Daniel K. L. Chua, Beethoven & Freedom. New York, Oxford University Press, 2017

Abstract

The association of Beethoven’s music and persona with freedom emerged in his reception in the first half of the nineteenth century, and eventually became a topos that, thanks to the composer’s alleged sympathies and/or affinities with the French revolution, gave the concept a distinctive political meaning. At first sight, Daniel K. L. Chua’s 2017 book Beethoven & Freedom is part of this hermeneutical tradition, which includes music criticism and scholarship. Chua repeatedly invokes contexts w...