The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14

Author(s): NICHOLAS COOK

Reviewed work(s):
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 3-24
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2003.27.1.3 .
Accessed: 26/10/2012 14:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-
Century Music.

http://www.jstor.org

The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon,
and the Works of 1813–14
NICHOLAS COOK
WELLINGTONS SIEG and DER GLORREICHE
AUGENBLICK: Fact, Fancies, Fiction
“Every composer has pieces in his catalogue
that do not show his best effort, and it is apt to
be pedantry to exhume them merely for the
sake of attracting notice.” So writes J. Merrill
Knapp,1 and in the case of Beethoven it is the
common view of modern commentators that
prime examples are the patriotic compositions
dating from, or shortly before, the Congress of
Vienna—most notoriously Wellingtons Sieg
oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria, op. 91 (1813)
and the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick, op.
136 (1814). There is indeed a rare unanimity of
critical judgment: for Maynard Solomon the
works of this period are “the nadir of
Beethoven’s artistic career,”2 and for William
1
My thanks to William Drabkin and Matthew Head for
their comments on a draft of this article; I have appropri-
ated several of their suggestions without further acknowl-
edgment. J. Merrill Knapp, “Beethoven’s Mass in C Major,
Op. 86,” in Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot
Forbes, ed. Lewis Lockwood and Phyllis Benjamin (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Music,
1984), p. 199 (pp. 199–216).
2
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (London: Macmillan, 1977),
p. 222.
19th-Century Music, XXVII/1, pp. 3–24. ISSN: 0148-2076. © 2003 by The Regents of the University of
California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University
of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
NICHOLAS
COOK
The
Other
Beethoven
Kinderman the “nadir of his artistic achieve-
ment.”3 Nor is this a specially recent phenom-
enon. In 1941 A. E. F. Dickinson wrote of op.
136 that “few will dispute Dr. Walker’s tren-
chant ‘Hardly two consecutive bars worthy of
Beethoven’s genius’ or Herr Bekker’s kinder
‘offers no new material to the critic’” (if only,
he added, “because the work is securely bur-
ied”),4 and in view of the productivity of the
Beethoven industry it is striking that no com-
mercial recording of Der glorreiche Augenblick
was issued until 1997. Opus 91, by contrast,
has long had a place in the record catalogs, if
only as a curiosity (sometimes coupled with
Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture): but the con-
trast between its popularity and its quality was
endlessly reiterated throughout the twentieth
century, from J. W. N. Sullivan’s 1927 descrip-
tion of the work as “the worst that Beethoven
ever wrote, and the only one that achieved
3
William Kinderman, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1995), p. 2.
4
A. E. F. Dickinson, Beethoven (London: Thomas Nelson,
1941), p. 176; the references are to Ernest Walker and Paul
Bekker.
3
 19 TH great popularity in his lifetime,”5 through Emil
CENTURY
MUSIC Ludwig’s claim that it was “valueless, and yet
it made him world-famous” (1943),6 to Robin
Wallace’s judgment that of all Beethoven’s work
it was “one of his worst—and most successful”
(1986).7 Twentieth-century critical orthodoxy
remains as summed up by Edouard Herriot in
1929: “How shameful! Beethoven, the eternal
quality of whose work had up to that time
appealed only to a small elite, obtained great
success as soon as he adopted that most odious
of all genres: political music.”8
This marginalization of music by the most
canonic of composers has naturally stimulated
a variety of apologetic strategies. The first em-
phasizes the political excitement and economic
opportunities of the times and comes in a vari-
ety of flavors, some more and some less favor-
able to the composer’s integrity. Martin
Cooper’s claim that Beethoven “consciously
condescended in the Battle of Vittoria and Der
glorreiche Augenblick”9 opens up the possibil-
ity that the composer was adapting his art to a
sincerely perceived social and political func-
tion. This line of argument (as far as it goes, I
shall argue, a legitimate one) is pursued by
such commentators as Thomas Röder and
Michael Ladenburger.10 For Ludwig, by contrast:
“With cold-blooded calculation, Beethoven
clothed his talent in patriotism the moment
Napoleon fell, and glorified a victory to which
he was indifferent.” 11 More moderately,
Solomon observes that there is “no reason to
5
J. W. N. Sullivan, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 197.
6
Emil Ludwig, Beethoven: Life of a Conqueror (New York:
G. Putnam’s Sons, 1943), p. 202.
7
Robin Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas
and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 35.
8
Edouard Herriot, La vie de Beethoven (Paris: Gallimard,
1929), p. 239.
9
Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade 1817–1827
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 429.
