February 25th: On Beethoven - Alex Ross, Mark Evan Bonds, Jan Caeyers, William Kinderman, and Laura Tunbridge

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Alex Ross will lead a discussion on the life, work, and afterlife of the composer.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, February 25th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.

Alex Ross - Wagnerism (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)

Alex Ross is the music critic for The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Listen to This, and the recently published Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.
“Until now, what I didn’t know about Wagner and his influence on culture could have filled a book. Fortunately, Alex Ross’s brilliant evocation of the composer’s world more than elucidates Wagner’s various mysteries―it gives voice to why and how he came to be such a significant political and aesthetic influence on the world stage. Masterfully written and researched, Wagnerism is itself a masterpiece―a breathtaking achievement.” ―Hilton Als

Mark Evan Bonds—Beethoven: Variations on a life (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Mark Evan Bonds is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1992. A former editor-in-chief of Beethoven Forum, he has written widely on the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

“In Beethoven: Variations on a Life, Mark Evan Bonds employs categories such as Love, Money, and Deafness to examine the legends and biographical  distortions that have encumbered our understanding of LVB. In doing so, he  enhances rather than diminishes our appreciation of the man and the music.  Bonds wears his erudition lightly, giving us prose that is graceful, forceful,  and always a pleasure.”—Garrick Ohlssohn

Jan Caeyers—Beethoven: A Life (University of California Press, 2020)

Jan Caeyers is a conductor and musicologist. One of Europe’s preeminent experts on Beethoven, he is the music director of the Beethoven orchestra Le Concert Olympique and a member of the Department of Musicology at KU Leuven.

“An extremely readable study, composed in the present for the present. … It is amazing how in a much-grazed field like Beethoven, a biography can come along and bring completely new insights into its topic through clarity, lack of prejudice, and rigor.”—Kai Luehrs-Kaiser, Die Welt

William Kinderman—Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

William Kinderman is professor of music and the Leo M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair in Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His many books include Beethoven, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág, and, most recently, Wagner’s “Parsifal.”

“Kinderman, one of the leading authorities on Beethoven, has succeeded here in connecting an impressive panorama of Beethoven’s life and works with the rarely touched aspect of the composer’s political leanings, an approach that yields particularly memorable insights in connection with his only opera, Leonore/Fidelio.”—Alfred Brendel

Laura Tunbridge—Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Yale University Press, 2020)

Laura Tunbridge is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. She is the author of three monographs—Schumann’s Late Style, The Song Cycle, and Singing in the Age of Anxiety—and the recipient of a three-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for a project on string quartets.

“Illuminating. ... Tunbridge’s pithy A Life in Nine Pieces is different and welcome: a biography presented through the focus of nine different compositions.”—Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian