This volume was first published in 1927, on the centenary of Beethoven’s death, as part of the Masters of Music series. The author was an established biographer of organ composers, such as The Organ Works of Bach. Attributing Beethoven’s disagreeable demeanour to his childhood, the author embarks on a passionate defence of Beethoven’s essential nobility of character, hoping to assuage the then-prevalent anti-Beethoven chill and to encourage readers to discover Beethoven anew. The volume covers an overview of Beethoven’s life, followed by his personality and an assessment of his works in an exploration of the most important characteristics of Beethoven’s works and their influence on his successors.

Who hasn't been stirred by the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? That's a good question, claims Esteban Buch. German nationalists and French republicans, communists and Catholics have all, in the course of history, embraced the piece. It was performed under the direction of Leonard Bernstein at a concert to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet it also serves as a ghastly and ironic leitmotif in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Hitler celebrated his birthdays with it, and the government of Rhodesia made it their anthem. And played in German concentration camps by the imprisoned, it also figured prominently at Mitterand's 1981 investiture. In his remarkable history of one of the most popular symphonic works of the modern period, Buch traces such complex and contradictory uses—and abuses—of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony since its premier in 1824. Buch shows that Beethoven consciously drew on the tradition of European political music, with its mix of sacred and profane, military and religious themes, when he composed his symphony. But while Beethoven obviously had his own political aspirations for the piece—he wanted it to make a statement about ideal power—he could not have had any idea of the antithetical political uses, nationalist and universalist, to which the Ninth Symphony has been put since its creation. Buch shows us how the symphony has been "deployed" throughout nearly two centuries, and in the course of this exploration offers what was described by one French reviewer as "a fundamental examination of the moral value of art." Sensitive and fascinating, this account of the tangled political existence of a symphony is a rare book that shows the life of an artwork through time, shifted and realigned with the currents of history.

"Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career - even in the face of deafness - Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works more than 250 years after his birth in 1770. Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing from a variety of perspectives whatever occupied him: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion. His ability to recognize and unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory. Beethoven's works are a series of variations on his life. The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he could assume and project through his music. The supposedly characteristic frown and furrowed brow, moreover, came only after his time. Discarding tired myths about the composer, this study proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self"--

Beethoven's Violin Concerto was the only significant work of this genre to appear between Mozart's five concertos of 1775 and Mendelssohn's E minor Concerto of 1844. This handbook explores the background to Beethoven's work, its genesis, its place in the composer's oeuvre and the influences which combined in its creation. It describes contemporary reactions to the work both in the musical press and in the concert hall during its first crucial years, and explains how it was eventually accepted into the repertory, spawning numerous recordings and editions. The principal sources and many of the work's textual problems are considered, including discussion of the composer's version for piano and orchestra, Op. 61a. A detailed account of the work itself is followed by a review of the wide variety of cadenzas that have been written to complement the concerto through its performance history.

Although some portions of Thayer's original text have been deleted because recent Beethoven research has proved them inaccurate, "the majority of the text used consists of the coordinated treatment of Thayer's notes and manuscript by these three editors [H. Deiters, H. Riemann, and H. Krehbiel]" with additions and corrections by the present editor.

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

Mention twentieth-century Russian music, and the names of three &"giants&"&—Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitrii Shostakovich&—immediately come to mind. Yet during the turbulent decade following the Bolshevik Revolution, Stravinsky and Prokofiev lived abroad and Shostakovich was just finishing his conservatory training. While the fame of these great musicians is widely recognized, little is known about the creative challenges and political struggles that engrossed musicians in Soviet Russia during the crucial years after 1917. Music for the Revolution examines musicians&’ responses to Soviet power and reveals the conditions under which a distinctively Soviet musical culture emerged in the early thirties. Given the dramatic repression of intellectual freedom and creativity in Stalinist Russia, the twenties often seem to be merely a prelude to Totalitarianism in artistic life. Yet this was the decade in which the creative intelligentsia defined its relationship with the Soviet regime and the aesthetic foundations for socialist realism were laid down. In their efforts to deal with the political challenges of the Revolution, musicians grappled with an array of issues affecting musical education, professional identity, and the administration of musical life, as well as the embrace of certain creative platforms and the rejection of others. Nelson shows how debates about these issues unfolded in the context of broader concerns about artistic modernism and elitism, as well as the more expansive goals and censorial authority of Soviet authorities. Music for the Revolution shows how the musical community helped shape the musical culture of Stalinism and extends the interpretive frameworks of Soviet culture presented in recent scholarship to an area of artistic creativity often overlooked by historians. It should be broadly important to those interested in Soviet history, the cultural roots of Stalinism, Russian and Soviet music, and the place of music and the arts in revolutionary change.