Ludwig van Beethoven

Few if any other composers in the history of European art music have inspired more words on paper than Ludwig van Beethoven. Even during his lifetime (b. 1770–d. 1827), Beethoven’s music inspired both heated debate and thoughtful reaction among some of the era’s most influential critics and philosophers, a discourse which would only intensify after his death and establish him as a singular force in musical thought and a formidable challenge for future composers. His seemingly all-encompassing absorption of the musical language of the 18th century, and his mastery over the full range of its expressive potential, attracted notice among connoisseurs, fortuitously as newly established concert-giving institutions and specialized journals began to conceive of and shape a canon of musical works. At the same time, many other listeners sensed that his music—in its dynamism and rude, often explosive contrasts—projected a sui generis compositional persona, a perception which spurred on his younger creative peers. If there is a red thread in the variegated written responses over the last 250 years, it is the tension between these two views of Beethoven, as a culmination of the past and as a finger pointing firmly toward the future. While words on Beethoven have surely been written in every language in which music is written about, the most essential ones for the modern student or scholar are in German and English, and serious research requires reading proficiency in both languages. Not all of the primary sources have been translated into English, to say nothing of important secondary literature, and in recent years the German academic publishing market has been robustly producing a number of fine compendia and reference works. English-language scholarship has historically distinguished itself, on the other hand, in biography and Sketch Studies. And while it might come as a surprise that there still remain neglected aspects of Beethoven’s body of work, it does not take long for the reader to realize that many words have been devoted to a relatively small corner of his output—namely a handful of Symphonies, String Quartets, piano Sonatas, and other instrumental works that embody what has come to be known as the “heroic style.” Much of the freshest recent scholarship, then, explores the previously marginalized works—music for dancing, singing, worship, the theater, political celebrations—while another belated but welcome development focuses on the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic contexts that shaped his music.

Beethoven 1806

Between early 1806 and early 1807, Ludwig van Beethoven completed a remarkable series of instrumental works including his Fourth Piano Concerto (Op. 58), “Razumovsky” String Quartets (Op. 59), Fourth Symphony (Op. 60), Violin Concerto (Op. 61), Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme for Piano (WoO 80), and Overture to Collin’s Coriolan (Op. 62). Critics have struggled to reconcile the music of this year with Beethoven’s so-called heroic style, the paradigm through which his middle-period works have typically been understood. Drawing on theories of mediation and a wealth of primary sources, Beethoven 1806 explores the specific contexts in which the music of this year was conceived, composed, and heard. Not only did Beethoven depend on patrons, performers, publishers, critics, and audiences to earn a living, but he also tailored his compositions to suit particular sensibilities, proclivities, and technologies.

Advancing Healthcare Leadership

As healthcare systems evolve and physicians face more administrative and regulatory burdens, it is imperative for them to build leadership competencies. In fact, there is a need for a pipeline to be created of emerging clinical leaders who have already mastered competencies and skills required of successful leaders. The heroic style of paternalistic leadership is less successful in an era of system complexity, quality control, and personnel diversity. A more preferable leadership style is that of shared leadership where a vision is created towards which team members are intrinsically driven to achieve. These factors have cumulatively contributed to the increasing cognizance that more training programs are needed to make comprehensive leadership development widely accessible to a greater number of potential clinical leaders. This chapter explores physicians and agents of change.

Cannon-fever: Beethoven, Waterloo and the Noise of War

Originally written to commemorate the Duke of Wellington's victory over Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain on 21 June 1813, Wellington's Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria (Wellington's Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria), Op. 91 became, in the months following the Battle of Waterloo, ‘a national stock-piece’ (Literary Gazette, 1817, 91). Based around a simple, not to say simplistic, opposition between French and English musical motifs – ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ for the British, and ‘Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre’ (a tune better known in English as ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’) – the symphony moves towards a carefully notated clash of arms, involving rapid bursts of musketry and cannon fire from opposing orchestral ‘sides’, and rhythmic simulations of galloping cavalry. However, as contemporary accounts of performances of the symphony reveal, the excessive frequency of the loud cracks, bangs and crashes, often deployed by live artillery, made for uncomfortable listening, evoking Goethe's description of the disorientating effects of ‘cannon-fever’ (kanonenfieber). In its activation of the ‘noise’ of war, a mimetic dissonance at odds with the formal unities of the heroic style, Beethoven's symphony thus subverts its assumed status as a pièce d'occasion while also emphasising the sense in which the sounds of battle exceed the regulatory parameters of the Kantian sublime. This article argues that although the Wellington symphony was denounced by critics as a ‘minor’ piece, it highlights an emergent note of discontent in Beethoven's music with the appropriation of music for triumphalist ends.

