Beethoven's professional life in Vienna was largely defined by his lack of institutional employment. Only his deafness had an equal impact on his career. In Bonn he had served the electoral court, playing organ and viola, and was expected to resume his duties after a period of study with Haydn that began in 1792. But the cessation of his salary in 1794 (perhaps for misleading the Elector Max Franz about his progress and refusing to return home) and the collapse of the electoral court in the French controlled Rhineland later in that year did not bode well for his prospects in Bonn, and the freedom and opportunities he enjoyed in the imperial city outweighed the strength of long friendships and familial obligations he had left behind. His concerted attempt to secure an appointment, with the Vienna Court Theater in December 1806, not surprisingly failed: after the problems and acrimony surrounding the performance of the first two versions of Leonore (Beethoven's original title of Fidelio) in 1805 and 1806, the directors apparently did not even respond to his multi-year offer to compose one opera and a smaller dramatic or choral work per annum. Beethoven sought the position, which would have allowed him ample time to compose instrumental music of his own choosing, despite continuing material and social support from a group of Viennese aristocrats who in the 1790s had eased his entry into Viennese cultural life.

Since its own time, Restoration drama has been controversial, provoking radically different judgments about its aesthetic value and moral significance. Critical debates reach back at least as far as 1698 when the High Tory churchman, Jeremy Collier, published a scathing indictment of Restoration comedy for its immorality and contempt for authority; various defenders of the drama, including playwrights such as William Congreve, countered these charges by arguing that comedy satirizes vice and vanity to secure the socioeconomic stability premised on feminine virtue and masculine property rights. The terms of this controversy have persisted for three hundred years – Collier and his critical descendants argue that Restoration comedy is obscene, blasphemous, and heartless; its champions claim that it offers timeless insights into the human condition or tellingly satirizes the vices and follies of its era. If these responses to the drama often tell us more about their authors than about the plays themselves, they also describe a contentious history of efforts to domesticate a morally suspect theatre by assimilating Restoration comedy to larger critical and ideological paradigms.

Of the reception of Beethoven's music these last two hundred years, one thing is clear: there has been little trace of the tidal cycles of popular and critical approbation suffered by almost every other important composer. More specifically, no significant ebb tide has yet been charted in the reception of his music. Or it may be that his fortunes are subject to a tide table of an exceedingly grander temporal scale: perhaps Beethoven will go out of fashion for the next two hundred years, only to return with force in some unthinkable new world. And yet, his image – however abiding – has not simply stood in place over the last two centuries, like some historically inert monolith. One may mark discernible stations in the critical reception of his life and music, points in the historical flow that seem to gather into a larger narrative.

I would like to construct four such stations, each anchored to a symbolic milestone in the history of Beethoven reception: 1827, death of Beethoven and birth of the artist as Romantic revolutionary and hero; 1870, centenary of Beethoven's birth and symbolic rebirth of the composer as a spiritual and political Redeemer; 1927, centenary of the composer's death and symbolic death of the figure of the Romantic artist in favor of that of the law-giver and natural force; and 1970, bicentennial of the composer's birth and symbolic birth of the culturally constructed hero. Beyond tracing the vibrant afterlife Beethoven has enjoyed in mainstream Western musical thought, the resulting trajectory illuminates a perhaps typical process of canon formation, whereby a canonic subject is gradually transformed into a canonic object.

The place of political thought in Josephus’ writings

The historian Josephus succeeds Philo as the exponent of a political theory centred on Judaism and expressed in Greek. The two writers are intellectually far apart, and Josephus had little penchant for philosophical speculation. Nonetheless, their backgrounds and experience are comparable. From a base within the small Jewish social elite of the Roman east, each acted for a period as political leader, defender of the Jews and delegate to the emperor; in Josephus’ case, the mission marked the beginning of his career. Josephus’ literary output, almost as much as Philo’s, belongs to the diaspora: transferring from Jerusalem to Rome, he addressed readers in the Greek world. Admittedly, unlike Philo, who probably knew no Hebrew, Josephus, of priestly and royal stock and brought up in an Aramaic/Hebrew milieu, had to labour, he informs us, to perfect his grasp of the language in which he wrote. But this he successfully did, and, for all his Roman patronage, the framework and the intellectual agenda of his writings are primarily Greek.

