Koerner Fellow Leon Plantinga, Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music, released a book entitled Simply Beethoven earlier this month. In the book, Professor Plantinga offers the lay reader a fascinating account of Beethoven’s life and music in its singular historical context, a time that saw the upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests, as well as the rise of the European middle class. It was in this milieu that Beethoven composed the groundbreaking, highly individual works that changed the course of music and have continued to inspire and delight listeners for more than two centuries. For anyone who is interested in knowing more about the extraordinary music that has become an integral part of Western culture, as well as the troubled genius who created it, Simply Beethoven is a perfect introduction to the man and his work.
Leon Plantinga graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1957. He received a M.Mus. in piano performance from Michigan State University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in the History of Music from Yale University in 1964. On the Yale faculty from 1963 until his retirement in 2005, Plantinga served as chair of the Department of Music for ten years. For six years in the 1990s, he was the Director of the Division of the Humanities. After retirement Plantinga spent a year at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study and served as Interim Director of the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. He has written widely on music of the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with books on Schumann as a music critic, a life and works study of Muzio Clementi, a history of nineteenth-century European music, and a study of the Beethoven concertos. Plantinga has published many articles and reviews in professional journals, and, lately, in the TLS of London.