Maynard Solomon – författare

In a series of powerful strokes, the music of Beethoven's last years redefined his legacy and enlarged the realm of experience accessible to the creative imagination. Maynard Solomon's "Late Beethoven" investigates the phenomenon of the final phase, focusing especially on the striking metamorphosis in Beethoven's system of beliefs that began early in his fifth decade and eventually amounted to a sweeping realignment of his views of nature, antiquity, divinity, and human purpose. Using the composer's letters, diaries, and conversation books, Solomon traces Beethoven's attraction to a constellation of heterogeneous ideas, drawn from Romanticism, Freemasonry, comparative religion, Eastern initiatory ritual, Mediterranean mythology, aesthetics, and classical and contemporary thought. Through these often arcane sources, Beethoven gained access to a vast reservoir of imagery and ideas with the potential to expand music's expressive and communicative reach. This 'multitude of productive images,' writes Solomon, 'provided kindling for the blaze of his imagination.' "Late Beethoven" is a rich tapestry of original perspectives on Beethoven's music.Solomon sees the Seventh Symphony as a deployment of the rhythms of antiquity in an effort to revalidate the premises of the Classical world; the Ninth as an essay on the prospects and limits of affirmative, monumental endings; and the 'Diabelli' Variations as a doorway to the universe of metaphoric significances that attach to beginnings. In the Violin Sonata in G, op. 96, Solomon finds a restoration of the full range of pastoral experience that the ancient poets had known. In the Grosse Fuge he locates issues of fragmentation and reassembly, and he suggests that pivotal passages of the last sonatas evoke sacred states of being. These stimulating perspectives illuminate the inner world within which Beethoven dwelled during his last fifteen years and the ways in which his thought and music may be interrelated. Written in accessible and eloquent prose, and with numerous music examples, "Late Beethoven" is a serious contribution to understanding this miraculous quantum leap in Beethoven's creative evolution.

These are the personal memories of an elderly man who, as a child, was closely acquainted with Beethoven. Gerhard von Breuning, the son of one of Beethoven's oldest friends, was a favourite of the ageing composer, who delighted in the boy's frequent visits. This firsthand account provides us with telling details about Beethoven's daily life, his personality, and his relationships with family and friends. It is as a clear-eyed witness of Beethoven's final illness that Breuning is particularly compelling, providing graphic reports on the atmosphere of the sickroom, the course of the medical treatment and Beethoven's death throes after he despaired both of his doctor and of his life and, muttering 'Oh, that ass!', turned his face to the wall. This is an English translation of a fascinating document. The Beethoven scholar, Maynard Solomon, has provided many explanatory notes as well as a full and informative introduction. A permanent contribution to the Beethoven literature, this book provides a sensitive and unique insight into the life of the composer during his later years.

Maynard Solomon is the author of a classic biography of Beethoven which has become a standard work throughout the world, having been translated into seven languages. In Beethoven Essays, he continues his exploration of Beethoven’s inner life, visionary outlook, and creativity, in a series of profound studies of this colossal figure of our civilization.Solomon deftly fuses a variety of investigative approaches, from rigorous historical and ideological studies to imaginative musical and psychoanalytic speculations. Thus, after closely documenting Beethoven’s birth and illegitimacy fantasies, his “Family Romance,” and his pretense of nobility, Solomon offers extraordinary interpretations of the composer’s dreams, deafness, and obsessive relationship to his nephew. And, following his detailed uncovering of a complex network of recurrent patterns in the Ninth Symphony, he considers the narrative and mythic implications of Beethoven’s formal design.Solomon examines the broad patterns of Beethoven’s creative evolution and processes of composition, the radical modernism of his music, and his intellectual, religious, and utopian strivings. A separate section on the “Immortal Beloved” includes the fullest biography of Antonia Brentano yet published. Closing the volume is Solomon’s translation and annotated edition of Beethoven’s Tagebuch, the moving, intimate diary that the composer kept during the critical period that culminated in his last style. Here, as throughout Beethoven Essays, Solomon offers scholarship that is at the cutting edge of Beethoven research.