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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.
Price: $31.95
Pages: 338
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
04 October 2004
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520243392
Format: Paperback
"[a] magisterial collection of 12 essays exploring new facets of Beethoven's late style. . . . Solomon has undertaken a study no one before him either dared or bothered to do. . . . He forces us to hear the late music with destabilized new ears. Given that Beethoven is a composer more often and more widely performed than any other in the classical pantheon, this is a feat with few equals."
"A new view of Beethoven's artistic development that will be much discussed."
"Beautifully written and produced."
“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.”
"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."
“Admirable.”
"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."
"Maynard Solomon's new book is horizon-expanding, informative, over-written yet often beautiful, controversial in its wealth of speculative interpretations and implications of referential meanings. It does for Beethoven what Nicholas Till's did for Mozart a few years ago, presenting him, despite being plunged at an early age into professional music-making, as widely read in literature and philosophy—ancient, esoteric and oriental as well as mainstream European; and Professor Solomon's own erudition and breadth of reference are exhilarating. We are shown another Beethoven, constituted in a different way, and it is for the reader and listener to bring the two together."
"[Solomon is] an approachable and frequently illuminating writer."
"[F]or 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."
“, , , as the book progresses, his language eases into fluency. . . . Essential.”
Maynard Solomon is on the Graduate Faculty at the Juilliard School. He is author of Mozart: A Life (1995), Beethoven Essays (1988), and Beethoven (1977, second edition 1998).
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