Ludwig Van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music

by Mary Whittall (Translator)

Many books have been written about Beethoven. But it is rare to find one that seeks an alternative between the fragmentation found in most specialized studies and the superficial overview typical of popular biography. In this volume, Carl Dahlhaus, one of the century's leading musicologists, combines interpretations of individual works that focus on issues of composition and musical history, with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800; an age that was not only a "classical" period in the history of the arts but also one in that aesthetics carved itself a place in the center of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's "musical thinking" from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas.

Genres: Music

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not so much a book about Beethoven as a book about musicology as a whole using him as an example. I've never encountered anything quite like it before.