Beethoven and His World

392 Pages·2000·41.276 MB·English

by  Scott Burnham, Michael P. Steinberg, Bard Music Festival

BEETHOVEN AND HIS WORLD
OTHER PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS VOLUMES
PUBLISHED IN CONJUNCTION WITH
THE BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Brahms and His World
edited by Walter Frisch (1990)
Mendelssohn and His World
edited by R. Larry Todd (1991)
Richard Strauss and His World
edited by Bryan Gilliam (1992)
Dvorak and His World
edited by Michael Beckerman (1993)
Schumann and His World
edited by R. Larry Todd (1994)
Bartok and His World
edited by Peter Laki (1995)
Charles Ives and His World
edited by J. Peter Burkholder (1996)
Haydn and His World
edited by Elaine R. Sisman (1997)
Tchaikovsky and His World
edited by Leslie Kearney (1998)
Schoenberg and His World
edited by Walter Frisch (1999)
BEETHOVEN
AND HIS WORLD
EDITED BY
SCOTT BURNHAM AND MICHAEL P STEINBERG
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
The image of the May 3 concert program on page 256 and the cover of the
Czerny memorial composition on page 245 are printed with permission of Archiv der
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Austria.
The essay by Alessandra Comini is adapted from her book, The Changing Image of
Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (1987). Images appearing in the essay are reprinted
with permission of the author.
The image ofEine Symphonie on p. 352 is reprinted with permission of the Konigliche
Neue Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beethoven and his world / edited by Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg,
p. cm. "Published in conjunction with The Bard Music Festival"—Half t.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-07072-5 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-691-07073-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827. I. Burnham, Scott G. II. Steinberg, Michael P.
III. The Bard Music Festival
ML410.B4 B2812 2000 780'.92—dc21 [B] 00-038529
This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:
Ginger Shore, Director
John Isaacs, Art Director
Designed by Juliet Meyers
Composed in Baskerville by Natalie Kelly
Text edited by Paul De Angelis
Music typeset by Don Giller
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper)
www.pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
13579 10 8642
13579 10 8642
(Pbk.)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
SCOTT BURNHAM AND MICHAEL P. STEINBERG VU
PART I
HEROIC BEETHOVEN
In the Time(s) of the "Eroica"
REINHOLD BRINKMANN
TRANSLATED BY IRENE ZEDLACHER 1
Beethoven, Florestan, and the Varieties of Heroism
LEWIS LOCKWOOD 27
PART II
LATE BEETHOVEN
Memory and Invention at the Threshold
of Beethoven's Late Style
ELAINE SISMAN 51
Voices and Their Rhythms in the First Movement
of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 109: Some Thoughts
on the Performance and Analysis of a Late-Style Work
GLENN STANLEY 88
Voicing Beethoven's Distant Beloved
NICHOLAS MARSTON 124
PART III
BEETHOVEN IN THE WORKSHOP
Keyboard Instruments of the Young Beethoven
TILMAN SKOWRONECK 151
Contrast and Continuity in Beethoven's Creative Process
WILLIAM KINDERMAN 193
• V
CONTENTS
PART IV
BEETHOVEN IN THE WORLD
Performances of Grief: Vienna's Response
to the Death of Beethoven
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS 227
The Visual Beethoven:
Whence, Why, and Whither the Scowl?
ALESSANDRA COMINI 286
Beethoven and Masculinity
SANNA PEDERSON 313
The Search for Meaning in Beethoven:
Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics in Historical Perspective
LEON BOTSTEIN 332
Index x
Notes on Contributors x
VI
Preface and Acknowledgments
Beethoven is forever. Beethoven in the year 2000—all millennial hype
notwithstanding—is a Beethoven of the moment. In the volume we
offer you here, leading scholars draw from several disciplines to pro-
duce, individually and collectively, a sense of both the current status
and emergent trends in Beethoven scholarship. Of the eleven essay
writers, ten are music scholars. Their contributions exemplify the
trend of the last fifteen or so years to place music into dialogue with
the texts and interpretive methods of literary, historical, and cultural
analysis.
In this context, Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary
milieu of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, showing how music partici-
pates in the making of a new sense of time. In particular, Brinkmann's
interpretation of the celebrated coda of the first movement as actually
conjuring the future moves beyond the usual invocation of closure and
apotheosis and serves to open up our sense of Beethoven's heroic style.
By asking what "heroism" really means in the context of works like
Fidelio, Lewis Lockwood also broadens our vision of the heroic music,
offering an informed taxonomy of Beethoven's musical heroic types.
Though Beethoven's heroic style is easily the composer's most public
manner—it is still the prevailing soundtrack of his stature in the mod-
ern West—Brinkmann and Lockwood bring fresh nuance to our
understanding of its commanding presence within our culture.
The second grouping of essays explores the emergence of
Beethoven's late style, with regard to themes of temporality, memory,
and voice. The late style has been the site of much recent activity in
musical thought, even prompting Charles Rosen to return to his land-
mark study, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, in order to add
a new chapter. Ever drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno, critical
fascination with the late style and its implied critique of Beethoven's
earlier music (and indeed of the Viennese classical style) has reached a
high tide. Analyses abound, particularly of the late quartets and piano
sonatas, for this music seems somehow to stage the dilemmas of mod-
ern subjectivity. With its staggering disjunctions in formal process and
stylistic register, its expressive intensity that is somehow both lyrical and
Vll
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
impersonal, Beethoven's late music invites musicologists and music
theorists to entertain poststructuralist and postmodern values while
continuing to engage in a more traditional kind of analysis that would
find and nurture an underlying coherence to this often discontinuous
music. In the present volume, Elaine Sisman addresses a group of
pieces written around 1815-1816 that share a preoccupation with
memory, traced here in the ways that Beethoven stages the return of
music from the opening movement in later movements. Sisman situates
