Publisher's Synopsis
The "Beethoven syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general-not just Beethoven-in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric, in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way.
