Author: Robin Wallace
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022642975X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Wallace demystifies the narratives of Beethoven’s approach to his hearing loss and instead explores how Beethoven did not "conquer" his deafness; he adapted to life with it. We’re all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his rapidly progressing deafness. That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven’s response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven’s music. Perhaps no one is better positioned to help us do so than Robin Wallace, who not only has dedicated his life to the music of Beethoven but also has close personal experience with deafness. One day, Wallace’s late wife, Barbara, found she couldn’t hear out of her right ear—the result of radiation administered to treat a brain tumor early in life. Three years later, she lost hearing in her left ear as well. Over the eight and a half years that remained of her life, despite receiving a cochlear implant, Barbara didn’t overcome her deafness or ever function again like a hearing person. Wallace shows here that Beethoven didn’t do those things, either. Rather than heroically overcoming his deafness, Beethoven accomplished something even more challenging: he adapted to his hearing loss and changed the way he interacted with music, revealing important aspects of its very nature in the process. Wallace tells the story of Beethoven’s creative life, interweaving it with his and Barbara’s experience to reveal aspects that only living with deafness could open up. The resulting insights make Beethoven and his music more accessible and help us see how a disability can enhance human wholeness and flourishing.
Author: Kenneth Drake
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011531
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
The definitive study of Beethoven’s piano sonatas is “remarkable as an insider’s account of the works in an individual perspective.” (European Music Teacher) In “one of the most interesting, useful and even exciting books on the process of musical creation” (American Music Teacher), Kenneth O. Drake groups the Beethoven piano sonatas according to their musical qualities, rather than their chronology. He explores the interpretive implications of rhythm, dynamics, slurs, harmonic effects, and melodic development and identifies specific measures where Beethoven skillfully employs these compositional devices. An interpreter searching for meaning, Drake begins with Beethoven’s expressive treatment of the keyboard—the variations of touch, articulation, line, color, use of silence, and the pacing of musical ideas. He then analyzes individual sonatas, exploring motivic development, philosophic overtones, and technical demands. Hundreds of musical examples illustrate this exploration of emotional and interpretive implications of “the 32.” Here musicians are encouraged to exercise intuition and independence of thought, complementing their performance skills with logical conclusions about ideas and relationships within the score.
Author: Keith Chapin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108595758
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts.
Author: Tim Rayborn
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1510712720
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
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.
Author: Paul Griffiths
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137580X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jonah Winter
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade
ISBN: 0307554007
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
How hard is it to move 5 legless pianos 39 times? Beethoven owned five legless pianos and composed great works on the floor. His first apartment was in the center of Vienna's theater district... but he forgot to pay rent, so he had to move. (And it's very hard to move a piano. Even harder to move five). Beethoven's next apartment was in a dangerous part of town... so he moved, and the pianos followed on a series of pulleys. Then came an apartment with a view of the Danube (but he made too much noise and the neighbors complained), followed by an attic apartment (where he made even MORE of a rukus), and so Beethoven moved again and again. Each time, pianos were bought, left behind, transported on pulleys, slides, and by movers, all so that gifted Beethoven could compose great works of music for the world.
Author: Franco Sciannameo
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810888866
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
Since the eighteenth century, violin concertos have provided a showcase for dramatic interplay between a soloist’s virtuosity and the blended sonority of an orchestra’s many instruments. Using this genre to showcase skill and ingenuity, composers cemented the violin concerto as a key genre of classical music and gifted our ears with such timeless masterpieces as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In Experiencing the Violin Concerto, Franco Sciannameo draws on his years of scholarship and violin performance to trace the genre through Baroque, Classical, and modern periods. Along the way, he explores the social and personal histories of composers, and the fabulous virtuosi who performed concertos, and audiences they conquered worldwide. Inviting readers to consider not only the components of the music but also the power of perception and experience, Sciannameo recreates the atmosphere of a live performance as he paints a narrative history of technique and innovation. Experiencing the Violin Concerto uses descriptions in place of technical jargon to make the world of classical music accessible to amateur music lovers. As part of the Listener’s Companion series, the volume gives readers an enhanced experience of key works by investigating the environments in which the works were written and first performed as well as those in which they are enjoyed today.
Author: John Clubbe
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242560
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 633
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Book Description
A fascinating and in-depth exploration of how the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon shaped Beethoven’s political ideals and inspired his groundbreaking compositions. Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafés and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of twenty-one to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon. As Napoleon had made strides to liberate Europe from aristocratic oppression, so Beethoven desired to liberate humankind through music. He went beyond the musical forms of Haydn and Mozart, notably in the Eroica Symphony and his opera Fidelio, both inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. John Clubbe illuminates Beethoven as a lifelong revolutionary through his compositions, portraits, and writings, and by setting him alongside major cultural figures of the time—among them Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goya.
Author: Harvey Sachs
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812969073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jan Caeyers
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520390210
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
"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.
