Political Beethoven
Nicholas MATHEW

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century.
Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.

- A brand new account of the relationship between Beethoven's music and the political life, both in his own time and up to the present - there has never been a study that has treated the subject of Beethoven and politics so comprehensively, from both historical and theoretical points of view
- Explains Beethoven's prominence in the musical life of the West in terms of the political power of his music
- Discusses and contextualises the denigrated 'political music' that Beethoven composed throughout his life to make this the only source available to find out about certain works and their contexts
- Of relevance to music historiography of the entire nineteenth century