Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge Music, Meaning, and Beethoven's Most Difficult Work

The Grosse Fuge, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven during his final illness, has an involved and complicated history. Written as the finale for Beethoven's Late Quartet in B-Flat but published as an independent work, the piece raises questions about whether music without words can have meaning, and invokes speculation about the composer and his frame of mind when he wrote it. Robert Kahn examines the work's musical, aesthetic, philosophical, and historical problems, considering its history, structure and development, and the critical response from Beethoven's day until our own. Kahn also explores Beethoven's difficulties with publishers and sponsors, his everyday life, and his character in light of recent advances in the pharmacology of depressive illness, and he theorizes that Beethoven's creative dry spell in his late forties was caused by an extended bout with clinical depression.

Robert S. Kahn worked as a professional musician after receiving music degrees from Reed College and the Manhattan School of Music. He is the author of the nonfiction work Other People's Blood: U.S. Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade and is news editor for Courthouse News Service, a national legal news service.