the romantic legend of Beethoven
Like all great men, Beethoven has had his own legend, whose origin goes back even to the very period in which he lived. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, which saw the development in Germany of the Romantic movement, this original musician, whose works bore an accent different from those of his immediate predecessors, was quite naturally regarded by critics and writers as a Romantic. The Romantics saw in this artist — whom they felt to be unlike other musicians — an innovator like themselves; and since musical language does not possess the concrete precision of verbal language, they interpreted this originality of his as Romanticism.
Those who were able to approach him also observed that his feelings, his character, and his manner of living differed profoundly from those of the classical musicians. Before him, a musician could earn his living only as the servant of a parish or of a great lord. Beethoven is the first musician who was able to remain always independent, even if with great difficulty. This independence appeared all the more singular because of Beethoven’s brusque manners, his difficult character, his negligent way of dressing like a brilliant gypsy, and because of his deafness, which had become almost total. Deprived of contact with the external world through hearing, he was compelled to live in an inner world of sound. What better opportunity to interpret fantastically such an extraordinary personality! And the Romantics did not let it escape them.
The contemporary writers who concerned themselves with Beethoven sought to characterize him in accordance with the ideas circulating among them. The period in which Beethoven lived was marked by an evolution, in the field of philosophical ideas about music, that leads from Classicism to Romanticism, from Kant to Schelling. It is the victory of Romantic, sentimental, and fantastic conceptions over classical theories, over rationalism, that would determine the way in which the Romantic writers of his time would regard Beethoven and his work.
This victory is complete when, in 1810, E. T. A. Hoffmann publishes, in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig, his analysis of the Fifth Symphony. Hoffmann, musician and poet, interprets Beethoven’s works in a Romantic key and makes of Beethoven a sort of magician in communication with the world of spirits. It is in the same Romantic sense that writers of lesser importance act, publishing at various dates the accounts of their contacts with Beethoven: Bettina Brentano, Varnhagen von Ense, Clemens Brentano (Bettina’s brother), Rochlitz, Rellstab, and Reichardt.
From about 1800 to 1827, the contemporary press — uncertain at first, bewildered by the new accents that Beethoven made his public hear — evolved, especially after Hoffmann’s publication, in a Romantic direction. Ultimately, at the moment when Beethoven dies, in 1827, the principal elements of his Romantic legend are already constituted.
Then comes Wagner, for whom Beethoven has become a reformer of art and morality, who has led music “from the domain of aesthetic beauty to the sphere of the absolute sublime.” The figure of Beethoven that he erected has remained standing, and modern criticism has preserved for Beethoven some of his Romantic traits: Beethoven the artist in communication with the world of spirits, the magician or priest in possession of the secrets of nature, the man of nature, the brilliant gypsy, the deaf man walled up in his inner world, the democrat, the prophet of ideal humanity.
The Romantic legend of Beethoven is still alive after more than a hundred years. — Boyer
Beethoven possesses, in common with the Romantics, the passions and the key to enter the sanctuary of ecstasy; yet at the same time he is not a Romantic because, as Ladislao Mittner writes (in Storia della letteratura tedesca dal pietismo al romanticismo, Einaudi, Turin, 1964), he is far removed from that vague and persistent Romantic restlessness which conceals a fundamental irresolution. Beethoven is par excellence the composer who knows what he wants and knows how he must say it. — Principe
For the Romantic, music is a language of a particular nature, perceived by our ears but directed toward our feeling: for the Romantic, music expresses the absolute. The Romantic tendency toward dream and mysticism sought to interpret this absolute — of which music can give us only an intuition — by virtue of a magical power. The musician becomes for the Romantic a sort of priest, prophet, or magician to whom the spirits, God, the infinite or the absolute have given the power to be their interpreter before men.
The greatest living musician at the time when these ideas were spreading was Beethoven, and the Romantics sought in his works the confirmation of their theoretical ideas. Yet the study of Beethoven’s principal works does not reveal in any of them an incontestably Romantic element. Neither Beethoven’s correspondence nor the Conversation Books contain any indication that would allow one to recognize in him Romantic tendencies, or even a sympathy for Romanticism. On the contrary, the elements of Beethoven’s art always have their origin in the eighteenth century.
Most of these elements are classical, but in part they derive from the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and from Sturm und Drang: the idea of heroism triumphing over trials and that of the victory of the heroic personality; the conception of the “beautiful soul”; the concern for morality and the aspiration to moral and social freedom; the hope for the formation, beyond borders, of an international fellowship of elites fraternally united by the same ideal, a prelude to the universal brotherhood of mankind. His conception of nature and of friendship might perhaps be brought closer to analogous Romantic conceptions.
There is nothing in Beethoven of the mystical or the fantastic. Like Mozart in his last opera, The Magic Flute (in which the Masonic idea of “trial” predominates), Beethoven dreamed of constituting that international élite of “beautiful souls” which the eighteenth century believed possible. Beethoven never considered it necessary to associate any theoretical reflection with his works. Only a few rare passages in his correspondence allude to his conception of art.
On 17 July 1812 [E.585] he urges Emilia M. to try to penetrate the intimate essence of art, “for only art and science raise man to divinity. The artist sees that art is boundless, dimly senses how far he is from the goal, and, while others perhaps admire him, is saddened at the thought of not yet having reached that place where the better genius shines only faintly, like a distant sun.”
On 17 September 1824, in a letter to the sons of B. Schott [A.1308], he writes that “it is art and science that show us and allow us to hope for a higher life,” and on 18 July 1825, from Baden, he writes to his nephew Karl [A.1402] that it is “art and science that bind together the best and noblest of men.”
How, then, can it be explained that so many Romantic writers were able to consider him one of their own? The simplest explanation is that they saw Beethoven through the lens of their own theories. Steeped in the idea of the magical power of music, through which the infinite, the absolute, the divine manifest themselves to us, they baptized as “Romantic” the greatest living musician of their age.
But what did Hoffmann and the Romantic writers who concerned themselves with Beethoven’s music mean by the term “Romanticism” when applied to music? This Romanticism is not, for them, a characteristic solely of their own epoch, but a tendency that has manifested itself throughout history in various artists. A simpler and more readily comprehensible designation for this tendency would be expression. This conception allows Hoffmann to declare musicians such as Haydn and Mozart to be Romantic.
Beethoven did indeed introduce something new into musical art, but this novelty is a moral and social concern, a personal accent that his predecessors did not possess to the same degree, and it is this original accent that was taken for Romanticism. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, secular music had, at least on the surface, an amiable, light, and frivolous character. Theatrical music had above all the purpose of enlivening the action and increasing its interest.
Even in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the music preserves, in the events it illustrates, an anecdotal and picturesque character. Quite different is its role in Fidelio, where Beethoven has given to the adventure of the heroic Leonore a general moral scope, a value of example. In the same way, the score of Egmont celebrates, in a general manner, the aspiration to freedom. The Pastoral Symphony evokes country life in general. The Third Symphony, once freed from its inopportune dedication to Bonaparte, celebrates heroism in a more general form and not a particular hero.
In fact, one must observe that, with regard to the appearance of Romanticism, the evolution of music is noticeably behind that of literature. Beethoven’s First Symphony, still very close to the style of Haydn, dates from 1800. At that moment the Romantic writers had already, in broad outline, established their doctrine: A. W. Schlegel was professor at Jena from 1798 to 1803. It is in Schlegel’s lectures that Romanticism appears as a set of opinions forming a system. Wackenroder’s Outpourings of an Art-Loving Monk was published in 1796; Tieck’s Franz Sternbald in 1798; Wackenroder and Tieck’s Fantasies on Art in 1799; the works of Novalis appeared, edited by Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, in 1802.
We do not know whether Beethoven knew these works: neither his correspondence nor his Conversation Books make mention of them, and none of them appeared in the inventory of his library made at his death. On the other hand, it is natural that the ideas of Sturm und Drang, of the Aufklärung, and of Classicism — which were developing at the very moment he was growing up — should have influenced his conceptions.
Romanticism emerged more or less directly from Sturm und Drang and from Herder. It united revolutionary, subjective, aesthetic, and poetic tendencies that had already begun to manifest themselves earlier in German thought as a kind of revolt against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment. The ideal of this movement would be a poetic conception of life, of nature, of religion, of philosophy — in short, of everything.
The musical art that we may properly call Romantic does not begin to manifest itself until considerably later. Schubert’s name does not leave Vienna and Austria until after 1820; in Vienna he was unable to give a concert of his works before 1827, and no newspaper reviewed it. The first performance of Weber’s Freischütz was in Berlin in 1821. Schumann begins to make himself known as a composer only after 1830.
Landormy, one of Schubert’s biographers, wrote: “Pure Romanticism begins with Schubert — that need to dream, to flee from the real world into something else that consoles and saves us, that need which belonged to all the great Romantics, but not to Beethoven. Dare we say once again that Beethoven lacks a certain poetry, a certain restlessness, a certain nostalgia? Beethoven offers us all the great emotions one could wish. But Schubert surpasses him in the greatness of his imagination, or rather in the quality of his fantasy.” (P. Landormy, La Vie de Schubert, Paris, 1928).
Weber is the creator of the Romantic opera. The librettos he set — Freischütz, Euryanthe, Oberon — make abundant use of the fantastic. But the great innovation he introduces into Romantic music is the use of “orchestral colour,” employing, for expressive purposes, the characteristic timbres of the orchestra to evoke forest life, the spirit of evil. The fantastic, therefore, is one of the essential elements of musical Romanticism, as Hoffmann had already said.
But Romantic music has other characteristics as well. For Weber, instruments acquire an expressive individuality. Schubert, through his simple feeling, and Schumann, through his profound poetic sense, give their works an intimate accent, an emotional content that had never before manifested itself so openly.
Hugo Riemann, in his Dictionnaire de Musique, under the entry “Romanticism,” wrote: “Romanticism, in opposition to Classicism, is characterized by the personal search for novelty, by the predominance of the subjective element over the formal. Romanticism gives free rein to the imagination, to the elemental power of creation unrestrained by the discipline of conventional laws. The Romantics bring new elements to art, enriching its means of expression. Every artist who, abstracting from the accepted forms of art and from established laws, creates freely, is Romantic.”
And V. Basch, in his Schumann, Paris 1926, writes: “All [the Romantics] were conscious of a new mission of music, which was no longer to limit itself to acting upon the ears through suitable combinations of sounds and rhythms, which in themselves constituted both form and content of musical pleasure, but was to express states of mind linked to precise images, to translate feelings, thoughts, and visions.” This is without doubt what all the great modern musicians had also done, after Johann Sebastian Bach, who had animated, vivified, and warmed the abstract and scholastic language that had been transmitted to him with the passions of an intense flame of emotion, although everything was well regulated and docilely subordinated to traditional forms. Beethoven had, as it were, exhausted the great themes of life and made thousands of souls vibrate with tremors of the sublime.
But Bach and Beethoven had addressed themselves to the great contents of life: the impulse toward the Most High, the aspiration to freedom, the love of mankind and of nature. To treat these vast subjects they had recourse to the great forms, to broad constructions (symphonies, sonatas, etc.) in order to express the great rising tide of universal emotions. Romantic music, on the contrary, strives to render singular, individual feelings, the instantaneous reaction to the torrent of impressions that incessantly assail our sensibility. It is in the small forms, in the short instrumental pieces, in the Lieder, that this world of feelings naturally finds expression. And only exceptionally did Beethoven turn to the small forms, to the Bagatelles and to the Lieder, for his fleeting, momentary sentiments.
There is in Beethoven nothing distinctly and specifically Romantic. The attitude of the Romantic writers toward Beethoven is explained by a banal fact: the artist of genius, he who brings something truly new to his art, has always disconcerted his contemporaries. The Romantic writers perceived Beethoven’s originality and interpreted it in the Romantic manner, seeking in his music ideas that resembled their own. — Boyer
Beethoven delights in contemplating, on serene nights, the starry sky. But he is not satisfied with this mute admiration; his spirit, as he confides to a visitor, “soars toward those remote stars, toward the primal source whence all that has been created derives,” in order to give musical form to his awakened and moved feelings. “Then I feel terribly disappointed; I throw to the ground my scribbled sheet, almost convinced that there is no child of earth who can express through sounds and notes the celestial images that his excited imagination has seen floating in that blessed hour.”
