Beethoven cast a looming shadow over the nineteenth century. For composers he was a model both to emulate and to overcome. "You have no idea how it feels," Brahms confided, "when one always hears such a giant marching behind one." Exploring the response of five composers--Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler--to what each clearly saw as the challenge of Beethoven's symphonies, Evan Bonds richly enhances our understanding of the evolution of the symphony and Beethoven's legacy.

Overt borrowings from Beethoven--for example, the lyrical theme in the Finale of Brahms' First Symphony, so like the "Ode to Joy" theme in Beethoven's Ninth--have often been the subject of criticism. Bonds now shows us how composers imitate or allude to a Beethoven theme or compositional strategy precisely in order to turn away from it, creating a new musical solution. Berlioz's Harold en Italie, Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Brahms' First, and Mahler's Fourth serve as illuminating examples. Discussion focuses on such core issues as Beethoven's innovations in formal design, the role of text and voice, fusion of diverse genres, cyclical coherence of movements, and the function of the symphonic finale.

Bonds lucidly argues that the great symphonists of the nineteenth century cleared creative space for themselves by both confronting and deviating from the practices of their potentially overpowering precursor. His analysis places familiar masterpieces in a new light.

The two-fold task of A Symphony of Distances is to provide an overview of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s use of distance imagery with regard to personal distinctions in the Holy Trinity and to offer a critical analysis of him as a modern Catholic theologian. A metaphor of “distance” integrates all of Balthasar’s theological thought as a primary cipher for the many symbols through which he reads the Christian theological tradition in a trinitarian and eschatological mode. The book follows a chronological, four-stage development of Balthasar’s trinitarianism through the lens of this distance metaphor as it occurs across representative texts. The critical analysis employs the conceit of a symphony of four musical movements that correspond to four varieties of theological distance. These distances show certain correspondences of God’s creation and redemption of the world—marked by the first two “distances”—with the relations of the divine persons to each other in the economy of salvation and in the eternal Trinity itself—marked by the third and fourth distances. “Listening” to the four movements of Balthasar’s theological distances enables his readers to “hear” the themes of all four movements in the ascending order of richness, complexity, and inclusivity over the long development of his thought. This fundamentally positive approach of A Symphony of Distances allows for a thorough critique of the internal consistency of Balthasar’s applied method, of the controversial use of gendered trinitarian notions in his speculations on divine pathos, and of his adequacy to the tasks of modern theology. The final judgment is that Balthasar’s theology of distance can be accepted, with reservations, as a positive element of his contribution to contemporary trinitarian theology. The book can thus serve as a critical reference for readers who find Balthasar’s notion of trinitarian distance, and indeed his trinitarianism as a whole, to be compelling, confusing, or frustrating.