3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

There would seem to be little left to learn about Beethoven. The common understanding of the composer as a temperamental, solitary genius, cursed with a tragic hearing loss—often credited with spurring him to produce the world’s most profound music—has changed little over the past century and a half. What might remain to be studied? This course takes up the challenge, reconsidering the well-known features of the composer’s life, work, and legacy through examining trends in Beethoven scholarship of the last 25 years. What did “heroism” sound like in music, and did Beethoven’s contemporaries hear the music in this way? What were the political forces behind Beethoven’s work? What can we learn by historicizing the notion of “genius”? How can disability studies inflect our understanding of Beethoven’s deafness? And what can Beethoven’s conversation books—recently published for the first time in English translation—show us about his life? Through asking these questions, we will consider what various historiographical methods, such as microhistory, disability studies, and actor-network theory, have to offer the study of a repertoire most commonly approached through biography. Consideration of these questions will inevitably shed light on the inherited value systems that make up contemporary musical life, many of which are inherited from nineteenth-century Beethoven reception.