Product Description

While the Beethoven string quartets are to chamber music what the plays of Shakespeare are to drama, even seasoned concertgoers will welcome guidance with these personal and sometimes enigmatic works.
This collection offers Beethoven lovers both detailed notes on the listening experience of each quartet and a stimulating range of more general perspectives: Who has the quartets' audience been? How were the quartets performed before the era of sound recordings? What is the relationship between "classical" and "romantic" in the quartets? How was their reception affected by social and economic history? What sorts of interpretive decisions are made by performers today?
The Companion brings together a matchless group of Beethoven experts. Joseph Kerman is perhaps the world's most renowned Beethoven scholar. Robert Winter, an authority on sketches for the late quartets, has created interactive programs regarded as milestones in multimedia publishing. Maynard Solomon has written an acclaimed biography of Beethoven. Leon Botstein is the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra as well as a distinguished social historian and college president. Robert Martin writes from his experience as cellist of the Sequoia Quartet. And the book is anchored by the program notes of Michael Steinberg, who has served as Artistic Advisor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194888 in Books
• Published on: 1995-12-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

From the Inside Flap
"Reading The Beethoven Quartet Companion made me want to listen to the quartets again from a new sociological as well as musical perspective. It is an invaluable guide not only for professional and amateur musicians but also for anyone who is curious about culture and wants to find out more."--Yo-Yo Ma

"These essays are the most readable, useful, and well-informed commentary available today on these masterworks. Michael Steinberg's 'program notes' to each quartet, directed at once to the musical beginner and to the expert, are as eloquent and persuasive as popular writing about music can get. . . . His essays are followed by equally expert and accessible contributions by other masters on The Master, providing literate music lovers with the context and equipment for a richer enjoyment and clearer understanding of these sixteen unique conversations among two violins, a viola, and a cello."--David Littlejohn, author of The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera

"A fine collection of essays to assist the music lover in the seemingly endless quest to illuminate the Beethoven string quartets."--Arnold Steinhardt, The Guarneri String Quartet

"This book delivers on the implied promise of its title--it provides a lively, readable, and wide-ranging introduction to the quartets. Readers at many levels of experience will find it profitable."--Lewis Lockwood, author of Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process

From the Back Cover
"Reading The Beethoven Quartet Companion made me want to listen to the quartets again from a new sociological as well as musical perspective. It is an invaluable guide not only for professional and amateur musicians but also for anyone who is curious about culture and wants to find out more." (Yo-Yo Ma)

About the Author
Robert Winter is Professor of Music at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Music for Our Time (1992) and co-author of The Beethoven Sketchbooks (California, 1985). Robert Martin is Assistant Dean of Humanities and Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Despite appearances, this deserves to be included with the set of Michael Steinberg program books
It is nowhere preconized that the core of this fine book (half its pages, in fact) is extensive notes on the pieces themselves by the gold-standard musicologist and annotator Michael Steinberg. While there is much fascinating historical and contextual material by the editors and others, anyone who has enjoyed and learned from Steinberg's famous series the Symphony, the Concerto, and Choral Masterworks should know that this is effectively a fourth volume of his superb notes.

Essential for LVB lovers, and not *just* LVB quartet lovers
This book should have been called simply "The Beethoven Companion." While it focues on the string quartets, it deals with many facets of the composer's life, and with life in Vienna at the time. Detailed but never dull, thorough but never technical, the book describes performance practice, takes you into the minds of interpretors, and deals with such fascinating philosophical considerations as Romanticism vs. Classicism, the meaning of the so-called "last period," and audience expectations in Beethoven's time. Essays by Beethoven scholars are thought-provoking. I know a fair amount about Ludwig, but time and again I found myself learning new things, or reconsidering old wisdom. I have many books on the Quartets, and on Beethoven in general. This one ranks among the very top of the heap.