The Beethoven Syndrome
Hearing Music as Autobiography
MARK EVAN BONDS
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bonds, Mark Evan, author.
Title: The Beethoven syndrome : hearing music as autobiography / Mark Evan Bonds. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020718 | ISBN 9780190068479 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190068509 (online) | ISBN 9780190068486 (updf) | ISBN 9780190068493 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—Philosophy and aesthetics—History. | Expression (Philosophy)—History. | Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—Appreciation—History. Classification: LCC ML3800 B75 2019 | DDC 781.1/7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020718
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Oxford University Press gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for support in the publication of this book.
To Sam Hammond
1.1 Title page of Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1747)
5.1 Detail from Rochlitz’s publication of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 29 (17 October 1827): 709–10
5.2 Hugo Höppener (“Fidus”), “Beethoven,” Die Jugend 11 (1903): 171
6.1 Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman, Haydn Composing His “Creation”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Austrian National Science Foundation (FWF), whose support during the period 2015–17 allowed me to complete the bulk of this study. It is particularly fitting that my time in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study was made possible by a fellowship endowed by the late Edward T. Cone, whose writings on the compositional persona provided an important starting point for my research.
I have also benefitted from ongoing conversations with departmental colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, particularly Andrea Bohlman, Tim Carter, Annegret Fauser, and Stefan Litwin. The staff of the Music Library there—Philip Vandermeer, Diane Steinhaus, and Carrie Monette—provided its consistenly unfailing support.
Colleagues at other institutions with whom I wish I could have had more conversations include Francesca Brittan (Case Western Reserve), Todd Cronan and Kevin Karnes (Emory), Ryan Ebright (Bowling Green State University), James Hepokoski (Yale), William Kinderman (University of Illinois), Tomas McAuley and David Trippett (Cambridge), Christopher Reynolds (University of California, Davis), William Robin (University of Maryland), Gilbert Sewall (Phillips Academy), Elaine Sisman (Columbia), Christian Thorau (Universität Potsdam), and Jeremy Yudkin (Boston University). My year in Vienna on a stipend from the Lise-MeitnerProgramm was especially valuable, and I will always have fond memories of discussions with my sponsor there, Birgit Lodes (Universität Wien), and with her colleagues John D. Wilson and Elisabeth Reisinger. Evenings with the “three M’s” from the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien—Marie-Agnes Dittrich, Martin Eybl, and Melanie Unseld—were as delightful as they were thought-provoking. And I owe special thanks to Michael Morse (Trent University), who somehow managed to make sense of a very early draft of this book and pointed out the many ways in which it could be improved.
At Oxford University Press, Suzanne Ryan, was once again the ideal editor and Barbara Norton the ideal copy editor.
As always, my family helped in far more ways than they could possibly realize. While often indirect, those ways were no less important to bringing this project to fruition. To Dorothea, Peter, and Andrew: Thank you.
Portions of chapters 3 and 5 draw on my essay “Irony and Incomprehensibility: Beethoven’s ‘Serioso’ String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, and the Path to the Late Style,” JAMS 70 (2017): 285–356. Brief passages in chapter 7 appeared in a slightly different form in chapter 13 of my Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Abbreviations
19CM 19th-Century Music
AfMw Archiv für Musikwissenschaft
AmZ Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
BAmZ Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
BGA Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel: Gesamtausgabe, 7 vols., ed. Sieghard Brandenburg (Munich: G. Henle, 1996–98).
JAMS Journal of the American Musicological Society
KdU Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Heiner F. Klemme (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001).
KFSA Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–).
MQ Musical Quarterly
NZfM Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
Unless otherwise noted, emphases in quotations appear in the original, and all translations are my own.
Introduction
The Instrumental Self
Beethoven struggled with many things during his life, but neglect was not one of them. By the time he died in 1827, his contemporaries had written so much about his music that the most recent anthology of their collected criticisms runs to almost seven hundred pages.1 Yet aside from a few reviews from the composer’s final years that speculate on the effects of his increasing deafness, these commentaries make almost no attempt to relate his works to his life or vice versa. The overwhelming majority of critics at the time in fact knew little or nothing about him beyond the barest outlines of his career, and the few who did, based mostly in Vienna, did not consider his personal self particularly relevant to the music he was creating. Writing from faraway Thuringia in his 1812 biographical dictionary of musicians, Ernst Ludwig Gerber acknowledged the “serious and gloomy” nature of many of Beethoven’s works but explained this by pointing to the wartime conditions being endured by so many composers in German-speaking lands during a period of seemingly endless conflict.2 In short, no one during Beethoven’s lifetime perceived his music as an expression of his inner self.
Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century listeners were routinely hearing Beethoven’s music as a revelation of his soul, and they regarded his soul, in turn, as the key to understanding his music. Critics eagerly mapped his life onto his works and his works onto his life. This new way of listening, moreover, extended well beyond Beethoven: audiences were now predisposed to hear the music of all composers—particularly their instrumental works—as a personal outpouring of the self, a form of sonic autobiography.
What changed? Why did listeners begin to hear music in such a fundamentally new way in such a short span of time? And why, in turn, has this mode of listening become increasingly suspect over the past hundred years? The inclination of listeners to hear composers in their music—the “Beethoven syndrome”—is so deeply ingrained that it is easy to forget just how novel and powerful it was for almost a century. “Syndrome” is not too strong a term.
The Beethoven Syndrome. Mark Evan Bonds, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190068479.001.0001
As in medicine, it is used here to indicate a pattern of symptoms, in this case behaviors that point to an underlying condition. The predisposition to hear music as a form of autobiography began in responses to Beethoven but soon extended to the output of composers in general and dominated musical criticism for almost a hundred years. Listeners routinely turned to biography to explain the general tendencies of what they were hearing in any given artists’ output, as well as any unusual exceptions to those tendencies. The rapid decline of such habits of listening in the 1920s reflects a general recognition that this predisposition, while not wholly without foundation, had gone too far. This mode of listening nevertheless remain with us today, even if in diminished form.
The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography explores the changing perceptions of music as a subjective outpouring of the compositional self. Beethoven is the central figure in this account, and his instrumental music was an important catalyst for the new mode of listening that took hold in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But this change cannot be ascribed to his works alone. It arose out of the convergence of aesthetic, philosophical, cultural, economic, and technological forces. New conceptions about the nature of all the arts, changing constructions of the self, the rising philosophical prestige of the emotions, and the growth of a mass-market music culture all contributed to a new way of hearing music— and above all instrumental music—as a medium of self-revelation.
The discourse on the perception of compositional subjectivity centers on changing conceptions of musical expression and falls into three broad phases:
(1) 1770–1830. Not until the closing decades of the eighteenth century did critics begin to address the relationship between a composer’s output and innermost self. Commentators had long kept the two quite separate, for they conceived of expression not as a subjective outpouring of the self, but as an objective construct, which is to say, as the projection of a text (in the case of vocal music) or the representation of an emotion (in the case of instrumental music), consciously crafted in either case to evoke a calculated response in listeners.
(2) 1830–1920. The growing prestige of instrumental music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries raised fundamental questions about the source and nature of the expression heard in those works. Critics
continued to perceive vocal music primarily as the projection of a text, but they now began to hear instrumental music as a manifestation of its creator’s unique individuality. The tendency to hear composers’ selves in their instrumental works took hold with remarkable speed in the years just after Beethoven’s death. Composers encouraged this perception by advocating an aesthetics of subjectivity in their own writings on music and through their strategies of self-promotion within an increasingly public and competitive marketplace.
(3) Since 1920. In the wake of World War I, the assumption that all expression came from the inner self lost its dominant position almost as quickly as it had attained it: many leading composers and critics returned to an outlook that openly acknowledged expression—and art in general—as an artifice. This renewed conception of expression as an objective construct became a key element of modernist aesthetics, beginning with the New Objectivity of the interwar years and running through the high modernism of mid-century. The inclination to hear a musical work as an audible manifestation of its composer’s essential being has nevertheless proven remarkably resilient. The notion of works as life continues to flourish in the public mind, particularly in the realm of popular music, and it continues to play a role in the ways we hear the works of composers from both the past and present.
