Claiming Beethoven

Born in Munich in 1966, Friedrich Geiger studied music, historical and systematic musicology and Latin philology in Munich and Hamburg. In 1997 he received his doctorate on the dramatic and oratorical works of the Russian-German composer Vladimir Vogel. From 1997 to 2002 he headed the research and information center for outlawed music (“Forschungs- und Informationszentrum für verfemte Musik”), a joint institution of the Dresden Center for Contemporary Music and the TU Dresden. In 2003 he completed his Habilitation at the University of Hamburg with the study Musik in zwei Diktaturen. Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin. In the same year, he became a research associate at the FU Berlin in the DFG Collaborative Research Center 626 Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste. Since 2000 he has taught as lecturer at various universities. From the summer semester of 2007 he was professor for historical musicology at the University of Hamburg. In the summer semester of 2020, he accepted a call from the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts to take up the chair in historical musicology. In the summer of 2020 he was elected a full member of the Academia Europaea. Friedrich Geiger’s main fields of research cover the history of music from the 18th century to the present, as well as music and music aesthetics of Greco-Roman antiquity and their reception. Other topics concern comparative research on music in dictatorships and in exile, the historiography of popular music, the geography of music history and musical judgement. Follow us on ⁠⁠Instagram

Esteban Buch (Buenos Aires, 1963) is a professor of music history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. A specialist in the relationships between music and politics in the twentieth century, he is the author of Beethoven’s Ninth. A Political History (The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and other essays on the composer, as well as of Trauermarsch. L’Orchestre de Paris dans l’Argentine de la dictature (Seuil, 2016) and Le cas Schönberg. Naissance de l’avant-garde musicale (Gallimard, 2006). He has also coedited the volumes Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorships (Routledge, 2016) and Finding Democracy in Music (Routledge, 2021), and other collective works. Follow us on Instagram | Twitter