TREASURE AND SPIRITUAL EXILE IN OLD ENGLISH JULIANA: HEROIC DICTION AND ALLEGORY OF READING IN CYNEWULF’S ART OF ADAPTATION

ABSTRACT The present article studies Cynewulf’s creative manipulation of heroic style in his hagiographic poem Juliana written around the 9th century A.D. The four poems now attributed to Cynewulf, on the strength of his runic autographs appended to each, Christ II, Elene, The Fates of the Apostles, and Juliana are written in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of heroic alliterative verse that Anglo- Saxons had inherited from their continental Germanic ancestors. In Juliana, the theme of treasure and exile reinforces the allegorical structure of Cynewulf’s poetic creation. In such poems like Beowulf and Seafarer treasure signifies the stability of bonds between people and tribes. The exchange of treasure and ritualistic treasure-giving confirms bonds between kings and their subjects. In Juliana, however, treasure is identified with heathen culture and idolatry. The traditional imagery of treasure, so central to Old English poetic lore, is inverted in the poem, as wealth and gold embody vice and corruption. The rejection of treasure and renunciation of kinship bonds indicate piety and chastity. Also, while in other Old English secular poems exile is cast in terms of deprivation of human company and material values, in Juliana the possession of and preoccupation with treasure indicates spiritual exile and damnation. This article argues that the inverted representations of treasure and exile in the poem lend additional strength to its allegorical elements and sharpen the contrast between secular world and Juliana, who is an allegorical representation of the Church.

Built leadership: women administrators in architectural education

Of the 114 accredited architecture programs within colleges and universities across America, only 18 (or 16%) employed females at the highest administrative positions as deans, directors, chairs, or heads at the time this study was conducted. Despite this statistic, nearly 50% of all graduates from architecture programs are female. Little is known about women administrators in architectural education, perhaps because of the fact that there are so few. The central question that guided this research study is as follows: What personal and professional factors characterize 10 women employed as administrators in nationally accredited architecture programs, departments, schools, and colleges in American institutions of higher education? Additionally, this study identified the women’s career paths, and obstacles they overcame andsacrifices they made in order to advance in their careers. The qualitative case study tradition was employed for this study. Ten women administrators of accredited architecture programs, departments, schools, and colleges within American institutions of higher education participated in the study. Interviews, documents, and observations were collected and included in the data analysis. While feminist leadership theories were used as a lens and guided the current research, themes emerged from the study that point toward a potentially new, emerging theoretical construct. This emerging construct requires that pioneering female leaders in male-dominated fields be characterized differently than female leaders in other contexts. Specifically, the conclusions drawn from this study require characterizing pioneering female leaders in male-dominated fields as built leaders or leaders who have systematically developed professionally as a result of unwavering ambition but who employa post-heroic style of leadership. In other words, these women fought their way to the top, but once there, use an up, down, and across hierarchical leadership style.

HEROIC HAYDN, THE OCCASIONAL WORK AND ‘MODERN’ POLITICAL MUSIC

Several compositions by Haydn from the 1790s appear to reflect, both directly and indirectly, the newly martial and patriotic atmosphere generated by the war with France. While this has long been recognized by music historians – in particular with reference to ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ – Haydn scholars have yet to describe or explain this trend adequately. Only Beethoven scholars have considered this music in any depth, portraying Haydn as the Viennese progenitor of the so-called heroic style. The paradox of this teleological Beethovenian reading of Haydn’s music from the 1790s is that the type of compositions that music historians have traditionally denigrated with the label ‘occasional works’ are portrayed as the ancestors of some of the most vaunted symphonic masterworks in the canon: historically situated music somehow creates the very pieces that supposedly instantiated the historically resistant ‘work concept’ in the period around 1800. Yet this paradox points to a growing tension within Haydn’s public identity and music in the 1790s – a tension between the emerging ideal of aesthetic autonomy and the reality of political appropriation during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, this very tension allowed Haydn and his music to enter political life and political discourse as never before, articulating a relationship between music and contemporary events that cannot adequately be described by the notion of the ‘occasional work’. Haydn’s emergence as a cultural hero, on a par with contemporary war heroes, and the attribution to his music of a sublime power analogous to worldly, even political, powers meant that his music could be heard as possessing a voice in its own right – a voice that could thus speak independently, and persuasively, on behalf of institutions and ideologies, rather than merely echoing them.