How do I start learning the ins-and-outs of classical music and the people who invented it (such as baitoven) by means of books? I want to understand the context behind what I'm hearing, and how to appreciate it outside of old vhs tapes.
http://www.classical.net/music/rep/begin.phpAdditionally, Robert Greenberg has a great video and audio course entitled " How to Listen to and Understand Great Music."
Beethoven invented classical music
>>23540780Wagner is the greatest writer on music. Not only because of the penetrating genius of his analysis, but also because he belonged to that musical tradition he is writing about. He is the inheritor of the entire German aesthetics of music, a continuer of Hoffmann and Schopenhauer, the founding father of modern conducting, and an enormous influence in much else of intellectual relevance to classical music. As Richard Strauss said, everything we know about Beethoven's Ninth comes from Wagner. Schenkerian analysis was foreran by Wagner's analysis of Beethoven's symphonies. Except Wagner as a composer (perhaps the most influential composer to ever live), as someone who feels the musical tradition as intrinsic to himself, holds a superior position to the merely academic commentator. He understood both the esoteric and exoteric nature of art, and is a willing initiator to all students who desire to really FEEL and UNDERSTAND the significance of Western music.If someone's only interested in Wagner's musical ideas, as opposed to his more general ideas on art, read: The Music of the Future, A Music-School for Munich, On Conducting, Beethoven, The Destiny of Opera, On Performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, On Poetry and Composition, On Operatic Poetry and Composition in Particular, On the Application of the Music to the Drama. There's a lot more, but these are an introduction.
>>23540780I haven’t read them but I know ETA Hoffman loved classical music and wrote reviews of his favorite pieces, you could look into that
>>23540780There’s a two volume collection called “Critical Reception of Beethoven's Compositions by his German Contemporaries” which might be just what you’re looking for.>Compiled here are reviews, reports, notes, and essays found in German-language periodicals published between 1783 and 1830. The documents are translated into English with copious notes and annotations, an introductory essay, and indexes of names, subjects, and works. This volume contains a general section and documents on specific opus numbers up to opus 54, with musical examples redrawn from the original publications. The collection brings to light contemporary perceptions of Beethoven’s music, including matters such as audience, setting, facilities, orchestra, instruments, and performers as well as the relationship of Beethoven’s music to theoretical and critical ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These documents, most of which appear in English for the first time, present a wide spectrum of insights into the perceptions that Beethoven’s contemporaries had of his monumental music.
>>23540780Charles Rosen. The Classical Style.
>>23541372More keen on that billiard-playing Austrian's stuff. It strikes me that he did all Bach is supposed to have done and besides what he did himself, and all that Beethoven did that was worth doing, better than Beethoven did, and none of the bad, nasty, wrong and unwise things that Beethoven did. Points that the others take five minutes to make, Mozart makes with two notes. It annoys me that this isn't more generally known and that that smallpox-scarred Dutchman gets all the splash.
>>23541813Appalling analysis, and wrong.
>>23541813> always delightfully gay, always light and easysomebody who obviously never even listened to half the mozart catalogue including some of the most important pieces like Dion Giovanni!opinion safely discarded!
