Approaches to Platonic interpretation

To introduce Socrates and Plato is to introduce the problem of the relation between them. Although other contemporaries left portraits of Socrates as well, it is Plato’s writings – primarily a body of dialogues in which Plato himself never appears – which stamped the figure of his teacher indelibly on the history of Western philosophy. Because Socrates is best known to us as a character in Plato’s writings, there arises what has been called the ‘Socratic problem’. Can a real or ‘historical’ Socrates, with distinctive beliefs, be identified on the basis of the testimony roughly contemporaneous with his life which survives from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and (a generation later) Aristotle? Or is, perhaps, the Socrates we value largely the portrayal Plato makes of him?

The ‘Socratic problem’ is complicated by the fact that Plato’s ‘Socrates’ seems to argue for contradictory positions in different dialogues. For example, in Protagoras (352–8) Socrates argues that because no one does wrong willingly, vice results simply from ignorance, an argument which assumes that only rational beliefs determine action. But in Republic IV he explains vice as due to the two irrational, or less than rational, parts of a tripartite soul when not stably governed, as they should be, by the third and rational part. This apparent contradiction has often been resolved by assuming that the Protagoras is one of a group of dialogues written early in Plato’s career (the ‘early’ dialogues), in which the character ‘Socrates’ is meant by Plato to represent the historical Socrates’ views, whereas the Republic is one of the ‘middle period’ dialogues in which Plato is using Socrates simply as a mouthpiece for his own theory.

Why does a piece of music end? Or rather, why does it end where it does? Webern, during the composition of his Six Bagatelles for string quartet op. 9, felt driven to a particularly uncompromising answer: “Here I had the feeling, ‘When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over.’” He was, admittedly, recalling his path to twelve-note composition; yet Heinrich Schenker, concerned exclusively with the structure of tonal music – to him, Webern's was a “path” that led away from music altogether – was equally clear about endings. In Free Composition he claimed that “with the arrival of Î the work is at an end. Whatever follows this can only be a reinforcement of the close – a coda – no matter what its extent or purpose may be.” There will be more to say about codas in due course; but we need immediately to distinguish Schenker's construal of “coda” from the conventional one whereby, for example, the section of music that follows the end of a sonata-form recapitulation is denominated the “coda.” A particularly clear Beethoven example is the coda to the finale of the “Appassionata” Sonata, beginning at m. 308: the double bar and new tempo indication articulate this coda especially strongly.

Despite its familiarity, its secure place in the operatic canon, and the large body of literature that surrounds it, Beethoven's Fidelio continues to pose challenges to interpretation and understanding. Its complicated genesis, performance history, and transmission present troublesome philological questions that in certain cases may never be fully resolved. And its position as the sole opera of a composer known primarily for his instrumental music makes it a difficult work to place within the context of his artistic development. But if Fidelio is nearly as much a problem for critics and scholars as it was for the composer himself, it is also a central work, an understanding of which is crucial for any attempt to comprehend Beethoven's ambitions and accomplishments, his self-critical spirit, and his world-view.

Whose Fidelio ? the historical background and the textual problem

The complex text-critical issues that surround Fidelio are perhaps best approached through a review of the biographical circumstances that led to its creation and revisions. In 1803 Beethoven accepted a commission for a new opera from Emmanuel Schikaneder, the impresario of the Theater an der Wien, who himself provided the composer with a libretto entitled Vestas Feuer. Beethoven began to compose Schikaneder's text in the autumn of that year, but he quickly abandoned it; by early January 1804 he had decided to have an extant French libretto, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal, adapted into German by Joseph Sonnleithner.

The fate of Aristotle’s writings

Aristotle evidently intended only some of his works for wider circulation, or ‘publication’; these were the so-called ‘exoteric’ works, mainly dialogues, which are now lost apart from some fragments. The genuinely Aristotelian parts of our corpus Aristotelicum represent an assemblage of collections of notes on particular topics, or more finished treatises, which evidently would only have been available for consultation by individuals, especially (we might suppose) members of his school; if in principle they might have been more widely available, it is hard to imagine a large demand for such a large body of relatively intractable material. It is thus possible to argue that other schools might not have had the direct access to Aristotle’s work that, living in a different age, we might incautiously presume; nor indeed are the fragmentary remains of the later Peripatetics sufficient to prove that in later periods of the school, after Theophrastus, even they had a complete collection in Athens. The first systematic edition was evidently that of Andronicus of Rhodes, at Rome, in the first century bc. Aristotle left his library, which also included a large collection of other books, to Theophrastus, and Theophrastus left it to another Peripatetic, Neleus; and reports in Strabo (XIII. 1, 54, 608–9) and in Plutarch (Life of Sulla 26) suggest that at some point between then and Andronicus’ editorial activity at least a proportion of the corpus was sufficiently ‘lost’, or inaccessible, to need to be ‘rediscovered’ – or to be capable of being described in such terms – when Sulla brought Aristotelian manuscripts back with him to Rome from Asia Minor.

