Reception mechanisms more than a century old cannot be switched off overnight. If Beethoven's music already bore a heavy ideological burden in the nineteenth century, myriad twentieth-century attempts to free his sounds from these fetters miscarried. Claude Debussy's early critique of 1901 was, for example, itself not free of ideological taints. Writing in a concert review of the Ninth, the sharp-tongued French composer stated that it “has long been surrounded by a haze of adjectives.” It goes so far, he continued, that one marvels that the work had not been buried long ago beneath the avalanche of prose. Explaining that Beethoven's thought was entirely musical, he attempted to divest it of the “stupid comments” that the work has excited. Yet his line of argument ended in the conclusion that an “excess of humanity” has burst the conventional bounds of the symphony, which sprang from a soul “drunk with the idea of freedom.” His attempt to break away from the reception tradition thus perpetuates one of its powerful topoi: the Ninth as a monument to liberty. In short, the attribution of ideas to Beethoven's works continues stubbornly apace. Nor are the attributions limited to verbal discussion: they equally mark the music's performance and find reflection in the visual depiction of Beethoven and his music. Even composers fall under their spell, either strengthening or interrogating them by their references to Beethoven.

If the tradition of ideological attributions can't be easily dispensed with, the things attributed are at once constant and variable: some cliches, such as romanticized heroism or the narrative of overcoming adversity, have been stubbornly perpetuated since the dawn of Beethoven reception; other attributions emerge from specific historical contexts, receive contradictory interpretations, and are often short-lived for that very reason. The constants seem to appeal to general needs for understanding, whereas the variables offer a broad range of possibilities for political, cultural, or philosophical appropriation. Perpetuations and reinterpretations form part of a complex system of meaning.3 By being endlessly repeated, they impart recognizability while broadening the spectrum of musings on “the Beethoven myth.”4 The constants will be briefly presented below with a backward glance at the nineteenth century. Then, proceeding from four documents on reception, the interplay of variable interpretations will be discussed insofar as they clarify specific twentieth-century Beethoven labels: the humanist, the revolutionary, the patriot, and the virile male.