Few composers have been more discussed, analyzed, or mythologized than
Beethoven. For two centuries the power and inventiveness of his music have not only kept it at the center of the canon, but have shaped our ideas about the nature and potentialities of music itself, inspiring and provoking artists, philosophers, and political parties alike. Musical factions from the classicist to the avant-garde, and political causes from the democratic to the authoritarian, have all sought to claim him as their own. But the very factors that ensure Beethoven’s centrality also make him elusive, since it is difficult to disentangle his music from the myths surrounding it and the uses to which it has been put. How do we decipher its meaning when it has been taken to mean so many different things?
In this course we will explore Beethoven’s music in the context of the ideas, art, and political struggles that shaped it, revealing a musician at once stranger and more of his time than his popular image suggests. Through a selective study of the symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, and Missa Solemnis—along with readings by
E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Thomas Mann,
Theodor Adorno, and
Edward Said—we will consider his music’s relationship both to the Enlightenment ideals out of which it was born and the Romantic movement it helped to shape. And finally we will consider what Beethoven’s subsequent influence and reception reveals about the singularity and enduring power of his music—a unique and unsettling synthesis of classical rationalism, Romantic sublimity, and prophetic grotesquery that is as compelling and disturbing today as when it was written.
Instructor:
Nathan Shields
Nathan Shields received his doctorate in Composition from the Juilliard School, where he also served for several years on the Music History faculty. Last year he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. His research interests include Romantic and Modernist music, with an emphasis on Wagner and fin-de-siècle Vienna; sacred music of the late medieval and early modern eras; and music’s relation to the history of philosophy and religious thought. As a composer he has received fellowships and commissions from Tanglewood, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Fromm Foundation, and his musicological writing has been supported by grants from Juilliard and the Presser Foundation. He has written for Mosaic magazine and Perspectives of New Music, and his music has been performed by the JACK and Jupiter String Quartets, Metropolis Ensemble, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among others.
Music, Revolution, and Romantic Culture: An Introduction to Beethoven is being held in conjunction with Carnegie Hall’s Beethoven Celebration, a 2020 event series marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.
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