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.
• Brand new account of the relationship between Beethoven's music and the political life, both in his own time and up to the present - there has never been a study that has treated the subject of Beethoven and politics so comprehensively, from both historical and theoretical points of view • Explains Beethoven's prominence in the musical life of the West in terms of the political power of his music • Discusses and contextualises the denigrated 'political music' that Beethoven composed throughout his life to make this the only source available to find out about certain works and their contexts • Of relevance to music historiography of the entire nineteenth century
Contents
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 early nineteenth-century musical sources consulted.
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