When young Anna Holz, a Viennese music student is asked to transcribe scoring notes for the great Ludwig van Beethoven, she eagerly accepts. She does so despite the warnings about Beethoven's volatile behavior. Beethoven is part maestro, part mentor and part madman. He reluctantly relies on Anna to help him realize the culmination of his art.

"In May of 1997 Edward W. Said delivered the Empson Lectures at Cambridge University under the title "Authority and Transgression in Opera." He planned to publish the lectures with Cambridge but never finished the manuscript. Some portions of the lectures were published in journals, about 20 years ago.The lecture typescripts are preserved in the Edward W. Said Papers at Columbia. The Edward W. Said Estate and Wouter Capitain have collaborated on the...

An analysis of Beethoven's seminal Ninth Symphony identifies it as a key cultural event that reflected major social upheavals, including the emergence of a dynamic Western world and changes in philosophical perspectives on individuality.

In this vividly imagined historical novel, acclaimed Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala has focused his laser-sharp wit on the life and times of George Bridgetower, a young violin prodigy, who, at the age of nine, took the courtly world of 18th century Europe by storm--and surprise, given the youth's unusual origins: for young George was of mixed- race parentage, known in the parlance of the day as a mulatto. Though his father Augustus was from Barbados...

"An in-depth and unified exploration of genius in the arts and sciences through the life and works of five seminal intellectual and cultural figures: Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, and Albert Einstein. Who among us hasn't read Hamlet, listened to the Fifth Symphony, gazed at the Mona Lisa, or marveled at the three laws of physics and the Theory of Relativity and been struck with the same simple question:...