Publisher's Synopsis
Beethoven's music, stemming from its 18th- and 19th-century European context, communicates values of the Enlightenment bearing a seemingly universal, timeless significance. More than a quarter millenium after his birth, a 21st-century perspective offers a timely opportunity - against a backdrop of the reconfiguration of Europe and tensional power shifts across continents - to explore ways in which notions of European ideals impacted the works of Beethoven and his contemporaries and which social-political contexts shaped its reception. The essays in this volume offer cutting-edge research shedding new light on varied aspects of Beethoven's music, and the ways it has been adapted and adopted by the musical world up to the present-day. Foremost international experts and younger scholars, gathered together with the editors William Kinderman and Malcolm Miller, share insights about Beethoven reception both within and beyond Europe, covering France, Italy, Britain, Spain, the USA and Japan. Innovative contextual studies consider topics on criticism and interpretation, performance and publication, and a variety of less familiar personalities, institutions and performing organisations. Studies of individual works illuminate Beethoven's well-known masterpieces through novel, sometimes polemical, contextual and analytical frameworks. The volume as a whole celebrates Beethoven's genius as European and global, marking a fascinating turning-point between the particular and the universal.