10
Thomas Röder, “Beethovens Sieg über die Schlachten-
musik: Opus 91 und die Tradition der Battaglia,” and
Michael Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Kongreß im Spiegel
der Musik,” in Beethoven zwischen Revolution und
Restauration, ed. Helga Lühning and Sieghard Brandenburg
(Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 1989), pp. 229–58 and 275–306.
11
Ludwig, Beethoven, p. 202. Barry Cooper concurs, con-
cluding from the lack of artistic success of these works
that “he did not have his heart in them and was not
greatly stimulated by ideas of patriotism per se, unless it
4
question the genuineness of Beethoven’s patri-
otic feelings,” but continues: “There is little
doubt, however, that the unaccustomed popu-
lar acclaim and financial reward reaped by
Wellington’s Victory tempted him to mine this
vein for all it was worth.”12 He goes on to
explain how nearly half of the public concerts
Beethoven put on for his own benefit during
his entire lifetime took place in 1815; the works
of the late period were largely bankrolled by
the success of Wellingtons Sieg. This form of
apologia, then, works by erecting a division
between the worldly (into which the works of
1813–14 fall) and the spiritual, and so buys into
the myth that Beethoven was himself creating
at this very time. In the autumn of 1814, that
is, at the very height of his social and financial
success, Beethoven wrote to his legal advisor
Johann Nepomuk Kanka that “a man’s spirit,
the active creative spirit, must not be tied down
to the wretched necessities of life. . . . I much
prefer the empire of the mind, and I regard it as
the highest of all spiritual and worldly monar-
chies”—higher, that is, than the temporal mon-
archies so liberally represented at the Congress
of Vienna.13
The second apologetic strategy focuses on
musical rather than external circumstances,
emphasizing the transitional nature of this pe-
riod within Beethoven’s stylistic development.
(Twentieth-century commentators have more
or less concurred with Schindler’s identifica-
tion of the Congress works as marking the tran-
sition between the middle and late style peri-
ods, though Solomon questions how far the
“patriotic potboilers” of 1813–14 can be use-
fully accommodated within the style-period
was connected with the question of liberty” (Beethoven
and the Creative Process [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990],
p. 57); however, his attitude is more generous in Beethoven
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 233.
12
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 223.
13
Letter no. 502 in The Letters of Beethoven, ed. and trans.
Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961) = let-
ter no. 747 in Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel Gesamt-
ausgabe (hereafter BG), ed. Sieghard Brandenburg, 7 vols.
(Munich: G. Henle, 1996). David Wyn Jones draws atten-
tion to the “incongruous” date of this letter in The Life of
Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 128.
framework at all.14) Weakest, perhaps, is the
claim that Beethoven “was probably suffering
from something like exhaustion after the truly
immense labours of the previous period.”15 More
convincing is the evidence of stylistic confu-
sion ranging from the retrospective elements of
the Congress works (and also of the uncom-
pleted piano concerto of 1815, the most sub-
stantial of all Beethoven’s abandoned works),
to what Wallace refers to as the “Romantic
crisis” exemplified by ops. 90, 101, and 102.16
But the most interesting variant of this strat-
egy is one that can again be presented in a more
or a less positive light. For Carl Dahlhaus, op.
91 “is only a petrifact, a parody of the heroic
style established in the ‘Eroica’.”17 Solomon
expands this critique when he writes that in
the works of 1813–14 the “heroic style is re-
vived, but as parody and farce. Rather than
moving forward to his late style, he here re-
gressed to a pastiche of his heroic manner. The
heroic style, forged in doubt, rebellion, and de-
fiance, had ended in conformity.”18 The teleo-
logical quality of Solomon’s formulation pre-
sents this development in its most negative
aspect, as a kind of exhaustion or corruption of
the style from within (for it might be argued
that bathos and farce were never entirely ab-
sent from the heroic style). But it is equally
possible to see op. 91 as intentionally parodis-
tic, as does Leon Plantinga when he refers to it
as “a potboiler surely meant at least partly as a
14
Anton Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him: A Biogra-
phy, ed. Donald MacArdle, trans. Constance Jolly (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, 1966); Maynard Solomon, Beethoven
Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988),
p. 119.
15
Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson, The New Grove
Beethoven (London: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 120.
16
For the piano concerto, see Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven’s
Unfinished Piano Concerto of 1815: Sources and Prob-
lems,” Musical Quarterly 56 (1970), 624–46; and Nicholas
Cook, “Beethoven’s Unfinished Piano Concerto: A Case of
Double Vision?” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 42 (1989), 338–74; for the “Romantic crisis,” see
Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics, p. 39. The claim concerning
Beethoven’s stylistic self-alienation is arguably weakened
by the fact that Beethoven completed, or revised into their
present form, a number of his canonic works during this
period, notably the “Archduke” Trio and Fidelio.
