Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination by Maynard Solomon
By Maynard Solomon
In a sequence of robust strokes, the song of Beethoven's final years redefined his legacy and enlarged the area of expertise obtainable to the inventive mind's eye. Maynard Solomon's "Late Beethoven" investigates the phenomenon of the ultimate part, focusing specifically at the remarkable metamorphosis in Beethoven's method of ideals that begun early in his 5th decade and at last amounted to a sweeping realignment of his perspectives of nature, antiquity, divinity, and human goal. utilizing the composer's letters, diaries, and dialog books, Solomon strains Beethoven's charm to a constellation of heterogeneous principles, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative faith, jap initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and modern concept. via those frequently arcane assets, Beethoven won entry to an enormous reservoir of images and ideas with the aptitude to extend music's expressive and communicative achieve. This 'multitude of effective images', writes Solomon, 'provided kindling for the blaze of his imagination'. "Late Beethoven" is a wealthy tapestry of unique views on Beethoven's song. Solomon sees the "Seventh Symphony" as a deployment of the rhythms of antiquity so as to revalidate the premises of the Classical global; the 9th as an essay at the clients and bounds of affirmative, enormous endings; and, the 'Diabelli' adaptations as a doorway to the universe of metaphoric significances that connect to beginnings. within the "Violin Sonata in G, op. 96", Solomon unearths a recovery of the complete variety of pastoral adventure that the traditional poets had identified. within the "Grosse Fuge" he locates problems with fragmentation and reassembly, and he means that pivotal passages of the final sonatas evoke sacred states of being. those stimulating views light up the interior global in which Beethoven dwelled in the course of his final fifteen years and the ways that his proposal and tune could be interrelated. Written in obtainable and eloquent prose, and with various tune examples, "Late Beethoven" is a major contribution to realizing this unbelievable quantum bounce in Beethoven's artistic evolution.
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Additional resources for Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination
Sample text
Classicizing scholars have collapsed Beethoven’s innovations into a few subsets of his music’s potential sources, thereby diminishing his uniqueness while simultaneously magnifying the originality of his predecessors, whose own influences are not always subjected to equally close scrutiny. The “heaven-storming” Beethoven thus yields to a more subdued, even a docile Beethoven. beyond classicism 33 To emphasize in Beethoven the traditional rather than the new, the compliant rather than the disruptive, the origins of his style rather than its originality, has had unexpected consequences, for the question of Beethoven’s classicism versus his romanticism, whatever its intrinsic merit, has served as a compact metaphor for the way we perceive his music.
Especially, it has given rise to the tendency to see Beethoven primarily as an inheritor of tradition rather than as a forceful agent in music’s evolution. Of course, we can only understand Beethoven’s music by documenting its manifold origins; but knowledge of origins cannot exhaust meaning. Moreover, the quest for origins is never-ending precisely because sources have their own sources, and the productive contexts of a complex work of art cannot be fully itemized. Classicizing scholars have collapsed Beethoven’s innovations into a few subsets of his music’s potential sources, thereby diminishing his uniqueness while simultaneously magnifying the originality of his predecessors, whose own influences are not always subjected to equally close scrutiny.
C 5 C g g C C T T hC C C C C C C g C 17 g Six Variations for Piano on Paisiello’s “Nel cor più non mi sento,” WoO 70, mm. 1–8. C C C C C C CO h C C C C C C h C C # W C C C g C C C C h C C C C C C C C C C h C g C C C C C C CO C C C C C g C g C C C C C C T T C C C C C C C C T T T C h C C C C T the familiar, which is then disassembled, chaoticized, deconstructed, and defamiliarized before it, in turn, rediscovers an ultimate state of concord. Thus, it should not be a surprise that this set of variations opens with a familiar theme-type—a German dance or waltz, or Ländler—one that is redolent of the commonplace, the here and now, the solidly present, the factual rather than the fanciful.