Beethoven by William Kinderman, Essay Example

The chapter offers a fascinating introduction to Beethoven and his work: a remarkable composer, Beethoven has cast a very long shadow, and many of his ideas about art have provoked a great deal of commentary and controversy (Kinderman, 2009, pp. 3-5). Kinderman explains that Beethoven’s artistic goal was described by the composer himself as Kunstvereinigung, “artistic unification”, and it is this that enables one to make much sense of Beethoven’s work throughout his career (pp. 3-4). One aspect of this can be seen in the fact that Beethoven wrote “absolute music”, and in fact was a particularly emblematic contributor to the form (p. 4). Beethoven’s absolute music can be seen as an expression of artistic freedom, inasmuch as it had broken with a great many of the conventions that had once governed Western music (pp. 4-5).

Kinderman (2009) also seeks to contextualize Beethoven’s aesthetic in terms of important ideas of the period, ideas about aesthetics that had emerged out of the Enlightenment (p. 6). Schiller, for example, distinguished between a number of innate “drives” in the human mind and heart, and believed that art was the result of a synthesis between sensuous and rational impulses, a synthesis crafted in what he called the “play drive” (Spieltrieb) (p. 7). This, Kinderman explains, differs significantly from the ideas of Hegel and others, notably Hegel’s philosophy of spirit (p. 7). Beethoven himself was philosophically-minded, and practiced a form of nature worship, and these views greatly informed his aesthetics (pp. 7-9). However, while Beethoven’s works evince the stamp of contemporary ideas about aesthetics, they also remain quite difficult to confine to any single mold: they seem to capture the aesthetic of the sublime, at a time when that was being eclipsed by the aesthetic of beauty. And, too, Beethoven’s works have a marked openness toward the world, designed to invite a reconsideration, Kinderman says, of the very nature of aesthetic experience (pp. 9-10).

References

Kinderman, W. (2009). Beethoven (2^nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.