Beethoven after Napoleon
Researched Bibliographic Dossier
Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.
- Title
- Beethoven after Napoleon
- Subtitle
- Political Romanticism in the Late Works
- Author
- Stephen Rumph
- Series
- California Studies in 19th-Century Music
- Edition
- First edition
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Place
- Berkeley and Los Angeles; London
- Year
- 2004
- Extent
- 304 pages; 20 music examples
- ISBN
- 9780520238558
- Online ISBN
- 9780520930124
- Language
- English
- Type
- Musicological monograph / political and aesthetic history
SCOPE & CONTENT
Rumph challenges the familiar picture in which Beethoven’s politics are identified almost exclusively with Enlightenment liberalism, revolutionary heroism and the Eroica. He asks what happened after the Napoleonic crisis and argues that the late works can be understood in dialogue with German Romantic political thought: history, religion, organic conceptions of society and a growing hostility toward French domination. The book therefore treats musical style as historically situated, reading counterpoint, lyricism, historical reference and formal transformation against the political and intellectual changes surrounding 1809 and the Restoration era.
RESEARCH VALUE
The monograph is deliberately argumentative. Its chapters move from the heroic sublime and Promethean history through 1809 to detailed discussions of contrapuntal writing, utopian themes and public voice. This makes it valuable for understanding one influential interpretation of Beethoven’s late style, but also means that its political reading should be compared with alternative accounts of Beethoven’s ideology and with scholarship emphasizing aesthetic autonomy, biography or compositional process. Its interdisciplinary method makes it particularly useful for advanced study of music and politics in the early nineteenth century.
- Catalogue completeness
- 9 / 10 core bibliographic fields