If one major intellectual source for Beethoven's late style was the body of ideas and readings he shared with Schlegel, Goethe and Herder--much of it derived from romantic Orientalism, especially that branch of it concerned with ancient mystery cults and religions from the East and the Mediterranean, translations of the ancient Indian classics by William Jones, and of course a renewed interest in Homer and other antique authors--the other was the Masonic tradition, which was extraordinarily influential in early modern Europe. Mozart was a prominent Mason, and so too in much of his thought about ritual purification, initiatory trials of endurance and moral fortitude, a deep veneration of the highest humanistic Illuminist ideals (all of this memorably embodied in Mozart's Sarastro), was Beethoven. A fine chapter by Solomon on Beethoven's "Masonic Imagination" goes over this material with great sensitivity, since as with all other fields of endeavor, Beethoven was a vital, if also eccentric, solitary whose prodigious hallmark was to cannibalize everything he borrowed or read and make it his own. Solomon's method is to show the trends and the inflections that enter the music as music, rather than as programmatic ideas.

The range of material in this book is striking indeed. Solomon moves gracefully between literature, philosophy, literary theory, social history, musical analysis and informed intellectual speculation. What is so impressive about the writing is the extraordinary tact and precision of Solomon's prose, as he describes music-- the most silent and enigmatic of the arts--in terms that relate both to the whole range of one of the most striking of human minds in its historical context while also allowing us to enter the music on its own formal and compositional terms. In analyzing, for example, Beethoven's "Diabelli" Variations, a complex late-style piano composition consisting of thirty-three variations on what has been usually considered to be a trivial waltz theme by Anton Diabelli, Solomon revises and overturns that conventional assumption by relating the tune instead to Wordsworth's concern with the "humble and rustic," and the romantic "valorization of folk art"; which in turn leads us to "the familiar [which] opens on the quotidian, the sphere of the quotidian itself opens, not only on the humble, the popular, the rustic, and every manifestation of the ordinary, but on larger issues of identity as well." From there, Solomon proceeds to an elegant account of the huge work as a journey, the many skillfully executed metamorphoses in it implying a narrator who "looks back to the theme, which is the link to the home that he left in favor of an arduous pursuit of every conceivable metaphor for a desired goal--toward God, Paradise, reason, wisdom, order, peace, achievement, perfection, healing, and love." And then, in a masterful turn of phrase, Solomon notes how Beethoven foils our expectations of arrival and chooses instead "to close with a wordless song, a spectral dance in tempo di minuetto, moderato, marked grazioso e dolce."

I wish there were more opportunity here to show how every chapter in Solomon's book is full of subtle, deeply satisfying accounts of what actually went into Beethoven's late-style works, but of course there isn't. Still, I can conclude here by suggesting the compelling nature of Solomon's achievement, which seems to me to provide a kind of humanistic inquiry on the highest level without ever scanting the technical demands of Beethoven's formidably complex music. How many musicologists today can, for instance, excavate the Romantic movement as thoroughly as Solomon does and then take from it its principal motifs and images as they are transformed by Beethoven according to the rigors of, say, a symphony, sonata, fugue or bagatelle?

What distinguishes so much of Solomon's work is his fearless way of connecting human concerns of the utmost importance with the exigencies of music: Thus a moving chapter on the use of music for healing purposes derives its power from reported actual performances by Beethoven and Schubert (his exact contemporary) of specific piano works, in whose sonic universe the composer placed a kind of therapeutic spell. Or, even more brilliant than that, there is a superb excursion on Beethoven's endings during his last period (for example, for transcendental works such as the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Ninth Symphony), which are shown to be far from the conclusive and triumphant cadences that we have all taken them for, but rather seen by Beethoven as alternatives among others for closing statements to these monuments in sound. Far from being airy speculations, Solomon's analyses rely on the archeological discipline of archival research, which he turns into evidence for what he unwaveringly regards as Beethoven's endless, unrelenting artistic vitality and creativity. "Ultimately, the coercive and subversive implications of [such works as] the Ninth Symphony may be inseparable, perhaps because Beethoven's futuristic impulse--to create things that had never before existed--warred with his yearning to belong to tradition."

My one nagging reservation about what Solomon does so well as an inventive critic and generously sympathetic cultural interpreter is that it isn't clear how his findings might be related to actual performances of Beethoven's music today. You can take Solomon's marvelously enlightening insights out of Beethoven's writing and his scores, but he does not quite provide us with a way of putting them back into musical realizations of the works themselves. Perhaps there is no direct indication of how that might be done, although, if the reader is a musician, he or she is filled with a sense of possible interpretive routes to take. Performance necessarily involves choices made and action taken. Solomon's reticence on this point somewhat undermines the attractive power of his overall insights, with their richness of allusion and the sense they convey of untapped possibility and as-yet-unthought alternatives buried inside the music, there to be discovered and deciphered with great intellectual pleasure. Perhaps that's enough of an achievement for one critic writing at the top of his form, but I must say that I feel tantalizingly close to an understanding of what I might do as a musician with Solomon there to guide me, along with the legions of performing artists who have so much to learn from his analyses. If only now he would.

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