In attempts to take a step towards illustrating Berlioz's musical aesthetic, my dissertation explores his "Critical Study" as his manifesto of the new poetic in music, which uses Beethoven's symphonies as models. First published in 1844, his "Critical Study" is a collection of individual essays on each of Beethoven's nine symphonies - the most widely known version of these essays originally published in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris in 1837-8. This collection of essays derives from a reworking of Berlioz's earliest articles on Beethoven (1829-37), notably his reviews of a new concert series at the Societe des concerts du Conservatoire that premiered Beethoven's symphonies in Paris. Almost ten years in the making, Berlioz's "Critical Study" represents the pinnacle of his writings on Beethoven. Here he promotes Beethoven's "romantic" symphonies as models of "poetic" forms, within the context of emerging French literary Romanticism. I examined some of the key components in Beethoven's music that most occupy Berlioz as critic and, in turn, how Berlioz as composer develops these key components in his own contribution to the symphonic genre - his Romeo et Juliette (1839), composed at the peak of his Beethoven study. Ultimately, I hope to have demonstrated that the subtle mixture of the musical, the poetic, the critical pedagogical, and the cultural that intersect in Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette exemplifies the same aesthetic of the poetic that he promotes in Beethoven's symphonies. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-233).

Thesis (M. Mus.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Music Theory, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Sept. 11, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 41). Also issued in print.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bern. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 124-125.

Treatise (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Scholars and performers have long wondered when and why Beethoven composed an alternative ending to his string quartet, Opus 130. The original, the Grosse Fuge, was an immense and heavy multi-sectioned fugal finale; the second was a much shorter and lighter hybrid sonata-rondo form finale. The second finale was the last substantial piece Beethoven composed and is reminiscent of earlier dance-like 2/4 Allegro finales composed by Beethoven, likely influenced by Haydn. This style is seemingly incongruous with our current understanding of Beethoven’s late style, centered around foreign harmonies and forms, with expansive thematic material. While research on this topic has been extensive, including studies in biography, source material, reception history, and harmonic and formal analysis, it has not led to a fully adequate understanding of this second finale. My study aims to provide a fresh understanding of this movement through the examination and evaluation of the later stages of its composition. The major sections of revision found in the composing score, Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Autograph 19c, and the autograph fair copy, Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Grasnick 10, are closely studied here for the first time. In order to highlight important steps in the creative process, I have selected four heavily revised areas from each of the sonata-form sections of this movement as shown in both manuscripts. My interpretation of these revisions is based on comparison to parallel sections in both manuscripts and the final version, as shown in transcriptions of these passages from the sketches along with accompanying images of the original pages. For each of these sections, I attempt to suggest the order in which Beethoven made his revisions, and I discuss their formal, thematic and harmonic implications. As a whole, these revisions reveal Beethoven’s concern for economical treatment of thematic material, especially motives from theme 1a, and a concern for playing upon the harmonic and formal expectations of his audience. The voicing of theme 2a in the exposition and recapitulation, and the voicing and texture of theme 1a in the development, the false and authentic recapitulations and the coda are analyzed in terms of momentum, sectional balance, texture, and dramatic tension. I suggest that further study of these sketches and related primary source material might help to revise our notion of Beethoven’s late style.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:13:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5659.pdf: 423776 bytes, checksum: 6281b1f112277d9e670009ebce3fd8fd (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-08-21 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / This dissertation intends to investigate Adorno s analysis concerning Beethoven s late style in the attempt of understanding the importance delegated to this composer s works, which led Adorno to identify it with the beginning of a process that would culminate in Schoenberg. For doing that, we will use these comprised fragments in Beethoven s work: the philosophy of music, in special The Style I and II . / A presente dissertação procura investigar as análises de Adorno acerca do estilo tardio de Beethoven na tentativa de compreender a importância delegada às obras deste compositor que levaram Adorno a identificá-lo com o início de um processo que culminaria em Schoenberg. Para tanto, utilizaremos os fragmentos compreendidos na obra Beethoven: the philosophy of music, em especial The Style I e II .

