MHMUS 438 — Beethoven: Life, Music, Myth

3 credits
Fall
Edgardo Salinas

This course undertakes a close study of Beethoven’s life and works in the context of the political and philosophical upheavals that brought about the Romantic Age. Following a chronological route, we will explore Beethoven’s life from his early years in provincial Bonn to his final years in imperial Vienna, spanning an unprecedented musical career that witnessed the end of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the consolidation of Romanticism as an all-embracing cultural movement. In the process, Beethoven himself developed into a mythical figure that incarnated romantic aesthetics, ultimately becoming the quintessential image of musical genius in the modern imagination. The course will examine a significant number of Beethoven’s works—the nine symphonies as well as representative piano sonatas, concertos, lieder, and string quartets—through the lens of their contemporary reception. In doing so, we will also contemplate how and why Beethoven’s iconic works came to embody aesthetic and political values that still today remain integral to the modern sense of self.