Courses

Historians point to the self-conscious awareness of a new age and a new temporality, but also a sense of belatedness, in the decades after the French Revolution of the 1790s. In this course we will study the ideas of lateness and late style across the generational breaks of late Classicism and early Romanticism (1798-1830) represented by Haydn’s late oratorios, Beethoven’s heroic and post-heroic styles, and Schubert’s overlapping private and public concerns during the 1820s. Classes will combine historical, analytical, and hermeneutic perspectives as we study innovative compositions completed under conditions of illness, disability, and cultural estrangement. Schubert completed his last symphony within a year of Beethoven’s—both of them “Ninths”— and their final string quartets were written at the same time, but the different fates of these works tell their own story.

Historians point to the self-conscious awareness of a new age and a new temporality, but also a sense of belatedness, in the decades after the French Revolution of the 1790s. In this course we will study the ideas of lateness and late style across the generational breaks of late Classicism and early Romanticism (1798-1830) represented by Haydn’s late oratorios, Beethoven’s heroic and post-heroic styles, and Schubert’s overlapping private and public concerns during the 1820s. Classes will combine historical, analytical, and hermeneutic perspectives as we study innovative compositions completed under conditions of illness, disability, and cultural estrangement. Schubert completed his last symphony within a year of Beethoven’s—both of them “Ninths”— and their final string quartets were written at the same time, but the different fates of these works tell their own story.