Beethoven Unbound by Allan S Haley
In the fall of 1802, Beethoven's anxiety over his loss of hearing reached a crisis point. Deafness would mean he could no longer play or perform in public, and also would have to withdraw from Viennese society. For a gifted composer filled with good will towards his fellow men, this was the most unjust punishment of all. While composing a ballet score in 1801, Beethoven had absorbed the legend of the Titan Prometheus. To punish him for stealing divine fire and bringing it to men, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a rock, where each day an eagle gnawed out his liver. Prometheus regenerated himself overnight, refused to buckle under to Zeus, and endured until Hercules set him free. This book documents the little-known story of how Beethoven drew inspiration from Prometheus' story. Transforming the music he wrote for the ballet, he surmounted his deafness, broke free of the classical mold and composed the Eroica Symphony, a masterpiece which changed the course of music forever.
Haley, Allan S.: - Allan S. Haley graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in music in 1966, and went on to study music and law at the University of Freiburg, in Germany. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1970. After ten years of practice in Honolulu, Allan returned to his home town in northern California to start a local winery with some partners. Ever since he has managed to combine the joys of winemaking, solving legal problems, and making and studying music. Beethoven Unbound is Allan's first book. It is a greatly enlarged version of the honors thesis he wrote under the tutelage of Professor Elliot Forbes at Harvard in 1966, with notes and scholarship brought up to the present day. The subject of the thesis was a Beethoven sketchbook (called the Wielhorsky after its long-time owner) that had been published in Moscow in 1962, but with annotations only in Russian. Allan mastered that language and translated, for the first time into English and for his own use in the thesis, a good part of the Russian editor's notes on the sketchbook and its contents. The 1962 publication remains largely unknown to the musical world, since no translation into any other language has yet appeared. As a result, Allan hopes that this book will assist in bringing the importance of the Wielhorsky sketchbook to a wider audience.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781732701106 |
| ISBN 10 | 1732701105 |
| Title | Beethoven Unbound |
| Author | Allan S Haley |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Eroica Press |
| Year published | 2018-08-14 |
| Number of pages | 200 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |