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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2024
It feels fitting to have worked on this review in Baden bei Wien, in which Beethoven spent many summers. This pretty town southwest of Vienna boasts not only a Beethoven-Haus, but also a Beethoven-Panoramaweg, Beethoven-Rundwanderweg, Beethoven-Spazierweg, and even an imposing Beethoven-Tempel, offering a scenic view; notions of decentring, decolonizing, or even critically engaging with Beethoven’s canonic status feel not only remote, but also faintly inappropriate in this, as many other, Beethoven-designated spaces. Moreover, at the time of writing, the international press is reporting that Beethoven’s skull fragments are being returned to Vienna, as though they are holy relics.1 Such material traces of Beethoven’s canonicity seem to mock attempts to rattle the ideological cage, yet two recent books by Erica Buurman and Nancy November make significant contributions.2 The former indirectly poses questions about Beethoven’s relationship to Viennese dance culture, while the latter is a deeply impressive account of the chamber music arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies. Both left me a touch nostalgic for the now marginal cultures of formal dancing and musical arrangement, which dominated the soundscape of early nineteenth-century Vienna.
1 See ‘Beethoven Skull Fragments Return to Vienna’, BBC News <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66261623> (accessed 23 July 2023).
2 The Beethoven literature is too vast to be surveyed here, but I will mention Tia de Nora’s Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (University of California Press, 1997); also relevant is the work of Scott Burnham and Mark Evans Bonds. Laura Tunbridge’s recent popular biography has also greatly enriched our understanding of Beethoven’s life: Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Faber, 2020).
3 See, for example, Aldrich, Elizabeth, ‘Social Dancing in Schubert’s World’, in Schubert’s Vienna, ed. Erickson, Raymond (Yale University Press, 1997), 119–40Google Scholar; and the substantial work by Caddy, Davinia and Clark, Maribeth (eds.), Musicology and Dance: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See, for example, Hunter, Mary, ‘“The Most Interesting Genre of Music”: Performance, Sociability and Meaning in the Classical String Quartet, 1800–1830’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 9/1 (2012), 53–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the substantial contribution of Lott, Marie Sumner, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (University of Illinois, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which recasts the worth of a vast amount of repertoire through the lens of playability.
5 See, for example, Bashford, Christina, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Boydell, 2007)Google Scholar.
6 November, N., Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber: Sociability, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Buurman, E., The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Ibid., 1.
9 Ibid., 19.
10 See, for example, ibid., 26.
11 Ibid., 12.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid., 34.
14 Ibid., 35.
15 Ibid., 56.
16 Ibid., 67.
17 Ibid., 66–67.
18 Ibid., 77.
19 Ibid., 91.
20 Ibid., 93.
21 Ibid., 108.
22 Ibid., 149.
23 On this topic, see Clark, Maribeth, ‘The Quadrille as Embodied Musical Experience in 19th-Century Paris’, Journal of Musicology, 19/3 (2002), 503–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom, 10.
25 Ibid., 1.
26 November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 1.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 3.
29 Goehr, L., The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2008 [1992])Google Scholar.
30 As November points out, she is not the first to question Goehr’s neat division of music into pre- and post-1800 categories, nor Goehr’s concentration on Austro-Germany, citing Harry White, Stephen Davies, and Jim Samson.
31 William Weber, among others, has contributed richly to our understanding of canon formation; November invokes his tripartite division into scholarly, pedagogical, and performing canons. See, for example, Weber, William, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Weber, William, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Cook, Nicholas and Everist, Mark (Oxford University Press, 1999), 336–55Google Scholar. See also McVeigh, Simon, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar and various significant contributions by Mary Sue Morrow.
32 I am not alone in this; as November reminds us, both Roland Barthes (in his essay ‘Musica Practica’) and Theodor Adorno (in ‘Vierhändig, noch einmal’, 1933) shared a nostalgia for piano arrangements as a form of embodied experience marginalized by mechanical reproduction. Quoted in November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 207.
33 Ibid., 1.
34 Relevant here is Bohlman, Philip V., ‘Translating Herder Translating: Cultural Translation and the Making of Modernity’, in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Fulcher, Jane F. (Oxford University Press, 2011), 501–22Google Scholar.
35 November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 7.
36 Ibid., 112.
37 Ibid., 18.
38 Ibid.
39 Quoted in ibid., 173.
40 Ibid., 117.
41 See Parakilas, James, ‘The Power of Domestication in the Lives of Musical Canons’, Repercussions, 4/1 (1995), 5–25 Google Scholar.
42 November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 144.
43 Ibid., 43.
44 Ibid., 156.
45 Ibid., 153.
46 See Hamilton, Katy and Loges, Natasha, Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
47 Paskins, Helen, Hamilton, Katy, and Loges, Natasha, ‘Brahms and His Arrangers’, in Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall, ed. Hamilton, and Loges, , 178–220 Google Scholar.
48 The rich literature on four-hand repertoire is drawn on here, including Christensen, Thomas, ‘Four-Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52/2 (1999), 255–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adrian Daub’s book-length study Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Handed Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.
49 November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 66–67. See, for example, the recent conference on Women’s Agency in Schubert’s Vienna, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3–5 November 2022, conference proceedings forthcoming.
50 For instance, Marianna Auenbrugger, Barbara Auernhammer, Maria Theresa de Paradis, Marie Bigot, Dorothea von Ertmann, and Marianna Martines.
51 An exceptional female amateur whose life overlapped with Beethoven’s is Irene Kiesewetter (1811–72). From a male perspective, see, for example, Philip, Brett, ‘Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire’, 19th-Century Music, 21/2 (1997), 149–76Google Scholar. An important recent addition is Joyce, Simon, LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though it does not focus on German-speaking lands.
52 November, Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber, 233.
53 Ibid., 189.