17
Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to
His Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), p. 17.
18
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 222.
spoof, but taken by the Viennese at face value.”19 NICHOLAS
COOK
This interpretation is convenient to modern The
commentators, since it constitutes an argument Other
Beethoven
for not taking the work at face value; I refer
below to longstanding attempts to ground it in
evidence of Beethoven’s intentions. And it is
perhaps this which has underwritten the con-
tinuing, if marginal, place of op. 91 in the rep-
ertory. But it would be harder to explain away
op. 136 (which by comparison has sunk virtu-
ally without trace) in the same manner, in view
of its sustained rhetoric of seriousness and high
moral purpose. A parodistic interpretation is
still admittedly conceivable, for as Kinderman
puts it: “Beethoven held up a very unflattering
mirror to this grand party of the restoration. . . .
[H]is Congress of Vienna pieces exposed the
superficial veneer that concealed the far less
glorious realities of post-Napoleonic politics.”20
Seen thus, Der glorreiche Augenblick might be
construed as an act of Velasquez-like observa-
tion and critique, and Frank Schneider coyly
hints at something of the sort.21 But it is symp-
tomatic that both authors shy away from the
implications of their own arguments, and
Kinderman even nominates op. 136 as his pre-
ferred candidate for the accolade “the lowest
point in Beethoven’s work.”22
Then again, there are specific apologias for
the individual works in question. In the case of
op. 91 such arguments revolve around the claim
that it was Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (the in-
ventor of the metronome) and not Beethoven
who was responsible for the initial conception:
“Naturally,” says Ludwig, “it was not his own
idea, but that of a shrewd manager which he
carried out, the only instance of this kind in his
entire life.”23 Such claims go back to Ignaz
Moscheles, who added a note in his 1841
English translation of Schindler’s Biographie
19
Leon Plantinga, Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style,
Performance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 252.
20
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 180.
21
Frank Schneider, “Kantate ‘Der glorreiche Augenblick’,
op. 136,” in Beethoven: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed.
Albrecht Riethmüller, Carl Dahlhaus, and Alexander Ringer
(Laaber: Laaber, 1994), II, 367 (364–69).
22
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 173, citing Alfred Einstein’s
description of op. 91 from Essays on Music (London: Faber,
1958), p. 244.
23
Ludwig, Beethoven, p. 202.
5
 19 TH von Ludwig van Beethoven to the effect that
CENTURY
MUSIC
not only did Mälzel decidedly induce Beethoven to
write it, but even laid before him the whole design
of it; himself wrote all the drum-marches and the
trumpet-flourishes of the French and English armies;
gave the composer some hints, how he should her-
ald the English army by the tune of “Rule Britan-
nia”; how he should introduce “Malbrook” in a dis-
mal strain; how he should depict the horrors of the
battle and arrange “God save the King” with effects
representing the hurrahs of a multitude. Even the
unhappy idea of converting the melody of “God save
the King” into a subject of a fugue in quick move-
ment, emanates from Mälzel.
In his own Life of Beethoven, Alexander
Wheelock Thayer gratefully seized on this evi-
dence of Beethoven’s diminished responsibil-
ity, quoting it in full and describing it (with a
revealing enthusiasm) as “Moscheles’s positive
and unimpeachable testimony.”24
From Thayer this version of the story be-
came disseminated throughout the literature,
being simply stated as the truth (without even
the benefit of a citation) in, for example, The
Classical Style of Charles Rosen.25 Once again,
the convenience of the argument has masked
its basic implausibility in relation to the com-
poser who wrote only a few months later that
“I refuse to allow another, whoever he may be,
to alter my compositions.”26 Accepting it also
entails ignoring a range of published evidence,
including Beethoven’s letter of thanks to the
participants in the 12 December 1813 perfor-
mance of Wellingtons Sieg, the postscript to
which reads “it is to be noted that the original
idea for the work on Wellington was mine,”27
and his letter of July 1814 to another of his
legal advisers, Dr. von Adlersburg, explaining
24
Extract and quote from Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, ed.
Elliot Forbes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964),
p. 561. “Malbrook” is another name for the French march
labeled “Marlborough” in the published score.
25
Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven (rev. edn. London: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 401:
“It is in large part not by [Beethoven] at all, but by Mälzel,
who was responsible for the structure, many of the ideas,
and even, it seems, some of the actual writing.”
26
Letter to Georg Treitschke, assigned to April 1814, Ander-
son, no. 478 = BG no. 708a.
27
The full text is given in Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew
Him, p. 169.
