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This book explores the animating presence of the political in almost every aspect of Beethoven's life, work, and legacy. Beethoven was a civically engaged thinker confronted with severe challenges. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment at Bonn and of the French Revolution, Beethoven experienced the reactionary turn of politics in Austria after 1792, disappointment with Napoleon Bonaparte, recurrent war and the repression of the Metternich era. Many new sources are assessed in this reevaluation of Beethoven as a competitor to Napoleon in the cultural sphere, a "Generalissimo" in the world of tones who fashioned Schillerian "effigies of the ideal" in his compositions. Works such as the Pathétique and Appassionata, the Eroica, Fidelio and Ninth Symphony reflect Beethoven's response to the political turbulence of his time, embracing a moral force that strongly resonates in our own troubled political times. The Fifth Symphony helped galvanize resistance to fascism, the Sixth has energized the environmental movement. During the Congress of Vienna, on the other hand, Beethoven sought a different approach, as a pioneer of kitsch, writing for the occasion rather than seeking to promote an "empire of the mind or spirit." His "Flea Song" based on Goethe's Faust shows Beethoven as master of political satire, whose art has lost none of its bite in the 21st century. Assessment of the worldwide reception of the Ninth Symphony, with examples from Asia and Africa, South America and Europe, demonstrate how Beethoven's music today is more relevant than ever before, inspiring activists around the globe.

Written from the perspective of Historically Informed Performance, Haydn at the Keyboard investigates various webs of communication in Joseph Haydn’s repertoire for solo keyboard. Communication suggests people. For the “rhetorical man” that Haydn was, this means taking into account the clientele of his sixty-odd works. Who was the woman-amateur at the keyboard, the typical user of his scores? Marie Esterházy (dedicatee of Hob. XVI:40-42), the sisters von Auenbrugger (Hob. XVI:35-39, 20), and the double dedicatees Theresa Jansen and Magdalena von Kurzböck (Hob. XVI:52) represent different types of “her,” the female partner in the modern performer’s triangular relationship with Haydn. The paradigm of playing Haydn “her” way (with a few notable exceptions along the way) is explored through six chapters, four of which are devoted to specific works or groups of works. Emerging dualities include composer vs. performer, master vs. pupil, professional vs. amateur, male vs. female, print vs. performance, descriptive vs. prescriptive notation, English vs. Viennese (female) pianism. This book complements a complete recording of the repertoire by the author (The Virtual Haydn, 2009/2011). No longer bound by single recording takes, this book, along with an annex website, revels in the process of performing Haydn. Sight-reading a new work is just as valid as a rehearsed performance of it, “before” and “after” yielding a rich paradox for the performer intent on encapsulating both.

The Voice as Something More starts from the paradox that voices nowadays are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. It tackles this paradox by looking at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a starting point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic approach around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice, whether talking about sounding voices, vocal metaphors, vocal owners, and mimics, or myths of voice, gendered voices, the uncanny voice, and vocal technologies. Included is an interlude by film and sound theorist Michel Chion that reflects on the gendering of voice in the audio-logo-visual form of vowels and consonants in words on screen. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that reflects on vocal aesthetics, the echo, and various vocal paradoxes, this collection ranges from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from the fields of classics and music to film and literature.