A singular work

The Laws can be considered the first work of genuine political philosophy in the Western tradition. Admittedly it was conceived within an already complex tradition of philosophical legislation and speculative constructions, in which the Republic holds an important place. But so far as we can judge, the Laws’ combination of an investigation into the foundations of legislation with the concrete elaboration of detailed laws is without precedent. From this point of view, the Republic is at best a sketch, whereas the Laws breaks ground for future political thought.

Part of the work’s importance lies in its having created a new genre, or rather two, by combining two approaches which posterity would come to distinguish. The Laws is at once an exposition of political principles (comparable to Rousseau’s Social Contract or Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Right), and a treatise of applied legislation (comparable to the Project for the Constitution of Corsica or the proposal for a German Constitution). Moreover, several concepts elaborated in the Laws have proved of lasting value to political philosophy. The so-called principle of Lord Acton, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, is already formulated in the Laws. More positive philosophical ideas first articulated in the Laws include the ‘mixed constitution’, the ‘rule of law’, and last but not least the ‘legislative preamble’. Plato himself presents this last item as his greatest legislative innovation (722e1–4).

Discussion of the ethical and political views of Democritus of Abdera (born c. 460 bc) cannot avoid preliminary consideration of our evidence for that area of his thought. In all other areas except ethics and epistemology we are virtually wholly dependent on doxographical evidence. When we come to ethics, by contrast, the doxography is meagre (see DK 68 a 166–70), but on the other hand we possess over two hundred purported quotations from Democritus on ethical topics. Yet far from giving us greater confidence in our judgments in this area, the problematic character of these quotations has the opposite effect. This is because the great majority of those quotations are contained in two collections, those of Stobaeus and the so-called ‘Sayings of Democrates’ (sic), where they are presented in isolation from any context and without attribution to any specific work. It is therefore necessary to undertake a brief consideration of the authenticity of this material before proceeding to discuss the content of Democritus’ ethical and political views.

Scepticism about the authenticity of the ethical fragments is grounded in two primary considerations, first the silence of Aristotle and Theophrastus on Democritus’ ethical writings and secondly the fact that our sources for the bulk of the fragments, the collections of Stobaeus and ‘Democrates’, cannot plausibly be thought to have been compiled from direct access to texts of Democritus. Stobaeus’ anthology is clearly based on earlier collections which included, besides excerpts from extant texts of authors such as Plato and the tragedians, anecdotes and maxims attributed to such famous figures as Pythagoras and Socrates, which cannot have had their origin in works written by their supposed authors.

Open any textbook in music history or music appreciation and the problem of Beethoven's relation to music historiography becomes immediately apparent: is he Classical or Romantic or both or neither? Is he part of the Canonical Three of the Viennese Classical Style – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – or is he a chapter unto himself, as the One destined to inherit and transform, even liberate, the achievements of the Classical Duo? As Charles Rosen astutely pointed out, “it would appear as if our modern conception of the great triumvirate had been planned in advance by history”: Count Waldstein's entry in Beethoven's album, written in 1792 as the young composer left Bonn for Vienna, famously assured him that “You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” This attractive phrase refers to the sense of lineage both conceptual and practical that places Beethoven in a musical culture already fully fledged in its genres and expressive possibilities. Mozart's premature death and the position of Haydn as Beethoven's teacher in Vienna left Beethoven perfectly placed to come into his inheritance. This chapter will examine some of the dominant elements in European music in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, and explore some of his methods of appropriating and personalizing the expressive language of Haydn and Mozart.

Oppositions

By 1790, observers of the musical scene could classify the genres and structures of music according to shared assumptions about their place in musical life and the level of sophistication of their audience. About Vienna we read of a broad division of the musical public into the more and less knowledgeable: audience members, including patrons, comprised “connoisseurs” and “amateurs,” while performers might be classed as “virtuosi” or “dilettanti” according to their skill. Music was performed in a range of venues from the grand and costly public theaters associated with courts (for example,Vienna’s Burgtheater) to the salons of the aristocracy and wealthier middle classes, from open-air gardens and coffee- [45] houses to private homes.

