition, and, in so doing, created new forms for thinking and talking about musical achievement—the author at once provides fresh insights into the institutional origins of 'classical' music and offers an exemplary contribution to the sociological study of the arts."—Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University "An important landmark in our understanding of the relationship of the creative musician to society, and a vital contribution to debates about the central phenomenon which distinguishes Western music from other musical traditions: the phenomenon of the Great Composer."—Julian Rushton, University of Leeds "This original book argues that Beethoven's high reputation was created as much by the social-cultural agendas of his aristocratic Viennese patrons in the 1790s as by the qualities of his music. DeNora's persuasive reading of this momentous cultural-artistic event will be welcome to sociologists for its successful contextualization of a hero of 'absolute music,' as well as to musicologists and music-lovers who wish to move beyond the myth of Beethoven as 'the man who freed music.'"—James Webster, Cornell University "Lucid, well-researched, and theoretically informed, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius is one of the best works yet published in the historical sociology of culture. DeNora makes important contributions not only to our knowledge of Beethoven and of the social construction of genius but to the general problems of how identities are created, shaped, and sustained and of how aesthetic claims gain authority."—Craig Calhoun, University of North Carolina
Download or read book Beethoven and His World written by Scott Burnham and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, Beethoven and His World gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him. The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality, memory, and voice in works at the threshold of Beethoven's late style, such as An die Ferne Geliebte, the Cello Sonata op. 102, no. 1, and the somewhat later Piano Sonata op. 109. Peering behind the scenes into Beethoven's workshop, Tilman Skowroneck explains how the young Beethoven chose his pianos, and William Kinderman shows Beethoven in the process of sketching and revising his compositions. The volume concludes with four essays engaging the broader question of reception of Beethoven's impact on his world and ours. Christopher Gibbs' study of Beethoven's funeral and its aftermath features documentary material appearing in English for the first time; art historian Alessandra Comini offers an illustrated discussion of Beethoven's ubiquitous and iconic frown; Sanna Pederson takes up the theme of masculinity in critical representations of Beethoven; and Leon Botstein examines the aesthetics and politics of hearing extramusical narratives and plots in Beethoven's music. Bringing together varied and fresh approaches to the West's most celebrated composer, this collection of essays provides music lovers with an enriched understanding of Beethoven--as man, musician, and phenomenon.
Download or read book Welcome to the Symphony written by Carolyn Sloan and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using one of the most famous works in classical music—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—here is the perfect way to introduce a young child to the world of classical music. This charming and interactive picture book with its panel of 19 sound buttons is like a ticket to a concert hall, taking readers on a journey from the exciting first moment when the musicians begin tuning up to the end of the first movement (attention newcomers: don’t clap yet!). At each step of the way, readers learn the basics of classical music and the orchestra: What is a conductor? What is a symphony? Who was Beethoven? The different aspects of music: melody, harmony, tempo, theme. And the families of instruments—strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. But the best part is that every critical idea is illustrated in gorgeous sound. The sound panel allows readers to hear the different parts of the symphony and voices of the music—the famous beginning of the Fifth, what a clarinet sounds like, the difference between a violin and a viola, what a melody is, and what harmony is. Kids will want to match their voices to the A note that tunes the orchestra, dance to the rhythmic passages—and, of course, sing along to da-da-da-daah!
Download or read book Beethoven and His World written by Erich Valentin and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Changing Image of Beethoven written by Alessandra Comini and published by Sunstone Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique study of the myth-making process across two centuries, Comini examines the contradictory imagery of Beethoven in contemporary verbal accounts, and in some 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and monuments.
Download or read book Beethoven the Man and the Artist as Revealed in His Own Words written by Ludwig van Beethoven and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words" by Ludwig van Beethoven. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Download or read book The First Four Notes written by Matthew Guerrieri and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year This revelatory book of music history examines what is perhaps the best known and most-popular symphony ever written—and its famous four-note opening. Reaching back before Beethoven’s time, Matthew Guerrieri uncovers premonitions of the opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and the music of the French Revolution. He discusses the Fifth’s impact when it premiered, tracing the artistic, philosophical, and political reverberations across Europe to China, Russia, and the United States, from Romanticism to ring tones, from propaganda to pop. This fascinating piece of musical detective work is a treat for music lovers of every stripe.