It is commonly thought that Josephus knew and exploited Philo. Thus, part of the discussion of Jewish practices in the Against Apion reveals a close dependence on Philo’s now fragmentary Hypothetical. At the same time, the bulk of Josephus’ extensive output is historical; there theory emerges, as we would expect, as analysis in the context of the narration of events – whether distant, recent or contemporary.

In the Hellenistic age changing political conditions set the stage for refinement and adaptation of the classical analysis and evaluation of forms of government. The most significant development was the rise of powerful autocratic monarchies on the model of the Persian and Egyptian kingships.

By the second century bc even the traditional kingships of mainland Greece, such as the Macedonian elected kingship and the limited dual kingship of Sparta, had been transformed into the autocratic Hellenistic type. Greek city-states continued to exist, but had to work out a new relationship with the monarchs, whose imperial ambitions encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. Most either settled for reduced autonomy under the authority of one of the monarchies, or banded together into an independent regional league. The development of regional leagues, chiefly on the Greek mainland, was another development that affected Hellenistic thought.

A third was the disappearance of the distinction between democracy and aristocracy or oligarchy. In the wake of intervening political and economic developments, the typical free city-state remained a democracy, but with a strong executive component, dominated by a narrow group of old wealthy families. Since such cities regarded themselves as democracies despite their aristocratic orientation, the classical distinction disappeared. The significant difference was now between a city with a high degree of self-rule and one administered by an agent of one of the Hellenistic kings, often in the shadow of a military garrison.

Beethoven made instrumental music seem to matter as it had not before. Charles Ives interpreted the “oracle” at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony as “the soul of humanity at the door of the divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened – and the human become the divine,” because the music apparently struck him, as it has many of the rest of us, with the vividness of revelation. Like the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the fusion of introduction and first theme in the Ninth, the point of recapitulation in the Eroica, and the interconnectedness of the C# minor quartet all have an aura of compelling significance. Ives chose to claim a portion of Beethovenian grandeur for American culture and himself by placing the Fifth Symphony's motto at the center of a theme in the Concord Sonata. And, indeed, much of music history after Beethoven reads as a series of engagements – aggressive, inspired, ironic, elegiac – with his greatness and the potential that he had revealed.

A new world of sound and a new subjectivity

Richard Wagner's reactions to Beethoven, voluminously documented in his own writings and in the recollections of his associates, exposed a number of key themes in the reception of Beethoven and his music; his observations will therefore serve as an occasional guide in this survey. Wagner attributed his very awakening as a musician to the Ninth Symphony: “I was struck at once, as if by force of destiny, with the long-sustained perfect fifths with which the first movement begins: these sounds, which played such a spectral role in my earliest impressions of music, came to me as the ghostly fundamental of my own life.”

The problem of farce

If one believes the column in Annals of English Drama which defines the “Type”of each play listed, Thomas Otway's The Cheats of Scapin (1677) ought to be the first English farce. Whatever else may be distinctive about Otway's play, it seems inherently improbable that it could claim that honor. But perhaps it is no honor: the naming of a work as a tragedy is construed as a label of dignity, an attempt to lay claim to an elevated cultural position and a network of weighty cultural resonances within which the work demands to be deemed worthy of a place; the naming of a work as a farce is more likely to be accompanied by an apology. When Leo Hughes and A. H. Scouten edited a collection of ten Restoration and eighteenth-century farces, their preface immediately set out to answer any accusation that they thought the plays good: “We have no illusions about the intrinsic merit of these little pieces. There is no great literary merit to be found in any one of them. In fact, their significance lies not so much in their merit as in their popularity.” Restoration playwrights would have had no difficulty understanding their point of view. Again and again, throughout the Restoration and long before the appearance of The Cheats of Scapin, Restoration dramatists sought carefully to define their own work as not being farce, a scrupulous resistance to the triviality that they too assumed to be inherent in the form, a resistance as necessary in the 1660s as in the 1940s.

