Schubert S Beethoven Project

Why couldn't Schubert get his 'great' C-Major Symphony performed? Why was he the first composer to consistently write four movements for his piano sonatas? Since neither Schubert's nor Beethoven's piano sonatas were ever performed in public, who did hear them? Addressing these questions and many others, John M. Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's career and his relationship to Beethoven. Placing the genres of string quartet, symphony, and piano sonata within the cultural context of the 1820s, the book examines how Schubert was building on Beethoven's legacy. Gingerich brings new understandings of how Schubert tried to shape his career to bear on new hermeneutic readings of the works from 1824 to 1828 that share musical and extra-musical pre-occupations, centering on the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet and the Cello Quintet, as well as on analyses of the A-minor Quartet, the Octet, and of the 'great' C-Major Symphony.

Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's relationship to Beethoven, and the ways in which he built on Beethoven's legacy.

Collecting the best of international Beethoven studies, Beethoven Forum promotes and sustains the high level of scholarship inspired by Beethoven's extraordinary works.

Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of “late style.” Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing “against”—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight. From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”

Biographies of three of the greatest musical geniuses that have ever lived.

A thematic exploration of Schubert's style, applied in readings of his instrumental and vocal literature by international scholars.