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Maynard Solomon
Late Beethoven
Music, Thought, Imagination
$50.00, £29.95 hardcover
978-0-520-23746-9
Available Now
$21.95, £12.95 paperback
978-0-520-24339-2
Available Now
344 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 5 figures, 61 music examples
May 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Music; Classical Music; Composers; Musicology
May 2003, Available worldwide
Categories: Music; Classical Music; Composers; Musicology
"The journey into Beethoven's inner world reveals startling new vistas--Eastern philosophy, mysticism, Masonic threads, and, above all, a deep, Romantic strain. . . . Solomon's twelve essays achieve a near miracle.... Beethoven scholarship will be digesting his radical portrait for years to come as the postmodernes Beethovenbild comes into clearer focus.... Solomon's extraordinary book should prove an important influence on the field."—Jrnl of Musicological Research
"Surely no living writer, at least in English, has had a greater influence on our current perception of Beethoven as a creative personality than Maynard Solomon . . . Solomon never seeks to foreclose on the range of interpretive possibilities. Late Beethoven rather charts a complex of interrelated thematic/metaphorical paths into the heart of the later oeuvre, leaving to Beethoven's music itself the role of initiating us as listeners into its bottomless and transcendent mysteries."—Jrnl Amer Musicological Soc
"Mature fruit of one of the great biographers of our time. . . Every chapter bears witness to the elegance, subtlety and humaneness of Solomon's own thought, as well as to his manifest faith in the importance of Beethoven's music . . . There can be no denying the fact that this important book lays the basis for a new appreciation of the richness of thought behind Beethoven's later works, and raises the stakes for all future inquiry into this music."—Michael C. Tusa, Notes
"Beautifully written and produced."—Philip Borg-Wheeler, Classical Music Magazine
"For sheer interpretive genius and an uncommon gift for rendering in prose the complex, humanly compelling subtleties of Beethoven's music and life, few approach Maynard Solomon. . . . [E]very chapter in Solomon's book is full of subtle, deeply satisfying accounts of what actually went into Beethoven's late-style works."—Edward Said, The Nation
"Solomon makes as compelling a case as can be imagined for the intricate and indirect bond between life and music. . . . [T]his is not a more fallible, less deified Beethoven but an even more impressive and moving figure whose courage and resolve redeem a raft of human frailties"—Robert Winter, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Mr. Solomon sounds discrete themes with earlier roots that converged in the psychic and emotional sea change leading to Beethoven's late thought and style. . . . When all is said and done, a reader is left hopeful and confident that all is not said and done: that Mr. Solomon still has much more to say about Beethoven."—New York Times
"What emerges is something of a cubist portrait of a reclusive and deeply introspective older master, presenting views from many angles that freely overlap or melt into one another."—James R. Oestreich, New York Times
"Surely no living writer, at least in English, has had a greater influence on our current perception of Beethoven as a creative personality than Maynard Solomon . . . Solomon never seeks to foreclose on the range of interpretive possibilities. Late Beethoven rather charts a complex of interrelated thematic/metaphorical paths into the heart of the later oeuvre, leaving to Beethoven's music itself the role of initiating us as listeners into its bottomless and transcendent mysteries."—Jrnl Amer Musicological Soc
"Mature fruit of one of the great biographers of our time. . . Every chapter bears witness to the elegance, subtlety and humaneness of Solomon's own thought, as well as to his manifest faith in the importance of Beethoven's music . . . There can be no denying the fact that this important book lays the basis for a new appreciation of the richness of thought behind Beethoven's later works, and raises the stakes for all future inquiry into this music."—Michael C. Tusa, Notes
"Beautifully written and produced."—Philip Borg-Wheeler, Classical Music Magazine
"For sheer interpretive genius and an uncommon gift for rendering in prose the complex, humanly compelling subtleties of Beethoven's music and life, few approach Maynard Solomon. . . . [E]very chapter in Solomon's book is full of subtle, deeply satisfying accounts of what actually went into Beethoven's late-style works."—Edward Said, The Nation
"Solomon makes as compelling a case as can be imagined for the intricate and indirect bond between life and music. . . . [T]his is not a more fallible, less deified Beethoven but an even more impressive and moving figure whose courage and resolve redeem a raft of human frailties"—Robert Winter, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Mr. Solomon sounds discrete themes with earlier roots that converged in the psychic and emotional sea change leading to Beethoven's late thought and style. . . . When all is said and done, a reader is left hopeful and confident that all is not said and done: that Mr. Solomon still has much more to say about Beethoven."—New York Times
"What emerges is something of a cubist portrait of a reclusive and deeply introspective older master, presenting views from many angles that freely overlap or melt into one another."—James R. Oestreich, New York Times
"Maynard Solomon writes with an unrivaled control of a vast cultural and intellectual sweep that reaches beyond Ancient Greece, and with a graceful precision that disguises the rich complexity of his ideas. Distilling from the late works their sources in both the overarching themes of mankind and the troubled psyche of the composer, he has forever altered a familiar landscape."—Richard Kramer, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song
"With a bow to the immortal study by J.W.N. Sullivan, Late Beethoven could have also been called "Beethoven: His Spiritual Development." Solomon weaves amazingly diverse threads, chapter by chapter, into the fabric of Beethoven's belief system, his take on nature, divinity, human purpose, morality, and the mission of music. This is a book of surprises by an author whose combination of breadth of thought, imaginativeness, aesthetic sensitivity, and learning is really wonderful.—Joseph Kerman, author, with Alan Tyson, of The New Grove Beethoven
"With a bow to the immortal study by J.W.N. Sullivan, Late Beethoven could have also been called "Beethoven: His Spiritual Development." Solomon weaves amazingly diverse threads, chapter by chapter, into the fabric of Beethoven's belief system, his take on nature, divinity, human purpose, morality, and the mission of music. This is a book of surprises by an author whose combination of breadth of thought, imaginativeness, aesthetic sensitivity, and learning is really wonderful.—Joseph Kerman, author, with Alan Tyson, of The New Grove Beethoven
In a series of powerful strokes, the music of Beethoven's last years redefined his legacy and enlarged the realm of experience accessible to the creative imagination. Maynard Solomon's Late Beethoven investigates the phenomenon of the final phase, focusing especially on the striking metamorphosis in Beethoven's system of beliefs that began early in his fifth decade and eventually amounted to a sweeping realignment of his views of nature, antiquity, divinity, and human purpose.
