Beethovens Kiss Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire [Hardcover]

In Beethoven's Kiss Kevin Kopelson, takes you on a journey through a unique literary style which is both scholarly and meditative. It interweaves the issues of gender, sexuality and erotic romanticism and presents them against the backdrop of romantic pianism. Exploring quasi-sexual myths of the nineteenth century, Beethoven's Kiss takes a long look at the origin and consequences of those myths. Beethoven's Kissis a beguiling, insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes moving study. The book is put together performatively, as a memoir-meditation, rather than a piece of traditional scholarship. But its tacit scholarly backing is solid and up to date, and its unorthodox form is under the control of a finely tuned prose style. Kevin Kopelson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Stanford, l994). He trained as a classical pianist at the Juilliard school of music.A vivid (and startling) example of the new musicology, this book is an interdisciplinary study of romantic pianism in relation to gender and sexuality. Discussing erotic anxieties of musical amateurs, sexual myths concerning child prodigies, prurient interests in virtuosos, castrating figurations of maiden piano teachers, and the phenomenon of Liberace, the author underscores the extent to which the piano resonates with homosexuality and mortality.