Beethoven 1806, by Mark Ferraguto

In Beethoven 1806, Mark Ferraguto addresses a number of issues that confront Beethoven scholarship some 250 years after the composer’s birth: the ubiquitous narratives of struggle and triumph in Beethoven biography and criticism; the privileging of certain works, often considered “heroic” in character, in the shaping of Beethoven’s image in popular culture and critical assessments; the limitations of the musical score and musical analysis as sources of historical insights; the relationship of life and work in artist biography; and the relationship of historical contexts to aesthetics in the musical work. In place of the master tropes of the “Beethoven myth” and the typically dualistic (e.g., “heroic” vs. “nonheroic”) categorization of the composer’s works, Ferraguto presents what he calls a “microhistory” (p. 3) of Beethoven’s activities over a limited period of time—approximately from spring 1806 through the early months of 1807—as a way to illuminate the particularity and historical contingency...