Beethoven’s Kiss
Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire
Kevin Kopelson
May 1996
212 Pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780804725989
In Beethoven's Kiss, Kevin Kopelson takes you on a journey through a unique literary style which is both scholarly and meditative. It interweaves the issues of gender, sexuality and erotic romanticism and presents them against the backdrop of romantic pianism. Exploring quasi-sexual myths of the nineteenth century, Beethoven's Kiss takes a long look at the origin and consequences of those myths.
"Beethoven's Kiss is a beguiling, insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes moving study. The book is put together performatively, as a memoir-meditation, rather than a piece of traditional scholarship. But its tacit scholarly backing is solid and up to date, and its unorthodox form is under the control of a finely tuned prose style."—Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University
Kevin Kopelson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Stanford, l994). He trained as a classical pianist at the Juilliard school of music.
