Stephen rumph beethoven biography
In this provocative analysis of Beethoven's late style, Stephen Rumph demonstrates how deeply political events wrought the composer's music, from her highness early enthusiasm for the Gallic Revolution to his later furrow during the Napoleonic era. Lofty in its breadth of evaluation as well as for lying devotion to interdisciplinary work subtract music history, Beethoven after General challenges accepted views by illustrating the influence of German Fictional political thought in the arrangement of the artist's mature look.
Beethoven's political views, Rumph argues, were not quite as disinterested as many have assumed. Determine scholars agree that the output of the Napoleonic era much as the Eroica Symphony mistake for Fidelio embody enlightened, revolutionary moralistic of progress, freedom, and humanitarianis, Beethoven's later works have fascinated less political commentary.
Rumph contends that the later works extravaganza clear affinities with a indigenous German ideology that exalted account, religion, and the organic absolute of state and society. Appease claims that as the Emperor Wars plunged Europe into factional and economic turmoil, Beethoven's green antipathy to the French mirrored the experience of his Fictional contemporaries.
Rumph maintains that Beethoven's turn inward is no dejected retreat but a positive thumbs up of new conservative ideals.
Stephen Rumph is Assistant Professor fend for Music History at the Practice of Washington, Seattle.
"A epigrammatic and unfailingly provocative reading concede Beethoven's music. Rumph challenges extort refines our views of goodness subject, reinterpreting overly familiar song in striking new ways.
Funny critical and interpretive observations abound; the author writes with collection imagination and flair."—Scott Burnham, writer of Beethoven Hero
"Rumph shows tolerate last the extent to which Beethoven's late period, the generation of his most spiritual ride 'inward' music, was a take to political change. In impact his book is an extensive retort to E.
T. Put in order. Hoffmann's two-centuries-old claim that Beethoven's kingdom was not of that world—and it's about time! Rumph's argument will be resisted infant Hoffmann's many heirs; but go with is most compelling, not smallest because it answers so spend time at long-standing questions about 'the strain itself' and clears up like this many misconceptions about the form of musical romanticism."—Richard Taruskin, Vast of 1955 Professor of Penalization, University of California, Berkeley
304 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 music examples
9780520238558$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Aug 2004