Beethoven [Hardcover]

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman'sBeethovenis both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life.

In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early chamber music, his songs, his operaFidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.

Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Plates
List of music Examples and Figures
Overture
1. The Bonn Years
2. The Path to Mastery, 1792-1798
3. Crises and Creativity, 1799-1802
4. The Heroic Style I, 1803-1806
5. The Heroic Style II, 1806-1809
6. Consolidation, 1810-1812
7. The Congress of Vienna Period, 1813-1815
8. The Hammerklavier Sonata, 1816-1818
9. Struggle, 1819-1822
10. Triumph, 1822-1824
11. The `Galitzin' Quartets, 1824-1825
12. The Last Phase, 1826-1827
Selected Bibliography
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index of Beethovel³Á