Category: MUS 111

  • Ossian in Italy

    How did the poetry of Ossian (really, James MacPherson) influence Italian opera in the nineteenth century? Why was Ossian — later acknowledged to be a fraud — so important to the Romantic generation in Italy? Could it be because these supposedly ancient poems spoke to the longing for a unified culture and community, one based…

  • Schubertiades in a Police State

    Schubert’s room, as drawn by his friend Moritz von Schwind, 1821. Franz Schubert at age 16. Franz von Schober. The Austrian poet Franz von Schober (1796-1882) was evidently the driving force behind the Schubertiades, the semi-private salon gatherings at which Franz Schubert premiered many of his Lieder. Schober was in fact such a close friend of…

  • Late Quartet

    A sketch Beethoven made for his String Quartet no. 14 in C# minor, op. 131. The last works Beethoven wrote were a series of six string quartets. Why do you think, in the last two years of his life, he turned to this extremely difficult form? Richard Taruskin suggests that: The intimacy of chamber music…

  • One with Everything

    Beethoven as a cultural icon crops up in some unexpected places. But perhaps the Buddhists are on to something. In this scene from the 1994 film Immortal Beloved, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony becomes the soundtrack for the mystical experience of the traumatized composer finding healing in nature and truly becoming one with…

  • Beethoven as a Black Composer

    The South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) published a short story collection in 2007 entitled Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. The title story is about a multiracial university professor in Johannesburg, thinking back over his life and his identity: Beethoven was one-sixteenth black the presenter of a classical music programme on the radio…

  • Beethoven Miscellany

    Ear trumpets that Beethoven used to compensate for his hearing loss: One of the roughly 140 “conversation books” that Beethoven used to communicate after 1818: his friends would write questions and comments in the book, and he would answer vocally. A list Beethoven made of his food expenditures: Beethoven’s funeral procession in 1827 (does it…

  • The Hero’s Funeral

    In the BBC film about the first rehearsal of Beethoven’s Third Symphony which you are going to watch later this week, the second movement — the funeral march — causes general consternation among the listeners. The Princess Lobkowitz talks breathlessly about picturing the funeral cortège, with black horses; the Prince’s nay-saying cousin, the Count von…

  • Fake News

    Who said it, Trump or Beethoven? I hear that in the [Allgemeine] Musikalische Zeitung  someone has railed violently against the [Third] symphony . . . I have not read the article. If you fancy that you can injure me by publishing articles of that kind, you are very much mistaken. On the contrary, by doing so…

  • Under Beethoven’s Shadow

    It can’t be avoided: every composer since Beethoven, in the nineteenth century and beyond, has had to labor under his shadow. And some musicians have to labor under the shadow of his hair.    

  • Night and Dreams

    Two Men Contemplating the Moon (Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1830). Words and images you will encounter over and over again in the Lieder of the Romantic era: night, dark, moon, dream — in German, Nacht, dunkel, Mond, Traum (German nouns are capitalized). Think of the thick, dark (dunkel), overgrown forests in which so many of the stories collected…