Ignition: Beethoven
Reception Documents from the Paul Sacher Foundation
A publication of the Paul Sacher Foundation
Accompanying the exhibition at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, 2 June to 3 October 2021
edited by Felix Meyer and Simon Obert
Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2020
language: English
other editions: German
Information on the exhibition here
Although the notion of a musical “mainstream” with Beethoven as its fons et origo barely holds today, countless composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have referred to Beethoven in their music or creatively sought to distance themselves from him. This volume illustrates his ongoing relevance using documents from the collections of the Paul Sacher Foundation.
Designed to accompany the like-named exhibition in the Bonn Beethoven-Haus, it adopts the four thematic areas of that exhibition: “Learning and Teaching with Beethoven,” “Idealizations,” “Strategies of Reference,” and “Distortion – Dismantlement.” It explores the contexts, techniques, and ideological thrusts of Beethoven references in musicians of very wide-ranging backgrounds, from Anton Webern, Béla Bartók, and Richard Strauss to Mauricio Kagel, Cathy Berberian, and Kaija Saariaho.
The selected documents are captured in photographic reproduction and accompanied by detailed commentary. Each section is preceded by an introductory essay discussing general aspects of recent Beethoven reception.
Contents
Essays by Esteban Buch, Simone Hohmaier, Matthias Schmidt, and Michelle Ziegler
Commentaries on works and texts by Hermann Danuser, Angela Ida De Benedictis, Matthias Kassel, Felix Meyer, Simon Obert, Wolfgang Rathert, Anne C. Shreffler, Heidy Zimmermann, and Giovanni Cestino
Contents PDF here