Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters […]
How great artists become great Read More »
From Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven: “For Beethoven’s German and Austrian contemporaries, the Napoleonic image was especially potent: Bonaparte’s admirers included Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, Wielan, and Klopstock. Grillparzer, in his Autobiography wrote, ‘I myself was no less an enemy of the French than my father, and yet Napoleon fascinated me with a
Napoleon’s German admirers Read More »
From a letter from Beethoven to Franz Wegeler in Bonn, June 29, 1801: “You want to know something about my present situation. Well, on the whole it is not at all bad … My compositions bring me in a good deal; and I may say that I am offered more commissions than it is possible
Artist as entrepreneur versus patronage — Beethoven and Mozart Read More »