Beethoven and Musical Biography/Beethoven und musikalische Biographie
The admiration and understanding of music has long been inseparable from the biographical portraits of its composers. As we approach the bicentenary of Beethoven's death in 2027, this seminar explores the art, craft and ideologies of music biography. How do biographers navigate gaps in the historical record? How are myths constructed and sustained? This lecture series explores how the conventions of music biography are rooted in the assumptions of their own historical moments, and how those assumptions continue to shape our ideas about musical greatness and the canon. In a time when artificial intelligence threatens to amplify the errors and prejudices of the past at unprecedented scale, we explore how biography might be reimagined for the twenty-first century.
Bonds, Mark Evan. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Buch, Esteban. La Neuvième de Beethoven: une histoire politique. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Caeyers, Jan. Beethoven: A Life. Translated by Brent Annable. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.
DeNora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803* Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Geck, Martin. Beethoven: Der Schöpfer und sein Universum. München: Siedler, 2017.
Lockwood, Lewis. Beethoven: The Music and the Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Massin, Brigitte, and Jean Massin. Ludwig van Beethoven. Paris: Fayard, 1967 [1955].
Solomon, Maynard. Beethoven. New York: Schirmer Books, 1998 [1977].
Swafford, Jan. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
Tunbridge, Laura. Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces. London: Viking / New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Pekacz, Jolanta T., ed. *Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms*. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006 [2017, paperback].
Wiley, Christopher, and Paul Watt. ‘Musical Biography in the Musicological Arena’, Journal of Musicological Research 38, nos. 3–4 (2019): 187–92.
Zinsser, Judith P. ‘Feminist Biography: A Contradiction in Terms?’ Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (2010): 31–51.