Sospeso performs music by Beethoven on the American Voices concert on February 10, 2006, part of the Americas Society Fortieth Anniversary Celebration.   

Beethoven’s music enjoyed an almost immediate appeal among the growing class of bourgeois music lovers, and its popularity has never wavered. Moreover, due to an irresitible conjunction of powerfully communicative music and compelling biographical circumstances, the mythically viewed image of Beethoven the creative artist took hold quickly and tenaciously, finding little or no resistance until the 20th century. To this day, the Beethoven myth remains an indelible part of the popular imagination.

Even within his lifetime, Beethoven began to be seen within emergent conceptions of the creative artist, which are developed in a growing literary tradition of Romantically-conceived works about artists and their lives. Writers such as Bettina Brentano, who invoked the newly fascinating power of electricity as a metaphor for Beethoven’s creative powers, or E.T.A. Hoffmann, who placed Beethoven at the very portals of the ‘infinite realm of the spirit’, embraced him as a living example of the artist as suffering outsider and as courageous hero.

Public awareness of Beethoven’s socially isolating deafness was galvanized by the posthumous discovery of the 1802 Heiligenstadt Testament. This selfconscious account of a wracking martyrdom for the sake of art may itself have relied on themes from the same literary tradition that Brentano, Hoffmann and others were to draw upon when writing about Beethoven. Beethoven’s famous letter to the ‘Immortal Beloved’, also discovered after his death, help confirm his stature as a true Romantic. Here was a creative artist who felt cut off from the simple communal joys of society, who yearned for an idealized love, and who was able to react to these privations with an outpouring of music conceived on an unprecedented scale. A more potent model for the Romantic view of the artist could hardly be imagined. Add to this the fact that music itself was newly elevated by leading aesthetic theories to the sublime copestone of all artistic endeavour, and the mythic ascension of Beethoven seems virtually inevitable.

Several defining aspects of the critical reception of Beethoven contributed to the perpetuation of the Beethoven myth. He was widely held, from the earliest years of the 19th century, to be the culminating figure in a progressive triumvirate of musical greatness: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Not only is he here placed as the highest term of a triad, he was also understood to have descended from a line of genius: he was possessed of a secure spiritual patrimony. In the benevolent formulation of his patron Count Waldstein, Beethoven went to off to Vienna to receive ‘Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands’. Such early consecration is a powerful trope in myths of the great artist.

Another decisive triadic formation in the composer’s reception is found in the early and sustained adherence to the idea of three style periods in his musical output. Here, too, the attractions of a triadic framework are manifest: they include the importance of the triad as a venerable organizing strategy (beginning, middle, end) and as a narrative structure that can support both an organic view of Beethoven’s compositional development (the middle period as bloom, the late period as decay) as well as a teleological view (the first two periods as preparatory to, and culminating in, the third).

These two views have coloured much of the history of Beethoven’s critical reception. In the broadest account of that history, one may discern a turn from the organic view to the teleological view, from regarding the middle period as the peak of Beethoven’s output to regarding the late period as such. Indeed, of all his music, the music of the so-called late period has undergone the biggest transformation in its reception. Many early critics held these works to be the symptoms of illness; the prevailing later view prefers to understand them as the highest testimony to his genius. The decisive turn to this latter view was helped by Wagner’s influential monograph of 1870, written for Beethoven’s centenary, in which he glorified Beethoven’s deafness as a trait of enhanced interiority — the deaf composer forced to listen inwardly.

The turn inward is a leading characteristic of 19th-century subjectivity; in this cultural field, Beethoven’s deafness was initially understood as the tragic plight of the suffering artist and then as the guarantee of interiority, the sine qua non for the production of the highest art. This view reached its summit in the treatment by J.W.N. Sullivan, writing in 1927, for whom the late-period music marked a synthesizing vision of life in which all suffering is subsumed, ‘a final stage of illumination’ in the composer’s spiritual development. But around the same time as Wagner’s quasi-mystical invocation of Beethoven’s creative process, a more empirical approach to the composer was gaining ground. Taking advantage of an enormous amount of existing documentation, Alexander Thayer gradually published his celebrated biography, in which he sought to counteract mistaken views of previous biographers by carefully restricting himself to the known facts about Beethoven’s life.

Imaginative speculation about the composer’s spiritual life yielded to a thickly detailed account of Beethoven’s personal and professional circumstances. That he never completed the biography may well be due to his Victorian distaste for what he began to descry under the varnish of the myth. Thayer prided himself on his use of Beethoven’s actual sketchbooks to help solve problems of chronology. The study and transcription of Beethoven’s sketches was pioneered by Gustav Nottebohm, again in the 1870s; they have since been the object of assiduous labour by analysts and musicologists. For in their sprawling and unruly traces, Beethoven’s voluminous sketches provide a palpable sense of the composer’s workshop, one which at once confirms the compositional act as both a human undertaking and a titanic struggle. Maintaining a status that hovers between holy relic and evidentiary documentation, the sketches offer the attractions of objectivity while keeping signature tenets of the myth alive and well. Thayer’s biography and Nottebohm’s work on the sketches together furnished the foundation for modern Beethoven scholarship. If late 19-century positivism thus began to peer behind the aura of the Beethoven myth, a full frontal assault on it was not launched until the 20th century.