What is Restoration comedy? The first temptation is to define the comedy of the fifty years following the restoration of Charles II in the terms used by the playwrights themselves. But it does not require much reading of seventeenth-century comic theory to realize that playwrights and critics shared few assumptions about comedy and fewer conclusions. Most agreed that comedy should meet the Horatian requirements for all literature – that it please and instruct. Most, though not all, privileged instruction over pleasure, since most maintained that the end of comedy was moral. But when the playwrights and critics turned to how that moral end was to be recognized, not to mention realized, they quickly reached the limits of their small consensus.

The best-known exchange of views about comedy in the period took place in the 1660s between two of the most important playwrights, John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, early in their careers as comic writers.

Little more than a year after Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658, the English revolutionary regime had collapsed as a result of inner dissension and popular hostility. Early in 1660, General George Monck marched his troops from Scotland to London, reinstated to the Rump Parliament the members whose exclusion in 1648 earned it its name, commanded new elections, and quickly decided to restore the monarchy. These events, up to the calling of a free parliament, were promptly celebrated in the first Restoration comedy, John Tatham's The Rump (1660), which satirizes the selfish ambition of the Puritan grandees, and the lechery and parvenu pretentiousness of their wives. (Political insurgency was at this time commonly paired with female insubordination.) But, with the intervention of Monck, hierarchy is restored to a distracted society, many of the upstarts are demoted to street vendors, and a world turned upside is set to rights.

The Rump had many successors; for one of the principal subjects of early Restoration drama was the Restoration itself. For example, the first Restoration heroic play, the Earl of Orrery's The Generall (written in 1661), transparently reworks recent events, portraying a general (Clorimun) who turns against a usurper in order to restore a rightful king.

As a political work, the Politicus is generally regarded as a poor relation of the Republic and the Laws: on the standard view, it reflects rather scrappily on issues arising out of the Republic (especially in relation to the idea of philosopher rulers), and somehow prepares the way for the Laws. But such an approach fails to do justice to its argument. Once its twists and turns are properly understood, it stands out as a major document of Platonic political theory in its own right; less bulky though it may be than either of the other two works, and certainly less appealing than the Republic, it offers real illumination of some central themes, and adds some important new elements which are not in any way superseded in the Laws.

The first, and perhaps chief, problem for the interpreter is to understand the structure of the argument, and its outcome or outcomes. The dialogue has four main components: a long series of ‘divisions’ aimed at defining the politikos, the ‘politician’ or (more traditionally) the ‘statesman’, together with his ‘art’ or expertise (‘statesmanship’); a cosmological myth, inserted into the divisions at an early stage, which allegedly helps take them forward; a discussion of the role of law in ideal and actual societies, which similarly interrupts the process of division, though it is formally motivated by it; and, after the divisions have been completed, a description of the role of the statesman in ‘weaving together’ complementary character traits or kinds of temperament among the citizens.

Restoration actors and actresses worked very hard. Acting on approximately two hundred days of the year over the course of an eight- or nine-month season (not counting summer tours and fairs), key company members could each be expected to play on relatively short notice perhaps as many as thirty different roles. The bills changed quickly, alternating between stock plays, revivals from recent seasons, and new plays. In the face of sometimes fickle demand for drama (daily attendance at plays varied considerably throughout the period), the actors and actresses supplied a specialized and highly skilled service – the performance.

Their business, practically speaking, was to embody the characters sketched by the playwrights, but their larger, unstated task was to provide their audiences with symbolic actions of various kinds. Whether they intended to or not, actors and actresses in Restoration England made themselves objects of public fantasy. According to Tom Brown, the acid-tongued observer of the London underworld, their workplace became known as the “Enchanted Island,” and their job was to populate it with attractive (and compliant) natives.

