Volume 42, Number 14 · September 21, 1995
Beethoven's Triumph
By Charles Rosen
Listening in Paris: A Cultural History
by James H. Johnson
University of California Press, 384 pp., $35.00
Beethoven
by William Kinderman
University of California Press, 374 pp., $35.00
Listening in Paris is an original book filled with good things. It takes up the way people listened to music in Paris, starting with the operas of Rameau in the mid-eighteenth century and ending with the chapters 'Beethoven Triumphant' and 'The Musical Experience of Romanticism.' Johnson traces the development of attentiveness, the change from an audience that chattered sociably during fashionable operas to a public that listened in religious silence. His book is an essay in the history of aesthetic 'reception,' that is, it deals with the public response to the revolutionary transformations in the nature of Western art music that took place during the life of Beethoven.
Review, 5427 words
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