Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The study and analysis of all eight cadenzas written by Ludwig van Beethoven for the first four of his piano concertos, reveals, as much as can be gleaned from this evidence, important information about Beethoven's approach to improvisation. This subject has long eluded investigation due to the paucity of musical and collateral evidence. The analyses of these cadenzas, seven of which are complete, reveal surprising information about the nature of the harmonic plan of the cadenzas, and the choice of thematic material in each section of the cadenza. They also uncover consistencies of pattern and compositional technique that clearly set these cadenzas apart from the late eighteenth-century norms, best exemplified by those of Mozart. Beethoven may have been prompted to commit these cadenzas to paper in 1809 by the fear of piracy, a fact he noted with increased attention, after his retirement from the concert stage 1n 1807. And by 1809 he had already begun study of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Versuch and Daniel Gottlob Turk's Clavierschule in preparation for the anticipated education of the Archduke Rudolph. The keyboard fantasy, an important subject in the writings of both these theorists, had i ts own set of rules and compositional approaches. That Turk drew a connec t ion between the fantasy and the cadenza as similar compositional forms, coupled with the amount of detailed description of the fantasy in Bach's treatise, may have served as an inspiration and perhaps guideline for Beethoven's composition of both the Fantasy, op. 77, and the cadenzas in the same year. Certain stylistic characteristics predominate in the cadenzas: the use of imitation at the outset; the greatest extent of fantasy- like free modulation in the first of the three formal sections; the development of the subsidiary theme in the second section, and the strikingly careful avoidance of a strong dominant prolongation before the actual closing dominant of the cadenza. The cadenzas show an increasing predilection to grow in the direction of compositional, rather than extemporizational planning, a tendency that reaches its zenith in the written-in cadenzas in the Fifth Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and the unfinished Sixth Piano Concerto.

The purpose of the present study is to determine the stylistic characteristics of Beethoven's early piano trios. For the purposes of this study, the term "piano trio" is defined as any work for three instruments in which a piano participates. Of the twelve such trios written by the composer, the first six are dealt with. There is in addition a brief discussion of a trio of uncertain origin. These six piano trios were composed over a span of about ten years (1785-1795), between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Although there is a great deal of uncertainty as to the exact time and place of origin of these trios, the first three are generally considered to have been written in Bonn, and the last three in Vienna.

It is the purpose of this thesis to offer some pertinent information in the form of a documentary symposium and analytical study in which historical and technical matters relative to Beethoven's fugal techniques in his choral compositions will be presented. References to specific musical examples in this composer's works will be illustrated by diagrammatic and verbal analyses, and correlated with the pagination of the scores of his complete works as published by Breitkopf and Hartel.

This dissertation explores the relationship between the critique of Jena romanticism and Beethoven's "neue Manier" in the context of the material conditions that shaped European modernity around 1800. By taking as a case study the piano sonatas Op. 31, each chapter examines from a different perspective what represents a key historical moment in the genealogy of the modern notions of musical form and experience. The underlying thesis is that instrumental music was legitimized via a massive epistemic transfer of values from the domain of the literary. From its integration into the economy of the literary, instrumental music acquired an unstable epistemic condition introduced in Chapter 2 as the "materiality of the literary." The theory of romantic irony serves as a methodological point of entry to scrutinize how musical practice, literary discourse, and socio-historical transformations collided and converged to reframe aesthetic experience. Through their critique, the Jena romantics complicated the relationship between the generic and the particular and upheld the preeminence of practice over theory in the art of modernity. Tracing connections between Beethoven's music and the literary, Chapter 4 suggests a structural homology between the novel, as paradigmatic form of literary modernity, and sonata form, as the main compositional strategy of the classical style. Both forms are seen as practices driven by a principle of openness toward difference that emerges within the formation of the literary. The formal approach Beethoven initiates with the sonata forms fashioned in Op. 31 will be recast in Chapter 5 as a self-reflexive manifestation of that principle within the interpretive framework offered by romantic irony. By virtue of the formalist thought of the literary, Beethoven's instrumental forms became aesthetic symbols of the modern self.

Diss.--Philosophie--Heidelberg, 1999--Ruprecht-Karls-Univ. / Bibliogr. Index à la fin du vol. 2.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 281-285). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Dissertation (D.M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Directed by Kelly Burke; submitted to the School of Music. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Apr. 29, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).

No description available.

Call number: LD2668 .R4 1966 L373

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Oklahoma, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. Discography: leaf 233.