One of the best-known features of Beethoven's composing activity is his enormous efforts and struggle to produce his great masterpieces, in contrast to Mozart, who is reputed to have composed with great facility, working everything out in his head. Abundant evidence for Beethoven's struggles comes from his numerous sketchbooks, which were sufficiently prominent and unusual to draw forth comment from several eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of him. For example, Ignaz von Seyfried reported: “He was never found on the street without a small note-book in which he was wont to record his passing ideas.” Although Beethoven is not the only composer to have used sketchbooks, he seems to have been the first to have done so in any kind of systematic way, and almost no other composer has devoted such a large proportion of his time to refining his initial ideas through sketching processes.

Beethoven's propensity for making rough drafts and sketches for his works began almost as soon as he started composing as a boy. Moreover, one of his first published works – a set of three piano sonatas of 1783 (WoO 47) – contains a number of handwritten amendments in the printed score he owned, which are not merely corrections but subtle refinement of such things as articulation marks. Such close attention to detail, and an incessant desire to seek improvement on his existing ideas, were elements that remained with him throughout his life, and gave the impetus to increasingly elaborate methods of sketching.

Introduction

‘If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 bc, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death’, speculate Long and Sedley, ‘he would hardly have recognised it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life.’ It had been eclipsed as a cultural centre by Alexandria, thanks to the patronage extended by the Ptolemies to a galaxy of scientists and literary men. In philosophy Athens remained the magnet. But the leading thinkers in the Academy and the Lyceum had in the interval been challenged by a host of rivals, some still active or influential: as well as the Cynics we may instance the younger Aristippus and his followers (known to later writers at least as Cyrenaics), various dialecticians such as Stilpo, Philo and Diodorus, and above all the Stoics and Epicureans. These philosophers did not pretend to the encyclopaedic range of scientific and cultural interests characteristic of the Academy and the Lyceum. Philosophy as practised by Stoics and Epicureans started to resemble the specialist discipline of modern times. And their systems of thought have often been perceived as constituting the deracinated philosophies of life one might expect in an age when political power was ebbing away from the city-state to the cosmopolitan courts of the Hellenistic kings. On this view the individual and his happiness become the new exclusive focus of moral reflection, displacing obsolescent questions about the best political order for the city.

A controversy which erupted in the final years of the seventeenth century threatened the survival of theatre in England. At its peak, the poet laureate, Nahum Tate, drew up “A Proposal for Regulating the Stage & Stage-Players,” describing it as “valuable only in case it is decided not to suppress the theatres entirely.” A character in George Farquhar's novel, Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698), similarly predicted that “in the Battel between the Church and the Stage” “the Theatre must down.” Such grim prophecies recalled the playhouses' mid-century fate, when a parliamentary edict in 1642 had heralded an eighteen-year ban on theatrical performances.

The attack which gave impetus to this new campaign – Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) – was the first book-length assault on the theatre by an English author to be published since William Prynne's infamous Histriomastix (1633). Pro-stage writers quickly dubbed Collier a “Younger Histrio- Mastix” and asserted that the drama's old enemies were once again venturing into the daylight.

Introduction

With the rise of persuasive public speech as a distinctive field of endeavour in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries bc, Greek political thought becomes deeply involved with democratic Athenian political practice and with Athenian legislative and judicial institutions. Significant political ideas and a distinctive form of political/ethical reasoning were developed by Athens’ practising political orators (rhētores); evidence for their ideas and style of reasoning survives in their preserved public speeches. Certain of the political ideas developed by practising orators challenged, and were in turn challenged by, teachers of formal rhetoric (rhētorikoi); this critical rhetorical tradition survives in some of the speeches of Isocrates. The political ideas and reasoning propounded by rhētores and the counter-arguments of the rhētorikoi in turn provided an important part of the intellectual context for the development of the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

The Athenian rhētores are noteworthy as the primary surviving source of ancient political writing that is genuinely sympathetic to democracy. The speeches of Athens’ public orators were written to influence large public bodies, especially the citizen assembly (ekklēsia) and people’s courts (dikastēria); another important venue was the (nearly) annual epitaphios: a public oration spoken over Athenians who had died in battle during the previous year. When addressing democratic audiences, composed primarily of ordinary citizens, the Athenian speaker necessarily paid close attention to the established social and political notions, opinions, and beliefs (i.e. the political ideology) common to most members of the Athenian citizen body (dēmos). Assembly and courtroom speakers who ignored or too overtly contravened their audiences’ deeply-entrenched ideological convictions were unlikely to win many votes.

So began the draft of a warrant, dated 19 July 1660, allowing two courtiers of Charles II to have shared control of the London public theatre. The document went on to authorize Killigrew and Davenant to give performances with scenery and music, to establish ticket prices and employee salaries, and to suffer no rival companies. This draft, written, remarkably, by Davenant himself, served as the basis for a warrant a month later stating essentially the same thing and directing the two new managers to be their own censors of plays.