Over the last two hundred years, Beethoven's music has been synonymous with modernity's 'absolute' value-freedom. Author Daniel KL Chua explores how Beethoven's music engages with freedom's aspirations and dilemmas, challenging the current image of Beethoven, and suggesting an alterior freedom that can speak ethically to the twenty-first century.

Through an important episode in the life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Régis Penet paints the portrait of a humanist genius who refused to submit to the powerful.

The "Coletânea Internacional Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata Poética da Liberdade" (Ludwig van Beethoven International Collection - Poetic Sonata of Freedom) is a Tribute to Beethoven in the celebrations of the 250th jubilee of his birth. The work was conceived, produced and organized by the Brazilian journalist and writer Élle Marques, who brought 90 guest authors together. It is a poetic composition that harmonizes around the Conductor's legacy. The authors reinterpret feelings such as "eternal love" and the value of creatures and nature. It is the first international collective poetic work in the world dedicated to the memory of the great German composer. The Poetic Sonata of Freedom was originally produced in Portuguese. English version: Hudson Ribeiro. Mundo Cultural World publishing house, 2021. Contributors: Aldir Carvalho Filho, Silvio Fergon, Amauri Queiroz, Gui Kallifer, Khathleen Evelyn Müller, Ana Paula Cunha, Eduardo Souza, Fábio Roberto

German music critic and opera producer Paul Bekker (1882–1937) is a rare example of a critic granted the opportunity to turn his ideas into practice. In this first full-length study of Bekker in English, Nanette Nielsen investigates Bekker's theory and practice in light of ethics and aesthetics, in order to uncover the ways in which these intersect in his work and contributed to the cultural and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. By linking Beethoven's music to issues of freedom and individuality, as he argues for its potential to unify the masses, Bekker had already in 1911 begun to construct the ethical framework for his musical sociology and opera aesthetics. Nielsen discusses some of the complex (and conflicting) layers of modernism and conservatism in Bekker that would have a continued presence in his work and its reception throughout his career. Bekker's demands for a 'practical ethics' led to his criticisms of metaphysically grounded approaches to aesthetics, and his ethical views are put into further relief in a sketch of the development of his music phenomenology in the 1920s. Nielsen unravels the complex intersections between Bekker's ethics and his opera aesthetics in connection with his practice as an Intendant at the Wiesbaden State Theatre (1927–1932), offering a critical reading of an opera staged during his tenure: Hugo Herrmann’s Vasantasena (1930). Further works are considered in light of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, inspired by several intersections between ethics and aesthetics encountered in Bekker's work.

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is 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 opera Fidelio, 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.

A fascinating and in-depth exploration of how the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon shaped Beethoven’s political ideals and inspired his groundbreaking compositions. Beethoven imbibed Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas in his hometown of Bonn, where they were fervently discussed in cafés and at the university. Moving to Vienna at the age of twenty-one to study with Haydn, he gained renown as a brilliant pianist and innovative composer. In that conservative city, capital of the Hapsburg empire, authorities were ever watchful to curtail and punish overt displays of radical political views. Nevertheless, Beethoven avidly followed the meteoric rise of Napoleon. As Napoleon had made strides to liberate Europe from aristocratic oppression, so Beethoven desired to liberate humankind through music. He went beyond the musical forms of Haydn and Mozart, notably in the Eroica Symphony and his opera Fidelio, both inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. John Clubbe illuminates Beethoven as a lifelong revolutionary through his compositions, portraits, and writings, and by setting him alongside major cultural figures of the time—among them Schiller, Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goya.

This book explores the fascinating musical and dramatic elements within Fidelio, Beethoven's only complete opera.

Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year 'Magisterial, warm, and engaging . . . A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity . . . Jan Swafford is to be saluted.' Independent Jan Swafford's biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and 'fate's hammer', his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral. This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethoven's key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

Beethoven is a classic study of the composer's music, written by one of the most important thinkers of our time. Throughout his life, Adorno wrote extensive notes, essay fragments and aides-memoires on the subject of Beethoven's music. This book brings together all of Beethoven's music in relation to the society in which he lived. Adorno identifies three periods in Beethoven's work, arguing that the thematic unity of the first and second periods begins to break down in the third. Adorno follows this progressive disintegration of organic unity in the classical music of Beethoven and his contemporaries, linking it with the rationality and monopolistic nature of modern society. Beethoven will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines - philosophy, sociology, music and history - and by anyone interested in the life of the composer.

During the modern period, the bond between music and literature constituted a crucial and influential idea for Conrad and Eliot, Mann and Rilke, and many other writers. For modern novelists in particular this idea has provided the model and rationale for the experimental liberation of narrative form and its desired effect on the reader. Critics later in the twentieth century have undertaken analyses of various contrapuntal, sonata, and other musical structures in fiction, and some critics have studied the influence of various composers on novelists. Fullness of Dissonance is concerned with the related matter of how the aesthetics of music influenced the writers and texts of modern fiction.