...Tekla Babyak Beethoven’s music has often been framed in terms of art religion, immortality, and secular humanism. Building on these studies, this article proposes that certain works by Beethoven enact a fantasy of infinitely postponing death and living forever on earth, something that I call...

...Dorian Bandy This article examines the communicative and interpretive significance of melodic embellishment in Beethoven's oeuvre, with a particular focus on multi-movement instrumental works from the period 1795–1824. Embellishment has received comparatively little attention in Beethoven studies...

...Abigail Fine This article shows how discourse on Beethoven's late works has been underpinned by material fascination with the composer's body, most apparent in the cult veneration of his dying face, which was commodified in the form of his mask. From 1890 to 1920 in Germany and Austria, Beethoven's...

...Robert D. Pearson After the failure of Beethoven's opera Fidelio, oder die eheliche Liebe in 1805, a series of reviews criticized the dramatic layout of the opera and Beethoven's musical setting. Much of the critical response to the first version focuses on an incongruity between the opera's first...

...Tobias Pontara The very last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who moves glasses around on a table just by fixing her eyes on them. As she performs this magical act the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, alongside the sound of a passing train, briefly...

...Nicholas Mathew This article argues for a number of hitherto unrecognized continuities—stylistic, aesthetic, and ideological—between Beethoven's marginalized “political music” from the period of the Congress of Vienna and his canonical symphonic works. It rereads his œuvre against the background...