Like so many other products of early 19th-century culture, the Beethoven myth faced the cleansing fires of 20th-century disillusionment — but the figure itself remained as potent as ever. The early years of the century witnessed a concerted effort to wrest Beethoven away from the Romantics and reclaim him for Classical art. In 1927, the centenary year of Beethoven’s death, a spate of essays, including those by Hermann Abert, Guido Adler and D.F. Tovey, argued for the classical virtues of Beethoven’s music. Arnold Schmitz wrote an entire book polemically engaging what he called ‘the Romantic image of Beethoven’. For Schmitz, Beethoven did not inhabit some romanticized realm of art separate from reality and its laws but rather deeply respected and supported the traditions of musical art in the service of a distinctly moral vision.

In Germany, this view of the composer as a standard bearer of normality and moral health began to spread in conjunction with overtly nationalistic appropriations of Beethoven. In England, the criticism of Tovey also stressed the healthy normality of Beethoven’s art. Several decades later, Beethoven the man would submit to uncompromising psychoanalysis, emerging as anything but healthy. In their 1954 study Beethoven and his Nephew, the psychoanalysts E. and R. Sterba portray Beethoven as something like a hero of a lurid naturalist drama; they describe a disturbed man and the people he hurt. Maynard Solomon’s more tempered account of 1977 (revised 1998) sympathetically relates the foibles and pretensions of a humanly flawed artist. Both accounts refuse to flinch from the more troubling aspects of the creative persona, and both go far to transform the mythical figure into a flesh and blood man. Related to these efforts are recent attempts to augment our knowledge of the economic conditions of Beethoven’s era, the system of patronage that served him so well, and the exact nature of his own financial circumstances.

All these studies choose to observe Beethoven from the perspective of the social, commercial and psychological forces of the modern world. Thus they serve to place him within the traffic and commerce of a recognizable reality; he no longer appears as a tortured but transcendent onlooker from some romanticized realm of genius. Perhaps the most unmistakable sign of demythification is the steadily growing interest in reception studies, for here the Beethoven myth is treated and studied as a cultural construction – the interest now lies in the nature of its formation and persistence. Initially prompted by the attractions of reception theory in literature and further motivated by a more strictly postmodern interest in the ways and means of the musical canon, the study of reception is now one of the more active branches of writing about Beethoven.

Meanwhile, traditional historical scholarship is by no means finished with Beethoven. The 1980s and 90s witnessed several crucially important additions to the foundation laid by Thayer and Nottebohm. First and foremost, the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn has continued to produce its indispensable editions: by the end of the 20th century Beethoven’s letters were published in a new and definitive seven-volume edition (1996–8); the transcription and publication of the conversation books were lacking only two of its twelve projected volumes (1968–); and the even longer-term projects of the Neue Ausgabe (of all Beethoven’s works) and the Skizzenausgabe (all the sketchbooks) were both moving forward. In 1985, Alan Tyson, Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter published The Beethoven Sketchbooks, a groundbreaking reference work that reconstructs the bewilderingly scattered corpus; and in 1996, Theodore Albrecht published three volumes of letters written to Beethoven. The long awaited establishment of these primary materials will give Beethoven scholars much to do in the 21st century.

Although the Beethoven myth has been dressed down in the academy, it remains alive as ever in mainstream commercial culture. A good deal of its vitality stems from the kitsch industry: the standard image of Beethoven’s face and mane – the ‘Lion King’ of Western music – is reproduced ubiquitously, while the opening motive of the Fifth Symphony is still Western art music’s most recognizable roar. An almost 200-year-old stream of minor novels, novellas and films about Beethoven continues unabated, less accomplished descendants of the Romantic Künstlerroman; the most substantial of these is Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christoph (1904–12). (There is even a subtradition detailing the dangerous effects of listening to Beethoven’s music: Robert Griepenkerl’s 1838 novel about a fatally boisterous Beethoven cult, Das Musikfest; oder, Die Beethovener, finds a distant echo in the ultra-violence of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, strikingly filmed by Stanley Kubrick.) Above all, the more explicitly highbrow commodification of classical music, in music shops and concert programmes, continues to provide supply for demand. It is indeed the perennial appeal of Beethoven’s music that perhaps tells most heavily for the persistence of the myth in popular culture.

(Excerpted from Scott G. Burnham's article in The New Grove.)