Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge Music, Meaning, and Beethoven's Most Difficult Work

Robert S. Kahn, "Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge: Music, Meaning, and Beethoven's Most Difficult Work"
English | ISBN: 0810874180 | 2010 | 180 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1338 KB + 5 MB
The Grosse Fuge, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in his late period, has an involved and complicated history. Written for a string quartet but published as an independent work, the piece raises interesting questions about whether music without words can have meaning, and invokes speculation about the composer and his frame of mind when he wrote it. Kahn looks closely at the musical, aesthetic, philosophical, and historical problems the work raises, considering its history, structure and development, meaning, and response among critics and contemporaries. Kahn also studies Beethoven's difficulties with publishers and sponsors, his everyday life, and his character in light of recent advances in the pharmacology of depressive illness.