The three parts of this book correspond to these changing conceptions of musical expression. Part One, “The Paradigm of Objective Expression,” surveys the period between approximately 1770 and 1830, when music functioned as an essentially rhetorical art, in which it fell to composers (and, working on their behalf, performers) to move listeners in a particular direction, to persuade them emotionally. Rhetoric is a theory of poetics: it provided a framework of composition in both the oratorical and musical senses of the term, and within this framework, expression was understood as a vital means to the end of moving an audience. Practitioners of the rhetorical arts, whether verbal or musical, anticipated the responses of their audiences and applied their craft accordingly. Listeners of the time, in turn, regarded composers as highly skilled artisans who could be identified through their distinctively individual styles, but not as individuals who had somehow imbued their creations with their own personal identities. Part Two, “The Paradigm of Subjective Expression,” examines the period from roughly 1830
to 1920, in which the burden of understanding shifted to listeners, who for the first time in the history of music were now expected to work, to make sense of what they were hearing. This was especially challenging if the music at hand had no words. Hermeneutics, in contrast to rhetoric, provides a framework of reception, not production. Within the new paradigm of subjectivity, listeners understood expression as a personal utterance, and they were prepared to hear music—especially instrumental music—as a revelation of the compositional self. Part Three, “Dual Paradigms: Since 1920,” examines the ways in which contrasting perceptions of expression have coexisted and mingled, often uneasily, at different times and for different repertoires.
The key issue throughout all three periods—and throughout this book—is not the extent to which composers have sought to express their inner selves, nor the extent to which any given work might reveal something about a composer’s inner self, but rather the extent to which the listening public has perceived a composer’s works as the subjective expression of that inner self.
Subjectivity, it must be said, is a much bigger word nowadays than it used to be, especially when it comes to music. Over the past thirty years or so, many commentators have invoked it to describe a contingent frame of reference implied by a given work;3 others have posited subjectivity in the music itself;4 and still others have treated it as a function of agency, an equally capacious concept.5 Valuable as these approaches may be, they do not for the most part reflect the sensibilities of earlier times, whose listeners understood subjectivity first and foremost as a projection of the compositional self. As a history of listening, then, the present study employs the term subjectivity as it was primarily understood in discourse about music throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth: as the projection of a composer’s interiority.
The perception of music as an expression of its creator’s self seems intuitively familiar to us today, yet it is striking how long it took to appear in music as opposed to the verbal arts. Poets and literary critics had begun to articulate an aesthetics of subjectivity as early as the 1770s in the so-called Sturm und Drang. Lyric poetry in particular, with its first-person perspective, enjoyed unprecedented prestige around this time, and Goethe, the leading poet of his generation, was particularly outspoken in his view of the written word as a vehicle of self-expression. From early on in his life, he maintained, he had routinely transformed personal experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, into “an image, a poem,” and in this manner was able to come to terms with his own subjectivity. He deemed his writings as a whole “fragments of a great
confession.” The “artist must act from within,” he declared, for “dissemble as he might, he can always bring forth only his own individuality.”6 Goethe considered “poetic content” equivalent to the “content of one’s own life.” He urged young poets to ask themselves of each poem “if it incorporates something experienced and if this experience has developed you.” Poetry, as he put it, “compels its possessor to reveal himself. Poetic utterances are involuntary confessions in which our interior opens itself up.”7
The idea of literary creativity as coming “from within” reflects a gradual drift away from the long-standing premise of divine inspiration, which by the late Enlightenment no longer seemed adequate to explain the products of genius. Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) had compelled his contemporaries to rethink their most basic assumptions about human perception and understanding, and his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790) extended this new epistemological foundation to the realm of aesthetics. After Kant, art could no longer be considered merely a source of pleasure: it could now be regarded as a source of knowledge, generated by an active engagement of the beholder with the work of art. The subjectivity of self now occupied center stage in both the production and reception of art.8
In England, William Wordsworth made subjectivity the basis of an ongoing campaign to shape the way in which the public read his verse, and for that matter all verse. Responding to the initially unfavorable reception of his Lyrical Ballads, he asserted in the preface to the collection’s second edition (1800) that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Those feelings would be “recollected in tranquility” but in such a way that “by a species of reaction the tranquility disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”9 Wordsworth thus posited the poet’s personal emotions grounded in actual, lived experiences as the driving force of the creative process.
