"Lockwood elegantly imparts an enormous amount of fascinating detail, placing each symphony in the context of Beethoven’s work in other genres and concert activity. What a pleasure to read!"
"Lewis Lockwood has served as an admirably articulate guide to the symphonies. . . . [H]is book will surely inspire new interest in Beethoven’s durable masterpieces."
★ 11/09/2015
In this captivating study of Beethoven's nine symphonies, Beethoven expert Lockwood wonderfully recreates the cultural and historical background of each work, the challenges the composer faced while writing it, and its enduring artistic qualities. Lockwood illustrates elegantly that Beethoven's preoccupation with the symphonic form grew out of his restless longing to achieve originality and his desire to experiment with various musical forms. With close attention to detail, Lockwood examines sketches and the process of composition. The second symphony, for example, written between 1800 and 1802, shows the increasing influence that French music had on Beethoven, as well as his engagement with the ideas of heroism and the ideals of the French Revolution. The eighth symphony, written in 1812, "reflects a wide range of stylistic directions," expressing his "sense of freedom and widening artistic space." With his now most familiar tune, the "Ode to Joy" from the ninth symphony, Beethoven sought to compose an easy-to-sing melody whose simplicity and power made it memorable. Lockwood's engaging study offers an excellent introduction and listening guide to Beethoven's symphonies. (Oct.)
"Lockwood has given music lovers a great gift. By looking at historical context—who listened to Beethoven, what he read—and how the symphonies were planned, the reader gets a unique view of the creative process of one of our greatest musical minds."
"This book contains a lifetime of love and admiration for the bedrock of classical music: Beethoven’s symphonies. Lockwood’s balanced approach and deep knowledge make for a majestic voyage of discovery through these familiar masterworks."
"The preeminent Beethoven scholar traces the composer’s lifelong engagement with the symphony, illuminates afresh the familiar Nine, and reminds us why these monuments claim listeners’ attention today as much as they did two hundred years ago. A masterful achievement."
"This remarkable book is much more than a guide to Beethoven’s symphonies. By granting us access to the composer’s workshop, Lockwood reveals a faltering human being whose unfaltering artistic resolution remains one of the great stories of the human spirit."
"This book contains a lifetime of love and admiration for the bedrock of classical music: Beethoven’s symphonies. Lockwood’s balanced approach and deep knowledge make for a majestic voyage of discovery through these familiar masterworks."
08/01/2015
Eminent music critic Lockwood (Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, emeritus, Harvard Univ.), whose Beethoven: The Music and the Life was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, proclaims that the composer's nine symphonies have "stood at the center of the canon of Western classical music" and are "the touchstones against which new works would be measured." So enduring is Ludwig van Beethoven's legacy that his Ninth (the "Choral") Symphony was performed at the Berlin Wall when it fell in 1989. The author takes us on a tour of the nine symphonies, devoting a chapter to each that includes a table describing each of the symphony's movements, their key, their time signature, and the number of measures. Along the way Lockwood makes frequent references to other works by the composer, as well as aptly citing major events of the era, to provide historical perspective. He describes how the First Symphony was Beethoven's transition from the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, how the Second is "the end of [his] first maturity for his orchestral music," and how the Third ("Eroica") and succeeding symphonies break free of tradition and take the piece to its greatest heights. VERDICT The erudite text, with its detailed musical analysis, is highly recommended to readers with at least a passing acquaintance with the symphonies.—Edward B. Cone, New York
2015-07-15
From music scholar and biographer Lockwood (Emeritus, Music/Harvard Univ.; Beethoven: The Music and the Life, 2002, etc.), a close examination of nine works at the heart of the Western classical tradition. "For Beethoven, the symphony was a lifetime preoccupation," writes the author, who draws on the composer's detailed and comprehensive sketchbooks to trace the evolution of this preoccupation from the "supremely competent" First Symphony through "Ode to Joy," the stunning choral finale to the Ninth. Acknowledging the profound musical influence of Haydn, Mozart, and (in later years) Bach, Lockwood also points to the wildly popular plays of Friedrich Schiller as inspirations for what Beethoven wished to achieve in his symphonies: "the ability to stir large audiences to emotional depths they had not experienced before." The author's technical analyses of such factors as key, tempo, and instrumentation are likely to daunt casual music lovers, but each chapter also contains eloquent summaries of each symphony's impact on listeners, both at the time of its premiere and over the centuries, and of its place within Beethoven's overall artistic development. The titanic nature of his ambitions, and the centrality of the symphony to them, is evident from the time of the Third Symphony, with which, Lockwood writes, Beethoven "lifted the genre of the symphony onto a new plane of expression and grandeur." While the composer is perhaps best known for that grandeur and for such forceful moments as the famous four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony ("Thus Fate knocks at the door," Beethoven is said to have remarked), the author also evinces and elicits appreciation for the quieter pleasures of the Fourth and the Sixth, or "Pastoral," displaying the composer's profound love for nature. The epilogue movingly affirms Beethoven's symphonies as "exemplars of what great music can still mean in our fragmented and pessimistic age." Of particular interest to specialists but written with an authority and passion that will appeal to general readers as well.
