Friends of the Festival
Become a Friend of the Festival to enjoy priority booking, to gain access to special events, and to receive a copy of Matthew Boyden’s Beethoven and the Gothic.
Benefits include:
£40
Synopsis of ‘Beethoven and the Gothic’
“Beethoven and the Gothic explores for the first time the evolution and vernacular of Gothic music through the work, personality and cultural place of Ludwig van Beethoven. As the world’s most celebrated composer from 1805 until his death in 1827, Beethoven and his music were subsumed to a manner and a disability that led to his adoption as the primary focus for Europe-wide considerations of the ‘mad genius’, in which form he continues still to be portrayed in literature and on film. When the Gothic’s essential features are analysed contextually, it is possible to see in Beethoven’s life and work, and particularly his late music, a uniquely transcendental articulation of Gothic otherness – reflected most strikingly in contemporary responses to the Gothic obsession with difference and exceptionalism. The interactions between Beethoven’s rejection of social order, his complex relationship with the Church, his proto-Freudian immersion in the Uncanny, his struggles with physical and mental illness and his pre-occupation with the Sublime generate fascinating parallels between the instinctive radicalism and deviance of his music and the Gothic’s indulgence of rebellion, concealment and the grotesque. Through a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary analysis – spanning music, literature, art, film, psychology, disability and religion – Matthew Boyden has written a breathtakingly original examination of what the Gothic meant for its earliest subscribers, particularly in Germany, and the first serious study of the origins and identity of Gothic music.”
