Volume 43, Number 18 · November 14, 1996
Did Beethoven Have All the Luck?
By Charles Rosen
Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803
by Tia DeNora
University of California Press, 232 pp., $29.95
Beethoven, some think, had all the luck. An ethnomusicologist, tenured at a respected university (he will perhaps be happy to remain anonymous), once asserted: 'There must be hundreds of symphonies just as good as the Eroica, but we just don't know them.' This is the naive view of his-tory immortalized in Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' quoted not quite accurately by Tia DeNora on the last page of her Beethoven and the Construction of Genius:
Review, 6755 words
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