Changing conceptions of the self encouraged this new attitude toward subjectivity. Once again Goethe played a key role. He maintained—and demonstrated—that the self could be cultivated through effort and sheer force of will, and that this process was central to the human experience. His ideal of self-development (Bildung), articulated most notably in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, 1795–96) gave the subjective basis of selfhood newfound prestige. Bildung allowed—indeed, compelled—the individual to explore those aspects of
selfhood lying beneath the level of consciousness and social conventions—in short, the realm of spontaneous, unreflective emotions.
In the post-Enlightenment world, emotions were no longer something to be contained, repressed, or monitored. What Peter Gay called the nineteenth century’s “pilgrimage to the interior,” its “preoccupation with the self, to the point of neurosis,” had its antecedents, to be sure. But the generation that came of age around mid-century, as Gay observed, was the first to make this sense of self-consciousness “available, almost inescapable, to a wide public,” and it did so most forcefully through the arts, which were coming to be seen more and more as outpourings of the innermost self. In retrospect, Isaiah Berlin considered this “the exfoliation of the self” a quintessentially Romantic tendency.10
Instrumental music lent itself particularly well to “exfoliations of the self,” for it operated outside the strictures of language and for that reason was widely held to spring from a deeper, more primordial, and thus more “authentic” site of the self. And it was in fact instrumental music that provoked a conceptual realignment of the perceived relationship between composers’ lives and their works. Vocal music continued to be heard as the projection of a text, and critics recognized that the act of setting words to music would necessarily compel a composer to carefully consider a text’s content and character, along with such technical features as its meter, structure, and rhyme scheme. With only rare exceptions, moreover, verbal texts came from an artist other than the composer, whose task it was to enhance and amplify thoughts and emotions set down in advance by someone else.11 More recent scholarship has made a compelling case for hearing composers in their vocal works, often through the ways in which their music goes against the grain of the given text.12 But such an approach reflects modern-day sensibilities, not those of the past. Even E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his enthusiastic 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, speculated that the composer’s vocal music was “less successful” because “it does not permit a mood of vague yearning but can only depict from the realm of the infinite those feelings capable of being described in words.” He reinforced this dichotomy between instrumental and vocal music a few years later in his review of Beethoven’s overture, songs, and entr’actes to Goethe’s Egmont:
In Beethoven’s instrumental music one is accustomed to finding a rich haul of genial contrapuntal turns, daring modulations, etc. But the extent to which the master knows how to rein in his riches and understands how to
use them at the right time is demonstrated by the composition under discussion here, which follows altogether the mind of the poet and clings to its drift without seeking in the slightest to stand out on its own. The reviewer has therefore taken pains to put into an appropriate light and acknowledge the successful aesthetic treatment of the composer’s given material.13
Hoffmann in effect lauds Beethoven for knowing when to restrain his personal inclinations in the service of a text that has come from the pen of another artist in another medium. Nor was Hoffmann alone in this regard. Two years before, an anonymous reviewer of the Sechs Gesänge, Op. 75, had already spelled out the potential for instrumental music to reveal Beethoven’s “distinctive interiority” in ways that vocal music could not:
Herr van Beethoven writes nothing that does not betray more or less the stamp of an original spirit, of deep feeling, of a particular disposition, even in its specific manner of elaboration. But in order to demonstrate these assets to their fullest degree, he requires many means and a broad, free field of play. When he is inhibited in this regard—be it through the genre, the words of a text, or his accommodation of the lesser capacities of performers, etc.—then he is rarely able to display his distinctive interiority and is often capable of doing this to only a limited degree and sometimes not at all.14
The relationship of the compositional self to purely instrumental music— “absolute music,” as it would later come to be called—was thus a different question altogether for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics. How to explain the creative starting point of sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and the like? Composers might occasionally provide clues in the form of programs or descriptive titles, such as the evocative movement headings Beethoven supplied for his Pastoral Symphony (1808) or the detailed prose program Berlioz wrote for his Symphonie fantastique (1830), but more often than not, they confined themselves to titles that are literally generic and differentiated by little more than keys and opus numbers: Piano Sonata in E Minor, Op. 90; String Quartet in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3; Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73. Without any distinctive point of reference to the world outside of music, such works provided listeners no immediate way in beyond the broad parameters of genre and the notes of the score. By the same token, the relatively self-contained nature of instrumental music provided composers greater opportunity to put their own creative
