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Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination.

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Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination. By Maynard Solomon. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003. [xi, 327 pp. ISBN 0-520-23746-3. $29.95.] Index, bibliography, music examples.

How Beethoven's intellectual concerns affected the creative work of his last 15 years is the underlying issue in Maynard Solomon's Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination, a collection of 13 essays comprising both previously published and new contributions on the composer's outlook and the spiritual resonance of his music. In the conviction that Beethoven's later music explores different worlds than his earlier works, Solomon draws on an impressive array of sources to suggest ways in which the composer's "increased accessibility and receptivity to a broad repertory of highly imaginative conceptions" (p. 10)--including ancient and Eastern ideas about the nature of Divinity, Masonic ideals of spiritual progress, and Romantic imagery--facilitated the expansion of Beethoven's imaginative faculties and led him to pursue increasingly ambitious aims in his music.

The book divides more or less evenly into chapters concerned with biographical and historical contexts and those focused on the interpretation of works. The essays of the first category, mature fruit of one of the great biographers of our time, posit various ways in which the ageing Beethoven regarded himself, the world, and his art differently than he did as a young man. "Prologue: A Sea Change" expounds one of the book's basic theses: that Beethoven experienced in his forties an existential crisis, documented in the diary that he kept from 1812 to 1818, that led him to read Classical, Eastern, and contemporary sources, to explore religious and philosophical questions as to ultimate meanings, and to rededicate himself, martyr-like, to his art, as a consequence of...

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