Description:

Part of the Music Studies Global Distinguished Speakers Series 

Presented by Scott Burnham, Distinguished Professor of Music at the City University of New York 

Massive, difficult, and ever imposing, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis has often been exiled to its own problematic space, apart from the rest of his later music. This talk will engage some of the contradictions and paradoxes perceived in the Missa Solemnis, listening out for late-style musical traits as well as for features that have made the work problematic throughout its reception history. Along the way, Burnham explores telling resemblances to the composer’s Ninth Symphony, as well as intriguing parallels to the Second Part of Goethe’s Faust, another sprawling late work that has undergone a vexed reception history. With the help of Edward Said’s sense of artistic late style as one of untimely exile, Burnham attempts to characterize the special place the Missa Solemnis holds both in Beethoven’s late style and in late style conceived more generally.