“Don’t let the title ‘Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary’ throw you off,” writes Tim Page in Sunday’s (8/18) Washington Post. “This is not one of those Marxian screeds that evaluate the work of an artist by perceived progressive leanings…. Rather, John Clubbe has written a thoughtful cultural history that takes into account the times in which Beethoven lived and worked—and they were times of revolution. Clubbe calls the two decades from 1790 to 1810 ‘the beginning of a new stage in the history of mankind [that] produced a tremendous flowering in science, technology, literature, art and music, and reforms of all kind.’ … Take the abrupt—and, for its time, deeply shocking—opening of the Symphony No. 3 (‘Eroica’), written in 1803: There is no formal introduction whatsoever, only two bluntly explosive chords and then the great first theme….. Thereafter, Beethoven would leave the rules behind—content would dictate form, rather than the other way around. Clubbe … traces Beethoven’s love for the work of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, and his profound early admiration for Napoleon … A chapter on the creation of ‘Fidelio,’ Beethoven’s only opera and an ode to human freedom, is especially comprehensive.”
Posted August 20, 2019
