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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2014
Beethoven the revolutionary is fading from history. Ossified by the Romantic tradition and, under the pressure of recent revision, reconsidered as conservative and prone to power worship, Beethoven's music has been drained of its radical essence. Yet his compositions also evoked the sonic impact of revolution – its aesthetic of natural violence and terrifying sublime – and so created an aural image of revolutionary action. Through stylistic appropriations of Luigi Cherubini and others, Beethoven imported the rhetorical tropes of French revolutionary composition to the more culturally conservative environment of Vienna. But where the music of revolutionary Paris accompanied concerted political action, the Viennese music that echoed its exhortative rhetoric played to audiences that remained politically mute. This inertia was the result of both a Viennese mode of listening that encouraged a solely internalized indulgence in revolution, and a Beethovenian musical rhetoric that both goaded and satisfied latent political radicalism. Far from rallying the public to the figurative barricades, then, the radical content of Beethoven's music actually helped satiate – and thereby stymie – the outward expression of rebellion in Vienna. This article is a bid to reaffirm the revolutionary in Beethoven.
I am grateful to William O'Reilly, Nicholas Marston, Nicholas Cook, and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. The research for this article was completed thanks to the kind financial assistance of the Wolfson Foundation.
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49 Hibberd, ‘Cherubini and the revolutionary sublime’, p. 313; despite this, Cherubini would later smoothly assimilate his musical voice to both the Napoleonic and (as Rumph and Mathew have convincingly argued of the later Beethoven) to the restored monarchy – even composing a Requiem in C Minor (1816) for a king (Louis XVI) whose death he had once glorified.
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53 Ibid., p. 10.
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112 Jean-François Le Sueur, cited in Knight, Beethoven and the Age of Revolution, p. 73.
113 Ludwig van Beethoven, to Count Franz von Oppersdorff (March, 1808), in Anderson, The letters of Beethoven, I, p. 188.
114 Anonymous, , ‘Vienna, 17 April 1805’, Der Freymüthige 3 (17 April 1805), p. 332Google Scholar, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 15; for the revolutionary musical influences upon the Eroica, see Palisca, Claude, ‘French revolutionary models for Beethoven's Eroica Funeral March’, in Shapiro, A. D. and Benjamin, P., eds., Music and context: essays for John M. Ward (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 198–209Google Scholar.
115 Mathew, Political Beethoven, p. 108.
116 K. B., ‘Miscellaneous’, AMZ, 16 (8 June 1814), pp. 395–6, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 114.
117 Mathew's extensive discussion of Viennese listening habits – ‘the inner public’ – is highly convincing: Political Beethoven, pp. 155–75, at p. 175.
118 Rellstab, ‘Travel reports by Rellstab, no. 4, Vienna’, pp. 61–4.
119 Hector Berlioz, cited in Knight, David B., Landscapes in music: space, place, and time in the world's great music (Oxford, 2006), p. 136Google Scholar.
120 Jones, David Wyn, Beethoven: the Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge, 1995), p. 75–6Google Scholar.
121 Scott, Burnham, Beethoven hero, p. 142; for discussion of this idea in relation to the Beethovian coda, see pp. 126–9.
122 Sealsfield, Austria as it is, p. 195.
123 Hanson, Musical life in Biedermeier Vienna, p. 72.
124 Rellstab, ‘Travel reports by Rellstab, no. 4, Vienna’, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, pp. 61–4.
125 Bonds, Music as thought, pp. xiii, xix.
126 Ibid., p. 70.
127 Mathew, Political Beethoven, p. 117.
128 Cook, Nicholas, ‘The other Beethoven: heroism, the canon, and the works of 1813–14’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 27 (2003), pp. 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 21.
129 Leith, ‘Music as an ideological weapon’, p. 135.
130 For the Viennese response to the (admittedly temporary) nationalistic fervour of 1809, see Mathew, Political Beethoven, pp. 156–75.
131 Jean-Paul Sartre, cited in Matthew Guerrieri, The first four notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the human imagination (New York, NY, 2012), p. 29; the marquis de Lally-Tollendal was a proponent of the ancien régime and deputy of the Estates-General before he slipped into exile in 1790.
132 Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon, p. 107.
133 For some of the Schillerian influences upon Beethoven's political thought, see Stanley, Glen, ‘Beethoven at work: musical activist and thinker’, in Stanley, , ed., The Cambridge companion to Beethoven, pp. 14–31Google Scholar, at pp. 25–8.
134 Rumph further indicates that even the alleged ‘conservatism’ of Beethoven's late style still retained a noticeably revolutionary hue: Beethoven after Napoleon, p. 6.
135 Friedrich Nietzsche, in Richard Oehler, Max Oehler, Friedrich Würzbach, eds., Friedrich Nietzsche: Gesammelte Werke XVI (Munich, 1925), p. 378.
