Beethoven cast a looming shadow over the nineteenth century. For composers he was a model both to emulate and to overcome. "You have no idea how it feels," Brahms confided, "when one always hears such a giant marching behind one." Exploring the response of five composers--Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler--to what each clearly saw as the challenge of Beethoven's symphonies, Evan Bonds richly enhances our understanding of the evolution of the symphony and Beethoven's legacy.

Overt borrowings from Beethoven--for example, the lyrical theme in the Finale of Brahms' First Symphony, so like the "Ode to Joy" theme in Beethoven's Ninth--have often been the subject of criticism. Bonds now shows us how composers imitate or allude to a Beethoven theme or compositional strategy precisely in order to turn away from it, creating a new musical solution. Berlioz's Harold en Italie, Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Brahms' First, and Mahler's Fourth serve as illuminating examples. Discussion focuses on such core issues as Beethoven's innovations in formal design, the role of text and voice, fusion of diverse genres, cyclical coherence of movements, and the function of the symphonic finale.

Bonds lucidly argues that the great symphonists of the nineteenth century cleared creative space for themselves by both confronting and deviating from the practices of their potentially overpowering precursor. His analysis places familiar masterpieces in a new light.

Although “form” is one of the most commonly used terms in music interpretation, it remains one of the most ambiguous. This penetrating study explores evolving ideas of musical form from a historical perspective and sheds new light on current conceptualizations of music.

Mark Evan Bonds examines the image—dominant among eighteenth-century composers and analysts—of music as a language, a kind of wordless discourse, which could move audiences. In the Baroque and Classical periods an instrumental composition was viewed as analogous to an oration, its form the intelligible elaboration of a central thematic idea. The predominant emphasis, therefore, was on the perspective of the listener. This rhetorical metaphor is shown giving way in the nineteenth century to the idea of a musical work as an organic entity, an image that emphasizes the autonomy of the work. The listener, in effect, becomes merely an interested third party.

In his account of these changing perspectives, Bonds draws on the writing of a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists. His analyses focus on specific sonata form movements by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and are informed by the theoretical premises that characterize the composers’ own times. In a final synthesis, the eighteenth-century rhetorical model—with its focus on the structural function of musical ideas and the role of the listener—emerges as a forerunner of today’s listener-oriented and plot theories about musical form.

In Wordless Rhetoric, Bonds makes fruitful use of literary theory to develop his innovative evaluation of musical form. This book will be invaluable to anyone who studies music or seeks to understand music analysis.