Isolating ‘political thought’ in Latin historical narratives is more difficult than in the works of historians who wrote in Greek. Explicit theorizing was not a Roman characteristic. But that does not mean that what Roman historical writers wrote did not reflect their conceptions of political institutions and structures and of how they changed over time. The further that a particular statement about historical events deviates from ‘real’ history (as in the analyses which we find in Plato or Aristotle, or in the Greek elements in Cicero), the easier it is to identify – and isolate – such a statement as ‘political thought’; but statements that correspond to the collective morality of a culture represent ‘political thought’; too.

Rome was a society used to accepting authority, whether that of the head of the household (paterfamilias) at home (domi) or the commander (imperator) in war (bello, militiae). From the fourth century bc on, warfare became the most important element in the Roman value-system. In war, obedience to the commander could not afford to be challenged; but the language in which domestic political issues were discussed was equally based on authority – that provided by the speaker’s virtus (proved by his own great deeds or those of his ancestors) or by ancestral tradition, mos maiorum, from which the speaker selected those precedents (exempla) which supported his argument. When the consul Cornelius Scipio Nasica at a contio (formal public gathering) in 138 bc heard views with which he disagreed, he did not try to persuade, but told his assembled fellow-citizens: ‘Please be silent. I know better than you what is best for the state.’

Terminology

Much of our political terminology is Greek in etymology: aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy, tyranny, to take just the most obvious examples, besides politics itself and its derivatives. Most of the remainder – citizen, constitution, dictatorship, people, republic and state – have an alternative ancient derivation, from the Latin. It is the ancient Greeks, though, who more typically function as ‘our’ ancestors in the political sphere, ideologically, mythologically and symbolically. It is they, above all, who are soberly credited with having ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ not only city-republican forms but also politics in the strong sense: that is, communal decision-making effected in public after substantive discussion by or before voters deemed relevantly equal, and on issues of principle as well as purely technical, operational matters.

Yet whether it was in fact the Greeks – rather than the Phoenicians, say, or Etruscans – who first discovered or invented politics in this sense, it is unarguable that their politics and ours differ sharply from each other, both theoretically and practically. This is partly, but not only nor primarily, because they mainly operated within the framework of the polis, with a radically different conception of the nature of the citizen, and on a very much smaller and more intimately personal scale (the average polis of the Classical period is thought to have numbered no more than 500 to 2,000 adult male citizens; fifth-century Athens’ figure of 40,000 or more was hugely exceptional). The chief source of difference, however, is that for both practical and theoretical reasons they enriched or supplemented politics with practical ethics (as we might put it).

Seven years before Charles II was returned to power, eleven after the Puritan regime had brought all legitimate theatrical activity in London to an abrupt halt, Aston Cokaine, writing a dedicatory poem to Richard Brome's belatedly published Five New Plays (1653), was already looking forward to the day when the playhouses would reopen. Presciently, he imagined a restored theatre which would be first and foremost a place for the revival of England's native dramatic classics, and only secondarily a venue where living playwrights might resume their interrupted careers:

As Cokaine's poem in part suggests (apparently remembering Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights among the glories of the lost Caroline stage), the repertories of the pre-Civil War playhouses had always included a substantial percentage of revived plays, some of them half a century old by the time the theatres were closed in 1642.

Julian and Themistius

In November ad 355 the emperor Constantius II elevated his twenty-four-year-old cousin Julian to the rank of Caesar, or number two in the hierarchy. On hearing the news one of Julian’s old teachers, the philosopher Themistius - author of surviving paraphrases of various Aristotelian treatises - wrote from Constantinople a letter to the new Caesar congratulating him and celebrating the advent of a Platonic philosopher king, comparable with a Dionysus or a Heracles. The letter does not survive, but we can infer quite a lot of what Themistius must have said in it from the successive extant panegyrics he addressed to emperors from Constantius on, and above all from Julian’s reply in his Letter to Themistius (probably ad 356), which is also extant. Themistius seems to have appealed both to history and to theory: Julian is to emulate and indeed surpass Solon, Lycurgus and Pittacus; and in switching from ‘indoors’ to ‘outdoors’ philosophy (Ep.Them. 262e-263a) he is not only following in the steps of philosophers like Thrasyllus and Musonius Rufus, who took up positions at court, but he is also living up to Aristotle’s ideal in the Politics, where in a discussion of the rival claims of the active and the leisured life statesmen are praised as ‘the architects of external actions’ (263d; cf. Pol. VII.3, 1325 b21-3).

