Ludwig van Beethoven Audiobook By Mark Evan Bonds cover art

Ludwig van Beethoven

A Very Short Introduction

Preview

Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Ludwig van Beethoven

By: Mark Evan Bonds
Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $11.17

Buy for $11.17

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career—even in the face of deafness—Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency, writes the music historian Mark Evan Bonds, provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works.

Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing whatever occupied him from a variety of perspectives: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion. His ability to unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory. Beethoven's works, Bonds argues, are a series of variations on his life. The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he could assume and project through his music. The supposedly characteristic furrowed brow and frown, moreover, came only after his time. Discarding tired myths about the composer, Bonds proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self.

©2019, 2022 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Tantor
Entertainment & Celebrities Instruction & Technique Celebrity Musician Piano Funny Career War Opera
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Ludwig van Beethoven

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.