Maynard Solomon is the author of a classic biography of Beethoven which has become a standard work throughout the world, having been translated into seven languages. In Beethoven Essays, he continues his exploration of Beethoven’s inner life, visionary outlook, and creativity, in a series of profound studies of this colossal figure of our civilization.
Solomon deftly fuses a variety of investigative approaches, from rigorous historical and ideological studies to imaginative musical and psychoanalytic speculations. Thus, after closely documenting Beethoven’s birth and illegitimacy fantasies, his “Family Romance,” and his pretense of nobility, Solomon offers extraordinary interpretations of the composer’s dreams, deafness, and obsessive relationship to his nephew. And, following his detailed uncovering of a complex network of recurrent patterns in the Ninth Symphony, he considers the narrative and mythic implications of Beethoven’s formal design.
Solomon examines the broad patterns of Beethoven’s creative evolution and processes of composition, the radical modernism of his music, and his intellectual, religious, and utopian strivings. A separate section on the “Immortal Beloved” includes the fullest biography of Antonia Brentano yet published. Closing the volume is Solomon’s translation and annotated edition of Beethoven’s Tagebuch, the moving, intimate diary that the composer kept during the critical period that culminated in his last style. Here, as throughout Beethoven Essays, Solomon offers scholarship that is at the cutting edge of Beethoven research.
It is well known that Mozart developed his works in his head and then simply transcribed them onto paper, while Beethoven labored assiduously over sketches and drafts--"his first ideas," in Stephen Spender's words, "of a clumsiness which makes scholars marvel at how he could, at the end, have developed from them such miraculous results." Indeed Beethoven's extensive sketchbooks (which total over 8,000 pages) and the autograph manuscripts, covering several stages of development, reveal the composer systematically exploring and evolving his musical ideas.
Through close investigation of individual works, Lewis Lockwood traces the creative process as it emerges in Beethoven's sketches and manuscripts. Four studies address the composition of the Eroica Symphony from various viewpoints. The chamber works discussed include the Cello Sonata in A Major, Opus 69 (of which the entire autograph manuscript of the first movement is published here in facsimile), the string quartet Opus 59 No. 1, and the Cavatina of the later quartet Opus 130. Lockwood's lucid analysis enhances our understanding of Beethoven's musical strategies and stylistic developments as well as the compositional process itself In a final chapter the author outlines the importance of Beethoven's autographs for the modern performer.
In this first full-scale examination of the theme-and-variations form in the Classical era, Elaine Sisman demonstrates persuasively that it was Haydn's prophetic innovationsplacing the variation in every position of a multi-movement cycle, broadening its array of theme types, and transforming its larger shapethat truly created the Classical variation. She elucidates the concept and technique of variation, traces Haydn's development and use of the form in symphonies, chamber music, and keyboard works, and then shows how Mozart and Beethoven in their individual ways built on his contributions.
Throughout, Sisman's analysis reflects both musical thinking of the Classical period and today's critical interests. She discusses ornamentation and musical figures, explores the pervasive eighteenth-century notion of music as rhetoric, and relates the style of the variation to that of the other dominant form in this period: sonata form. Her book offers a revaluation of the nature of the variation form and a new approach to the music of Haydn. Haydn and the Classical Variation is addressed to students and scholars of music, but the author's unaffected style makes it accessible to nonprofessional music lovers as well.
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