powers on display. As the anonymous reviewer of a collection of Mozart symphonies observed in 1799, a composer could demonstrate a higher degree of genius in instrumental genres like the string quartet and symphony than in vocal music, for in the former he must invent “all his material entirely by himself” and is limited beyond this “exclusively and entirely to the language of tones. His thoughts have their specificity in and of themselves, without the support of poetry.”15
Because of its inherently abstract nature, then, instrumental music lent itself particularly well to the idea of artists creating entirely from within. The representational nature of painting and sculpture—at least prior to the advent of wholly abstract art in the early twentieth century—tended to shortcircuit questions about the relationship between the creative subject and the represented object because that object, however stylized, always provided a point of interpretative departure for artists and the public alike. Even in the case of landscapes, which lent themselves particularly well to abstraction, that degree of abstraction was invariably judged in relation to a tangible object.16
In this respect, critics working before the era of abstraction treated the visual arts in ways that were analogous to those in which they regarded vocal music: they considered it the task of the artist to project and enhance something that existed before and outside the work of art. Viewers perceived the finished product, however mannered, as the representation of an object, just as listeners heard vocal music as the representation of a text. Artists themselves liked to emphasize their agency in this process, understandably enough, and the notion that every painting is to some extent a depiction of its creator dates back to antiquity: it reemerged in the late fifteenth century and became a cliché over the course of the ninteenth.17 But this line of thought invariably collided at some point with the materiality of the depicted object, even in the case of self-portraits. Instrumental music, by contrast, offered stylized representations of emotions and inner thoughts, themselves invisible. This allowed listeners to close their eyes, open their ears, and enter into a world without nouns. It was precisely the absence of external referents that gave instrumental music its particular appeal or deprived it of its significance, depending on a given listener’s time, place, and aesthetic convictions. Only when visual artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Francis Picabia made the conceptual leap to total abstraction around 1910 did they compel critics to see the artist’s self as both the source and the object of the work. It is not by accident that this later movement in art history would
eventually come to be known as abstract expressionism, the “expression” in question understood as that of the artist. Representation of or through anything remotely identifiable in the external world was no longer an issue. Until then, however, only instrumental music could be perceived and discussed of in such terms, and even this mode of thought, as we shall see, had not entered the mainstream of commentary about music before the 1830s.
The nineteenth century’s discourse on subjective expression in instrumental music took place largely in German-speaking lands, for it was then and there that critics and philosophers wrestled most intensively with the philosophical and aesthetic issues surrounding “pure” music. French and English writers weighed in on the matter from time to time, as we shall see, but the mysteries of instrumental music held a special fascination for their counterparts east of the Rhine, many of whom regarded this repertoire as the special province of German composers.18 As public concerts became increasingly common, critics struggled to explain the significance and creative sources of this expanding body of wordless music. Many of them, including Kant and Hegel, considered it inferior to vocal music on the grounds that it lacked conceptual content, but no one, not even Kant or Hegel, denied its emotional power. To the contrary: writers of the time routinely described instrumental music as the “language of the heart” because of its ability to convey and arouse emotions in ways that words could not.
The idea of hearing such works as emanating from the composer’s heart, however, did not begin to surface until the mid-1820s, and it offered a radically new way of understanding purely instrumental works as projections of their creators’ inner selves. It was around this time that a small handful of critics began to explain the unusual nature of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and string quartets by appealing to the circumstances of his life, specifically his growing deafness. But it was the publication of what would become known as the Heiligenstadt Testament in October 1827, some seven months after Beethoven had died, that effectively legitimized with a single stroke critical interpretations of all his music as an expression of his inner self. In this remarkable document, written in 1802 but not discovered until after his death, the composer acknowledged—if only to himself— his struggle against deafness and his resulting estrangement from society. “Had things gotten only a little worse,” he declared, he would have committed suicide. “It was only art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world before having produced everything that I felt called upon to bring forth.”19