Nonetheless, an echo of this dreamed harmony of the spheres, of this yearning toward the divine, seems to resound in Beethoven’s music. This presentiment of the divine Hoffmann had intuited as present in Beethoven’s music, which “transports the listener into the world of spirits, the infinite,” and which “expresses Romanticism in the highest degree.” This judgment gave rise to the legend of a Romantic Beethoven. In truth, by the term “Romantic,” Hoffmann did not mean solely the aesthetic movement contemporary with him (against which the criticism supported by Hegel and Goethe launched its attacks), but the full attainment of expressive perfection. Thus had composed Bach, Haydn, Mozart, whom Hoffmann does not hesitate to call Romantics. — Magnani
During the last years of Beethoven’s life, and in the period that followed his death, the musical public was changing: a new bourgeois component replaced the aristocratic and eighteenth‑century circles for whom Beethoven himself had composed. This new public was drawn to Beethoven’s music with a particular and almost mysterious intensity. Thus, down to the present day, his music has enjoyed a great and enduring popularity. Beethoven’s fame, however, was and is something more than a purely musical phenomenon. The story of his life became inextricably intertwined with the specific qualities of his music, to the point of producing a composite image that fascinated the Romantic age. More than any other composer, painter, or writer, Beethoven was seen as the prototype of the artist, to the point of assuming mythical proportions. The myth was created by music lovers, amateurs, and writers on musical subjects … but also by composers who were themselves writers and popularizers. — Kerman and Tyson
For Hoffmann, Romantic music has the task of suggesting ideas to our spirit. Expressive music, for Hoffmann, is that which, speaking directly to our soul, grants it the intuition of a higher life, of the inner life of nature. Romantic music is for Hoffmann a kind of filter or talisman. The Romantic musician is for Hoffmann a sort of magician, a privileged being who, dragging behind him our wretched humanity, lifts it upward and makes it penetrate the empyrean of the ineffable and the absolute. Beethoven belongs to that category of artists capable of making act upon our soul the mysterious and magical power of musical sounds that reveal the absolute.
Hoffmann’s musical reviews appeared between 1810 and 1814. Weber composed the Freischütz between 1817 and 1821; Schubert’s first Lieder date from 1814; Schumann begins to compose in 1830. Through the conception he formed of Beethoven’s genius, Hoffmann contributed to creating his Romantic legend. He was the first to present him as a sort of magician, at whose summons the absolute and the infinite reveal themselves to our feeble eyes. It is he who first fashioned this vigorous, somewhat theatrical figure of Beethoven, bearing traits of the proud and unsettling necromancer, but who above all rises above his own epoch, above average and vulgar humanity. Hoffmann’s Beethoven is a magician, a colossus, a hero, a superman. — Boyer
Already before his death the “legend of Beethoven” was well established, and in it the story of his life and the description of his appearance and behaviour played a role equal to that of his music. The writings of Bettina Brentano von Arnim were particularly important in this respect. She attributed to Beethoven’s music certain qualities that contributed to its mystique. Later, Artur Schmitz, in 1927, described him as childlike in nature, revolutionary, magician, religious leader, and prophet. These ideas were then taken up by other commentators, and often his music receded into the background, overshadowed by descriptions that made of Beethoven a typical Romantic figure.
Among these writers in a Romantic vein, some did not lose sight of the music: E. T. A. Hoffmann, even though he had introduced the idea of the magical in Beethoven’s music; Schumann, who believed that Beethoven’s moral values were reflected in his music; and Liszt, who wrote to Wilhelm von Lenz: “For us musicians, Beethoven’s work is like the pillar of cloud and fire that guided the Israelites through the desert. Its darkness and its light show us the way to follow.”
Wagner’s reaction to hearing the Seventh Symphony in 1828 was typically Romantic, the result of the combination of the music itself and prevailing opinions: “The effect on me was indescribable. To this must be added the impression made on me by Beethoven’s features, which I had seen in the lithographs that circulated everywhere at the time. I immediately conceived in my mind an image of him that made him a supernatural, sublime, and unique being.” Wagner did much to promote the nineteenth‑century image of Beethoven through his ideas and writings. He believed in Beethoven’s “magical inner world,” evident particularly in the characteristics of the late quartets. In his book Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future), he maintained that in the Fifth Symphony Beethoven had succeeded in intensifying musical expression almost to the point of making it a moral resolution; and that with the Ninth he had transferred music from its particular world to the realm of universal art.
Berlioz was among the first to promote the acceptance of Beethoven’s music [in France], creating a complex image of him through his critiques, which often took the form of poetic fantasies. He described the String Quartet Op. 131 as “a celestial inspiration that had taken material form.” The religious element in the music was considered by de Vigny, Lamartine, and Hugo, who were fascinated by the concept of the “infinite,” which they felt they could identify with Beethoven. By the end of the nineteenth century these views had led to Beethoven being perceived as one who dispensed salvation and as the creator of a new universal morality. — Coldicott