Political Beethoven [Paperback]

Political Beethoven explores Beethoven's music as an active participant in political life from the Napoleonic Wars to the present day.Political Beethoven provides a completely new account of the avalanche of political music by Beethoven and his contemporaries composed in the fraught atmosphere of Napoleonic Vienna and explores the musical, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that have made this music such a potent force in political life to the present day.Political Beethoven provides a completely new account of the avalanche of political music by Beethoven and his contemporaries composed in the fraught atmosphere of Napoleonic Vienna and explores the musical, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that have made this music such a potent force in political life to the present day.Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career  from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna  to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice  a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.Introduction: political collaborations; 1. Music between myth and history; 2. Beethoven's moments; 3. The sounds of power and the power of sound; 4. The inner public; 5. After the war; Appendix: eighteenth- and lS9