Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological Bibliography of Books, Articles, Book Chapters, and Musical Editions by Lewis Lockwood
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One A Creative Life
- 1 Of Deserters and Orphans: Beethoven's Early Exposure to the Opéras-Comiques of Monsigny
- 2 “A Really Excellent and Capable Man”: Beethoven and Johann Traeg
- 3 A Four-Leaf Clover: A Newly Discovered Cello, the Premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Circle of Friends in Bonn, and a Corrected Edition of the Song “Ruf vom Berge,” WoO 147
- 4 “Where Thought Touches the Blood”: Rhythmic Disturbance as Physical Realism in Beethoven's Creative Process
- 5 The Sanctification of Beethoven in 1827–28
- Part Two Prometheus / Eroica
- 6 The Prometheus Theme and Beethoven's Shift from Avoidance to Embrace of Possibilities
- 7 Beethoven at Heiligenstadt in 1802: Deconstruction, Integration, and Creativity
- 8 “Mit Verstärkung des Orchesters”: The Orchestra Personnel at the First Public Performance of Beethoven's Eroica
- Part Three Masses
- 9 “Aber lieber Beethoven, was haben Sie denn wieder da gemacht?” Observations on the Performing Parts for the Premiere of Beethoven's Mass in C, Opus 86
- 10 Heart to Heart: Beethoven, Archduke Rudolph, and the Missa solemnis
- 11 God and the Voice of Beethoven
- Part Four Quartets
- 12 “So Here I Am, in the Middle Way”: The Autograph of the “Harp” Quartet and the Expressive Domain of Beethoven’s Second Maturity
- 13 Meaningful Details: Expressive Markings in Beethoven Manuscripts, with a Focus on Opus 127
- 14 The Autograph Score of the Slow Movement of Beethoven’s Last Quartet, Opus 135
- 15 Early German-Language Reviews of Beethoven's Late String Quartets
- Part Five Explorations
- 16 Three Movements or Four? The Scherzo Movements in Beethoven's Early Sonatas
- 17 Utopia and Dystopia Revisited: Contrasted Domains in Beethoven's Middle-Period F-Major and F-Minor Works
- 18 Schooling the Quintjäger
- 19 Cue-Staff Annotations in Beethoven's Piano Works: Reflections and Examples from the Autograph of the Piano Sonata, Opus 101
- 20 Another Little Buck Out of Its Stable
- 21 Beethoven's Cavatina, Haydn's Seasons, and the Thickness of Inscription
- List of Contributors
- Index of Works by Beethoven
- General Index
17 - Utopia and Dystopia Revisited: Contrasted Domains in Beethoven's Middle-Period F-Major and F-Minor Works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronological Bibliography of Books, Articles, Book Chapters, and Musical Editions by Lewis Lockwood
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One A Creative Life
- 1 Of Deserters and Orphans: Beethoven's Early Exposure to the Opéras-Comiques of Monsigny
- 2 “A Really Excellent and Capable Man”: Beethoven and Johann Traeg
- 3 A Four-Leaf Clover: A Newly Discovered Cello, the Premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's Circle of Friends in Bonn, and a Corrected Edition of the Song “Ruf vom Berge,” WoO 147
- 4 “Where Thought Touches the Blood”: Rhythmic Disturbance as Physical Realism in Beethoven's Creative Process
- 5 The Sanctification of Beethoven in 1827–28
- Part Two Prometheus / Eroica
- 6 The Prometheus Theme and Beethoven's Shift from Avoidance to Embrace of Possibilities
- 7 Beethoven at Heiligenstadt in 1802: Deconstruction, Integration, and Creativity
- 8 “Mit Verstärkung des Orchesters”: The Orchestra Personnel at the First Public Performance of Beethoven's Eroica
- Part Three Masses
- 9 “Aber lieber Beethoven, was haben Sie denn wieder da gemacht?” Observations on the Performing Parts for the Premiere of Beethoven's Mass in C, Opus 86
- 10 Heart to Heart: Beethoven, Archduke Rudolph, and the Missa solemnis
- 11 God and the Voice of Beethoven
- Part Four Quartets
- 12 “So Here I Am, in the Middle Way”: The Autograph of the “Harp” Quartet and the Expressive Domain of Beethoven’s Second Maturity
- 13 Meaningful Details: Expressive Markings in Beethoven Manuscripts, with a Focus on Opus 127
- 14 The Autograph Score of the Slow Movement of Beethoven’s Last Quartet, Opus 135
- 15 Early German-Language Reviews of Beethoven's Late String Quartets
- Part Five Explorations
- 16 Three Movements or Four? The Scherzo Movements in Beethoven's Early Sonatas
- 17 Utopia and Dystopia Revisited: Contrasted Domains in Beethoven's Middle-Period F-Major and F-Minor Works
- 18 Schooling the Quintjäger
- 19 Cue-Staff Annotations in Beethoven's Piano Works: Reflections and Examples from the Autograph of the Piano Sonata, Opus 101
- 20 Another Little Buck Out of Its Stable
- 21 Beethoven's Cavatina, Haydn's Seasons, and the Thickness of Inscription
- List of Contributors
- Index of Works by Beethoven
- General Index
Summary
As these utopian and dystopian fictions remind us, we rely on works of fiction, in any medium, to help us understand the world and what it means to be human.
—Janet MurrayShaping events into conceptual narratives has long been the business of historians. Until well into the twentieth century, the contours of social development, market forces, and ideology were described along historical time-lines. The ups and downs of human affairs—in Lear's pithy phrase “who's in, who's out”—are the fiber of history, chronicled in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Yuval Harari's Brief History of Humankind, just as the ups and downs of nature's affairs are mapped out in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. Along the time-lines of chronology are reference points and markers that enable us to collate fragmented, often indecipherable events in the present into recognizable patterns, and extrapolate probable courses of action into the future. In musical works, similarly, such identifiable patterns help us distinguish normative features of style and structure from digressive action.
But chronology is not the only way of looking at time and events. Like Newtonian physics and relativity theory, which offer alternate descriptions of space, cyclical time offers an alternative view of chronology, by reading history, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, “against the current.” Instead of viewing stylistic musical features as characterizing a particular slice of chronological time, cyclical time focuses on how they recur at subsequent periods of time. This repositions the perspective from time-strands to time-curves. The linear view, for example, regards dissonance in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury music as such an identifiable feature, a litmus test of the weakening and subsequent dissolution of tonality as an organizational system. The cyclical view, on the other hand, sees dissonance as conflicted action that appears in many periods of music, and in each instance, challenges premises of order and propriety. For example, Julian Johnson, describing musical modernity, regards abrasive textures and harmonic dissonance as endemic not just to twentieth-century Expressionism but also as the imprint of innovation in many periods from Monteverdi to Cage.
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- The New BeethovenEvolution, Analysis, Interpretation, pp. 405 - 436Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020