Beethoven by Mark Evan Bonds

Author:Mark Evan Bonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Early—Middle—Late

Critics and historians have long divided Beethoven’s music into three stylistic periods—early, middle, and late—in an attempt to trace the trajectory of his output in its broadest terms. This tripartite scheme has its advantages and limitations, for it shapes how we hear the music in ways that are sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

The dividing lines that separate the three periods have varied considerably over the years. This in itself is a good reminder of their inherently arbitrary nature. The consensus nowadays aligns them with two major moments of crisis in the composer’s life, the first coinciding with the Heiligenstadt Testament (late 1802), the second with the end of the affair with the Immortal Beloved (late 1812), which led to a temporary decline in both the quantity and quality of music produced over the next two years. It was around 1815 that Beethoven seems to have found renewed energy and began to write in what is now considered his “late” style.1

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