Beethoven's folksong arrangements and variations have been coldly received in recent scholarship. Their melodic and harmonic simplicity, fusion of highbrow and lowbrow styles, seemingly diminished emphasis on originality, and the assorted nationalities of the tunes have caused them to be viewed as musical rubble within the heritage of Western art music. The canonic composer's relationship with the Scottish amateur folksong collector and publisher George Thomson, as well as with his audience, amateur music lovers, has been largely downplayed in the reception of Beethoven. I define Beethoven's engagement with folksongs and their audience as the "Beethoven Folksong Project," evaluating it in the history of Beethoven reception as well as within the cultural and ideological contexts of the British Isles and German-speaking lands at the turn of the nineteenth century. I broaden the image of Beethoven during his lifetime by demonstrating that he served as an ideal not only for highly educated listeners and performers but also for amateur music lovers in search of cultivation through music. I explore the repertory under consideration in relation to the idea of Bildung ("formation" or "education" of the self or of selves as a nation) that pervaded contemporary culture, manifesting itself in music as the tradition of Bildungsmusik ("music for self-improvement"). Drawing on both contemporary reviews and recent studies, I show that the music's demanding yet comprehensible nature involved a wide range of elements from folk, popular, and chamber music to Hausmusik ("house music"), Unterhaltungsmusik ("music for entertainment"), Alpenmusik ("music of the Alps"), and even Gassenhauer ("street music"). Within the tradition of Bildungsmusik, adaptation of folksongs for domestic music-making, recomposition of pre-existing materials, collaboration between professionals and amateurs, and incorporation of musics familiar to and popular with contemporaries served as significant means for the composer to communicate with a middle-class audience. The hybrid and flexible nature of the folksong settings was not an awkward mix of various kinds of "trivial" music but rather a reflection of political, cultural, and social phenomena in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.

This dissertation argues for a reappraisal of Beethoven’s middle period using the chamber music written between 1806 and 1815 to advance a new paradigm of “middleness.” I argue that Beethoven’s creative output was profoundly influenced by the circumstances of life in Vienna 1806-15. Napoleon’s eastward-advancing armies brought about the end of the Holy Roman Empire and undertook multiple bombardments of the city of Vienna itself, profoundly disrupting both the established social order and daily life. Unlike other scholarship that has made similar claims of influence on Beethoven’s oeuvre, this project does not seek to ascribe programmatic readings or political aspirations to Beethoven’s music, but rather to suggest that the effects of these events were echoed in the composer’s approach to manipulating musical time and conveying musical subjectivity. The stylistic developments that occurred in Beethoven’s music in this period are reflective of currents of upheaval and historical rupture that have been discussed in historiographic and critical literature on early nineteenth century Europe by such scholars as Reinhart Koselleck, Lynn Hunt, and Peter Fritzsche. These developments in Beethoven’s style are seen most clearly in his chamber music, a compositional venue notable both for its experimental potential as well as timbral and textural richness. To support formal and topical analyses of these works, I develop and advance a new paradigm for understanding “middleness.” Using tools from literary criticism, including work by Harold Bloom and Julia Kristeva, I conceive a framework for middleness that posits it as a fundamentally disruptive impulse. This paradigm provides artistic “middleness” with a stature comparable to oft-discussed “lateness” and opens pathways for potential future study. I furthermore theorize that, if middleness is disruptive, the nature of an artist’s disruptive middle style is heavily dependent on the context in which it occurs. Beethoven’s middle style therefore reflects the context of temporal dislocation and social change in which it occurs. Taking this into account, I consider anew questions of style in Beethoven’s middle period, which runs roughly concurrently with the period of Napoleonic upheaval in Vienna. Rather than relying on the idea of the “heroic” style, which is the most commonly cited archetype for Beethoven’s middle-period music, I establish a more capacious framework that allows for understanding even the non-heroic middle period works as part of a larger artistic current. In these works, we see a profusion of genres and topics related to improvisation, as well as new approaches to employing introductions and codas in sonata form movements. Movements from the String Quartet Op. 59 no. 3, the Piano Trio Op. 70 no. 2, the String Quartet Op. 74 “Harp”, the Violin Sonata Op. 96, the Piano Trio Op. 97 “Archduke,” and the Cello Sonata Op. 102 no. 1 are used as examples of Beethoven’s particular disruptive middle style.

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