From the Ruins of Enlightenment

"This is a book about Vienna in 1815, at the close of the Napoleonic era and the Napoleonic wars, and on the verge of the Congress of Vienna, which would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. Beethoven and Schubert were both citizens of Vienna at this time, Beethoven half-way through his composing career and socially withdrawn because of his almost total deafness; Schubert not yet twenty years-old and in the middle of one of his most prolific periods, with 140 songs and a symphony composed over the course of 1815 alone. Seemingly oblivious to the momentous events and deeply immersed in their own world, they each seemed to be composing 'against' something, in Richard Kramer's compelling reading: 'against the Enlightenment' in Beethoven's case, for whom only a sense of stripped-down nostalgia remained of the optimistic spirit of the 1790s; 'against Beethoven' in Schubert's case, who felt the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination bloomed. In taking his readers through a carefully chosen selection of works dating from 1815-songs, string quartets, piano sonatas, and more-Kramer insightfully unearths previously undetected resonances and associations and illuminates the two composers' 'lonely and singular journeys' through the 'rich solitude of their music'"--