Beethoven, Rossini and Wagner

Professor Nicholas Mathew, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley

One of the tall tales of the meeting between Beethoven and Rossini (in Vienna in 1822) was supposedly recounted by the rotund Italian maestro himself to Richard Wagner late in the nineteenth century. Starting from this overlapping series of “composer encounters,” this lecture will explore what the symbolic opposition between Beethoven and Rossini – a perceived aesthetic antagonism that became ever more fraught as the decades wore on – might teach us about Wagner’s position in the history of nineteenth-century music.

Professor Mathew is an Assistant Professor of Musicology whose research interests include, Enlightenment and Romantic music, Beethoven, Haydn, Vienna, music and politics, aesthetics, cultural studies, pianos and performance