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BEETHOVEN AND THE SOUND OF REVOLUTION IN VIENNA, 1792–1814*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2014

RHYS JONES
RHYS JONES*
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
*
Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, CB2 1TJ[email protected]
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Abstract

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.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 947 - 971
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

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.

References

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24 K. B. ‘Miscellaneous’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ), 16 (27 July 1814), in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, i, pp. 127–8.

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29 Comini, The changing image of Beethoven, p. 223.

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41 Whilst it is true that these four notes appear elsewhere – for example, in Haydn's Symphony No.96 or Mozart's Piano Concerto No.24, K.491 – the contention here is not that this configuration possessed ready-made revolutionary potential, but rather that it acquired a radical complexion through its increased use by revolutionary French composers. Calhoun, Martha, ‘Music as subversive text: Beethoven, Goethe, and the Overture to Egmont’, Mosaic, 20 (1987), pp. 43–56Google Scholar; for this motivic relationship in Beethoven's work, see Knapp, Raymond, ‘A tale of two symphonies: converging narratives of divine reconciliation in Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (2000), pp. 291–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 301–9.

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43 ‘Anonymous review of Op.38, Op.47 and Op.52’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 7 (1805), p. 769.

44 ‘Irrespective of whether Beethoven may have previously encountered the collection, it is extremely unlikely that, had he not known it before, Kreutzer or even Bernadotte would have failed to introduce it to him’: Broyles, Beethoven, p. 125.

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48 According to Maynard Solomon, Beethoven's ‘conformism’ during the 1790s, particularly with the publication of his nationalistic Freidelburg settings of 1796–7, were necessary ‘concessions’ to a culture of political suppression and police surveillance: ‘Beethoven's “Magazin der Kunst”’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 7 (1984), pp. 199–208; Beethoven to Nikolaus Simrock, 2 Aug. 1794, in Anderson, The letters of Beethoven, i, pp. 17–19, at p. 18.

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.

50 Wendt, ‘Thoughts about recent musical art’, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 185.

51 Hoffmann, ‘Review’, AMZ, 14 (5 Aug. 1812), pp. 519–26, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, pp. 72–9.

52 Miller, A natural history of revolution, p. 4.

53 Ibid., p. 10.

54 Joseph Fouché to Jean-Marie Collot-d'Herbois, cited in Guillaume Honoré Rocques abbé de Montgaillard, Revue chronologique de l'histoire de France, 1787–1818 (Paris, 1820), p. 179.

55 Marat, Jean-Paul, L'ami du peuple (18–19 Sept., Paris, 1789)Google Scholar, cited in Miller, A natural history of revolution, p. 12; see Dan Edelstein, The terror of natural right: republicanism, the cult of nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2009), pp. 1–21.

56 Anonymous, ‘Theatre de la rue Feydeau’, Journal de Paris (30 Frimaire iii (20 Dec. 1794)), p. 366, in Charlton, David, ‘Cherubini: a critical anthology, 1788–1801’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 26 (1993), pp. 95–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 108. According to Michael Fend, ‘Eliza seems indeed to be…the first opera in which nature performs an active role. Both exterior and interior nature set in motion destructive forces whose threat is overcome only by the unselfish solidarity of a community’: ‘Literary motifs, musical form and the quest for the “Sublime”: Cherubini, 's Eliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 (1993), pp. 17–38Google Scholar, at pp. 29–30.

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59 Winton Dean, ‘Opera under the French Revolution’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 94th sess. (1967–8), pp. 77–96, at p. 84; on Cherubini's presence in Vienna, see Rice, John, Antonio Salieri and Viennese opera (Chicago, IL, 1998), pp. 565–6Google Scholar.

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64 Ibid.

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71 Readership of the AMZ was not common to every Viennese household, but it was scarcely restricted to the aristocratic musical literati, see Wallace, Beethoven's critics, p. 9; Albrecht, ‘Music in Public Life’, p. xii: the ‘Viennese public’, she concludes, included the aristocracy, the middle class, professional musicians, but also ‘the larger (and more geographically widespread) reading public’.

72 Rellstab, ‘Travel reports by Rellstab, no. 4, Vienna’, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 62.

73 K. B., ‘Miscellaneous’, AMZ, 16 (23, 30 Nov. 1814), pp. 795, 810–11, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 43.

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76 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, cited in Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Thayer's life of Beethoven, i, ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, NJ, 1967), p. 448; this concert also included premieres of the Sixth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Choral Fantasy, Op.80.

77 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe, geschrieben auf einer Reise nach Wien, Ende 1808 un Anfang 1809, i (Amsterdam, 1810), p. 220: ‘Bethovens übermächtige, gigantische Ouverture zu Collins Coriolan…Gehirn und Herz wurden mir von den kraftschlägen und Rissen.’

78 Ludwig van Beethoven to Simrock, in Anderson, The letters of Beethoven, i, p. 18.

79 Marcel Brion, Daily life in the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert, trans. Jean Stewart (London, 1959); Raymond Erickson, ‘Vienna in its European context’, in idem, ed., Schubert's Vienna (Yale, CT, 1997), pp. 3–36.

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87 For the first formulation of the idea that German receptivity to revolution was premised upon thought and not action, see Palmer, R. R., The age of democratic revolution: a political history of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2 vols., Princeton, NJ, 1959–64), ii, pp. 425–58Google Scholar.

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101 Ibid., p. 128.

102 Ibid., p. 48.

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109 Cited in Guéniffey, ‘Robespierre’, p. 304.

110 Wendt, ‘Thoughts about recent musical art’, in Senner, Wallace, and Meredith, eds., Critical reception, ii, p. 200.

111 Nicholas Marston, ‘‘The sense of an ending’: goal-directedness in Beethoven's music’, Stanley, The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, pp. 84–101: unlike the ‘finale aesthetic’ established by Haydn, Beethoven seems ‘from an early stage’ to have been interested in subverting ‘repetitive formal types’ such as rondos, ‘by writing finales that are not merely equal in weight to their respective first movements, but which actually overpower them’: p. 92.

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.