these unusual works in a post-Kantian context, linking invention and
fantasia with the work of reminiscence. Glenn Stanley shows how a vex-
ing performance problem in the first movement of op. 109 can be read
as a symptom of the incursion of voices into the genre of the piano
sonata—and he goes on to speculate about the nature of their conver-
sation. Beethoven's celebrated song cycle An die feme Geliebte (the locus
classicus of this quintessentially Romantic genre) is Nicholas Mars ton's
quarry in an exciting new interpretation that turns the tables on the
usual way of construing the presence of the Distant Beloved and that,
like Brinkmann and Sisman, reveals a Beethoven deeply engaged with
the vicissitudes and possibilities of human temporality.
Moving into a more concrete world, Tilman Skowroneck peers
behind the scenes into Beethoven's workshop, explaining how the
young Beethoven chose his pianos, and showing along the way that the
titan and the myth was also a practical worker with an interest in
machinery. William Kinderman reveals a similarly workmanlike
Beethoven in the process of sketching and revising his compositions;
more important, Kinderman offers compelling evidence of several of
Beethoven's abiding aesthetic concerns as well as keen insight into the
ways that different genres come to inform and enrich each other in his
music. Beethoven emerges from these two essays as a discerning musician
from a specific time and place, facing the usual problems of production
and dissemination, and concerned as much with the real as with the
ideal.
The volume concludes with four essays engaging the broader ques-
tion of reception, of Beethoven's impact on his world and ours. This
emphasis represents a much worked recent trend in Beethoven studies,
in line with the spread of reception theory and the related question of
canon formation. Christopher Gibbs's study of Beethoven's funeral
and its aftermath features documentary material appearing in English
for the first time. As companion pieces to his essay we have translated
some purple poems written in memory of the composer; these will
never be recognized as great works, but they emerge as fascinating
documents in the history of literary emotion. Above all, Gibbs shows
• viii •
Preface and Acknowledgments
how characteristic constructions of artistic greatness quickly gathered
in the various "performances of grief" surrounding the memorializa-
tion of Beethoven. Art historian Alessandra Comini offers an illus-
trated discussion of Beethoven's ubiquitous and iconic frown and
traces how the myth of the frown relates to the actual practices of tak-
ing life masks as well as death masks. Sanna Pederson shows how the
"new musicology's" critical engagement with gender and the ideology
of masculinity in fact reopens ambiguities that were crucial to the
Romantic theorists of Beethoven's generation. In so doing, she deep-
ens and contextualizes the feminist backlash to Beethoven famously
broached by Susan McClary's vividly explicit suggestion of masculinist
violence in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. Can Beethoven
survive without the ideology of masculinity? This is the question that
rings in our ears at the end of Pederson's essay. Finally, Leon Botstein
surveys the reception of Beethoven in two fins-de-siede, showing how
pioneering music scholars in turn-of-twentieth-century Vienna
squared off on the issues of rhetoric and narrative and the question of
the extramusical in Beethoven, setting the terms of an often acrimo-
nious debate that continues in our own day.
Beethoven and His World is the eleventh annual volume in a series to
appear in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival and its reconsider-
ations of canonic composers. Those of us who have followed the festi-
val over the last decade have developed an ardent respect and
affection for its audiences. We imagine the readers of the volumes to
have a similar profile: professionals and amateurs with a commitment
to the aesthetic and cultural importance of music, eager to hear good
music and to learn more about it in its various contexts. You will notice
immediately that this volume is built differently from its predecessors.
It contains no discrete section of primary documents. This was an edi-
torial decision resulting from our sense of the "Beethoven difference."
The man, music, and myth have remained so iconic for so long that
the most telling documents and commentaries are widely known and
easily available. Moreover, if there is any one thing that Beethoven can
be said to have done these last two hundred years, it is to continue to
confront and provoke his audiences, to demand fresh interpretations
from performers, critics, and analysts. Beethoven has always been a
Beethoven of the moment. We too have acceded to this demand: with
a few exceptions, such as the poems of Kanne and Mayrhofer, we have
IX
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
filled the volume with new work, offering you eleven essays rather
than the five or six of the previous volumes.
This is the first of the Bard/Princeton volumes to be co-edited—in
this case by a cultural historian in addition to a music theorist. Permit
us to gloat for a moment in how well we got along throughout our work
on the book—a good omen for the potential of interdisciplinary work.
We were supported throughout by colleagues at the Bard Music
Festival, as well as at the Bard Publications Office, the Princeton
University Music Department, and Princeton University Press. We
would like to acknowledge in particular Leon Botstein, Paul De Angelis,
Saralyn Fosnight, David Kasunic, Mark Loftin, Robert Martin, Ginger
Shore, and Irene Zedlacher. We want also to thank the eleven contrib-
utors for their enthusiasm, punctuality, and intellectual generosity.
Collectively, the eleven essays that follow do argue for a sympto-
matic asymmetry in the politics of interdisciplinarity. They suggest as
a group that music scholars are currently more eager to engage ques-
tions of cultural history than cultural historians are to think about
music. As a body of work and mode of cultural experience, music
remains discursively remote to historians, still much more so than
word- or image-based "texts." The themes developed in this volume—
such as time, memory, heroism, revolution, and gender—are prime
categories for cultural analysis. The scholars engaging the themes
show how music in general and Beethoven in particular participate in
defining them for historical interpretation. Historians have not yet
paid enough attention to music. In this respect, we hope that this book
will serve as an invitation to interdisciplinary reciprocity.