Using the composer's letters, diaries, and conversation books, Solomon traces Beethoven's attraction to a constellation of heterogeneous ideas, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative religion, Eastern initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and contemporary thought. Through these often arcane sources, Beethoven gained access to a vast reservoir of imagery and ideas with the potential to expand music's expressive and communicative reach. This "multitude of productive images," writes Solomon, "provided kindling for the blaze of his imagination."
Late Beethoven is a rich tapestry of original perspectives on Beethoven's music. Solomon sees the Seventh Symphony as a deployment of the rhythms of antiquity in an effort to revalidate the premises of the Classical world; the Ninth as an essay on the prospects and limits of affirmative, monumental endings; and the "Diabelli" Variations as a doorway to the universe of metaphoric significances that attach to beginnings. In the Violin Sonata in G, op. 96, Solomon finds a restoration of the full range of pastoral experience that the ancient poets had known. In the Grosse Fuge he locates issues of fragmentation and reassembly, and he suggests that pivotal passages of the last sonatas evoke sacred states of being.
These stimulating perspectives illuminate the inner world within which Beethoven dwelled during his last fifteen years and the ways in which his thought and music may be interrelated. Written in accessible and eloquent prose, and with numerous music examples, Late Beethoven is a serious contribution to understanding this miraculous quantum leap in Beethoven's creative evolution.
Using the composer's letters, diaries, and conversation books, Solomon traces Beethoven's attraction to a constellation of heterogeneous ideas, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative religion, Eastern initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and contemporary thought. Through these often arcane sources, Beethoven gained access to a vast reservoir of imagery and ideas with the potential to expand music's expressive and communicative reach. This "multitude of productive images," writes Solomon, "provided kindling for the blaze of his imagination."
Late Beethoven is a rich tapestry of original perspectives on Beethoven's music. Solomon sees the Seventh Symphony as a deployment of the rhythms of antiquity in an effort to revalidate the premises of the Classical world; the Ninth as an essay on the prospects and limits of affirmative, monumental endings; and the "Diabelli" Variations as a doorway to the universe of metaphoric significances that attach to beginnings. In the Violin Sonata in G, op. 96, Solomon finds a restoration of the full range of pastoral experience that the ancient poets had known. In the Grosse Fuge he locates issues of fragmentation and reassembly, and he suggests that pivotal passages of the last sonatas evoke sacred states of being.
These stimulating perspectives illuminate the inner world within which Beethoven dwelled during his last fifteen years and the ways in which his thought and music may be interrelated. Written in accessible and eloquent prose, and with numerous music examples, Late Beethoven is a serious contribution to understanding this miraculous quantum leap in Beethoven's creative evolution.
Acknowledgments
Prologue: A Sea Change
1. The End of a Beginning: The "Diabelli" Variations
2. Beyond Classicism
3. Some Romantic Images
4. Pastoral, Rhetoric, Structure: The Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96
5. Reason and Imagination: The Aesthetic Dimension
6. The Seventh Symphony and the Rhythms of Antiquity
7. The Masonic Thread
8. The Masonic Imagination
9. The Shape of a Journey: The "Diabelli" Variations
10. Intimations of the Sacred
11. The Sense of an Ending: The Ninth Symphony
12. The Healing Power of Music
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Prologue: A Sea Change
1. The End of a Beginning: The "Diabelli" Variations
2. Beyond Classicism
3. Some Romantic Images
4. Pastoral, Rhetoric, Structure: The Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96
5. Reason and Imagination: The Aesthetic Dimension
6. The Seventh Symphony and the Rhythms of Antiquity
7. The Masonic Thread
8. The Masonic Imagination
9. The Shape of a Journey: The "Diabelli" Variations
10. Intimations of the Sacred
11. The Sense of an Ending: The Ninth Symphony
12. The Healing Power of Music
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
The Beethoven Quartet Companion, by Robert Winter and Robert Martin, editors