The
Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of
Musical Genius by Peter Kivy
The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something
other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable
kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities.
It is as if the artist is suddenly possessed, as if some outside force
flows through him at the moment of creation. In other cases genius seems
best explained as a natural gift. The artist is the possessor of an extra
talent that enables the production of masterpiece after masterpiece. This
book explores the concept of artistic genius and how it came to be symbolized
by three great composers of the modern era: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Peter Kivy, a leading thinker in musical aesthetics, delineates the two
concepts of genius that were already well formed in the ancient world.
Kivy then develops the argument that these concepts have alternately held
sway in Western thought since the beginning of the eighteenth century.
He explores why this pendulum swing from the concept of the possessor to
the concept of the possessed has occurred and how the concepts were given
philosophical reformulations as views toward Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven
as geniuses changed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
(Hardcover -- October 1, )