Julian’s reply is not exactly uncivil, but it is lacking in grace, and it is highly critical. Consider the question of the comparative merits of the philosophical and the political life, or - as Themistius sometimes puts his contrast between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ philosophy elsewhere (e.g. Or.8.104a-b, 31.352b-c) - the choice between two paths of philosophy: the more divine and the human, more beneficial to the community.

The aim of all of Aristotle’s practical philosophy is to provide a description of the best life for a human being, along with an understanding of how that life is to be achieved or at least approached. The discussion of individual happiness (eudaimonia) in the ethical writings and the discussion of political arrangements in the Politics are complementary and equally necessary parts of that inquiry. The happiness of an individual is that of a naturally political animal whose life and happiness are essentially interwoven with that of his fellow citizens. The happiness of a city is nothing other than the happiness of the individuals who constitute it. The best or happy life is the life of virtue. Justice, in one of its forms, is complete virtue in an individual. The best life is thus the just life, and the best city the one populated by just citizens. This much said, much remains to be explained, in particular, what Aristotle thought justice was.

Aristotle’s writings about justice, found chiefly in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics and the third book of the Politics, are notoriously difficult. If there is any explanation for this apart from the combination of the complexity of the issues being dealt with, the state of our texts, and the identity of the author, it has to do with Aristotle’s characteristic method of answering philosophical questions. He approaches all topics through the views of his predecessors, often quite explicitly.

While Restoration playwrights were influenced by Shakespeare and earlier English tragedians, the years that Charles II and his court had spent in France during the Interregnum (1642-60) made them acquainted with French playwrights and theorists who exercised an important (albeit unfortunate) critical authority concerning tragedy that created a thematic and stylistic disjunction between the major serious dramatists of the Restoration and earlier English playwrights.

French influence on Restoration drama can be overstated. French critics, for instance, thought they could derive from Aristotle a set of rules called “the unities.” The unity of action meant that there should be a single, serious action of magnitude to the play; i.e., not merely the elimination of subplots, but assuredly the absence of comic interludes (such as the gravedigger scene in Hamlet). The unity of place stipulated a single setting.

The three style periods

The idea that Beethoven's music and his career as a composer fall into three periods was first proposed in rudimentary form by an anonymous French author in 1818 – at the very beginning of what we now consider the third period and almost ten years before his death in 1827. It was advanced again in 1828, and taken up by some of the most influential biographers and authors of life-and-works studies in the nineteenth century, among them A. Schindler (Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven, 1840), and W. Lenz (Beethoven et ses trois styles, 1852). Yet almost from the start objections were raised to its usefulness, and it did not figure prominently in the seminal biography by A. W. Thayer (first published in Germany in three volumes, 1866, 1872, 1879), which includes little discussion of the music. And there was little agreement among those authors subscribing to the idea about the criterion for and the chronological limits of the “style periods.” But the necessity of imposing some kind of narrative structure was self-evident, and, while some twentieth-century authors have advanced four-part and even five-part divisions, the original ternary one has proved to be remarkably strong.

As ever more details of Beethoven's life became known, it was recognized that “the breaks between the periods correspond with the major turning-points in Beethoven's biography.” This certainly increased the attractiveness of the basic idea, regardless of the number of periods proposed, because with the new biographical underpinning, such divisions provided a (superficially) persuasive answer to the question of the connections between the artist and his art. The new periods are precipitated by personal crises that help trigger artistic ones; the new style is the result of Beethoven’s overcoming or surmounting both personal and creative problems.