Political Beethoven

Nicholas Mathew

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781107005891
• eBook ISBN: 9781139603188
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Political Beethoven
• Title
• Series
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Music examples
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 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
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index