Political Beethoven

Political Beethoven explores Beethoven's music as an active participant in political life from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day.

Nicholas Mathew (Author)

9781316616291, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2016

292 pages, 8 b/w illus. 1 table 44 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 1.5 cm, 0.52 kg

In writing Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew has provided a thoroughly-researched and fascinating look at the composer's lesser-known works, giving a vivid description of the music, criticism, and theatricality of the period surrounding the Congress of Vienna.' Jane Riegel Ferencz, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.

Introduction: political collaborations
1. Music between myth and history
2. Beethoven's moments
3. The sounds of power and the power of sound
4. The inner public
5. After the war
Appendix: eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical sources consulted.

Subject Areas: Romantic music [c 1830 to c 1900 AVGC5], Classical music [c 1750 to c 1830 AVGC4], Music [AV]