Beethoven Essays [Paperback]

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. InBeethoven Essays, he continues his exploration of Beethovens 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 Beethovens birth and illegitimacy fantasies, his Family Romance, and his pretense of nobility, Solomon offers extraordinary interpretations of the composers 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 Beethovens formal design.

Solomon examines the broad patterns of Beethovens 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 Solomons translation and annotated edition of BeethovensTagebuch, the moving, intimate diary that the composer kept during the critical period that culminated in his last style. Here, as throughoutBeethoven Essays, Solomon offers scholarship that is at the cutting edge of Beethoven research.

Solomons most important achievement is to demonstrate with astonishing clarity the connection between psychological dramas of the life and the stylistic transformations of the music& Solomons vision of the life has all the energy and reflection of the music itself.TheEssaysshare with [Solomons biography of Beethoven] the Enlightenment qualities of reasonableness, humour,lÃ%