6
that whereas he had indeed composed the
Sieges-Symphonie for Mälzel’s panharmonicon,
“previously I had already hit on the idea of a
battle, which, however, could not have been
used for his p[anharmonicon].”28 Thayer quoted
this passage in order to argue that Beethoven
was not responsible for the idea of the Sieges-
Symphonie,29 but of course it equally implies
that he was responsible for the Schlacht, the
representation of the battle itself, which has
been the prime focus of negative commentary.
Fortunately it is not necessary to pursue the
argument further, in light of Hans-Werner
Küthen’s study of the manuscript sources, on
the basis of which he concludes that the fan-
fares and other stereotyped military elements
form the total extent of Mälzel’s musical con-
tribution.30
As for op. 136, the apologias center around
the nature of the text, and here at least they
have a historical foundation, if a rather con-
fused one. According to Thayer, the unsatisfac-
tory text, by Aloys Weissenbach, was a replace-
ment for an even less satisfactory one by Carl
Bernard which Beethoven “cast . . . aside.”31 In
reality, Bernard’s text was abandoned not on
grounds of quality but because it was vetoed by
the censors, and Schindler (not, of course, the
most reliable of sources) says that Bernard was
actually called in to help improve Weissenbach’s
text.32 A member of the audience at the work’s
premiere, Carl Bertuch, noted in his diary that
28
Anderson, letter no. 485 = BG no. 728.
29
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, pp. 561–62. Thayer does not
quote the first sentence of the letter, which explains the
purpose of Beethoven’s statement: “On my own initiative
I had composed for M[älzel] a movement of the S[chlacht]
s[ymphony] for his panharmonicon without being paid for
it” (Anderson’s trans.; Brandenburg reads S[ieges]).
30
Hans-Werner Küthen, “‘Wellingtons Sieg oder die
Schlacht bei Vittoria’: Beethoven und das Epochenproblem
Napoleon,” in Beethoven zwischen Revolution und
Restauration, pp. 262–63 (259–73), summarizing his ear-
lier study “Neue Aspekte zur Entstehung von Wellingtons
Sieg,” Beethoven-Jahrbuch 8 (1975), 73–92. Küthen’s re-
search confirms that only the Sieges-Symphonie, not the
Schlacht, was conceived for the panharmonicon.
31
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 596, though Bernard’s name
is not mentioned.
32
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 172; for this
whole issue, see Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Kongreß,” pp.
294–95.
while “the music is excellent,” the text “is
extremely mediocre: all that it really contains
is the fact that there are now many sovereigns
in Vienna.”33 And Schindler himself went fur-
ther, writing that the problems over the text
“explain why in this work the genius of the
composer does not attain its usual heights.”34
This argument is not wholly convincing, sim-
ply because there is no general principle that a
poor text entails a poor setting; if there were,
the reputation of many of Schubert’s and
Brahms’s songs would be very different. I shall
argue later that what is central is not so much
the literary qualities of the text as its func-
tional or performative qualities—in other words,
the cantata’s role in the construction of a cer-
emonial occasion. But for now it is necessary
only to note how, once again, the responsibil-
ity for Beethoven’s failure to compose music
that accords with present-day expectations is
diverted onto others, a strategy that, like other
strategies for excluding these works from the
Beethovenian canon, avoids the interrogation
of those expectations. In effect the various
apologias I have been dealing with purport to
explain why Beethoven’s music of 1813–14, or
at least that associated with the public celebra-
tion of Napoleon’s defeat, was not good. They
beg the question of in what sense it might not
have been good, given that it was these works
which made 1814 (in Schindler’s words) “indis-
putably the most brilliant year of Beethoven’s
life, for here we see the composer at the very
peak of his glory.”35
Dissension and Acclaim
While, on the one hand, admitting the irony of
Beethoven’s greatest successes being his worst
33
Translated in H. C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: A Docu-
mentary Study (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 282.
34
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 172. Not all
contemporary reviews agreed, however: an 1814 Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung review (rpt. in Ludwig van
Beethoven: Die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, Gesammelte
Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830, ed. Stefan
Kunze [Laaber: Laaber, 1996]) states that “the poem has
many successful moments and was worthy of setting by a
distinguished composer” (p. 595).
35
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 169.
works (and so feeding a multitude of Romantic NICHOLAS
COOK
myths), twentieth-century commentators have, The
on the other hand, been at pains to emphasize Other
Beethoven
dissenting voices in the original reception of
these works. Among these, two predominate.
The first is that of Gottfried Weber, the final
words of whose critique of op. 91 entered
Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical
Invective: “Should not everyone, the dearer
Beethoven and his art are to him, the more
fervently wish that oblivion might very soon
draw an expiatory veil on such an aberration of
his muse, through which he has desecrated the
glorified object, Art, and himself?”36 Yet care
must be exercised here. Quite apart from the
fact that this attack constitutes part of an ex-
tended aesthetic argument concerning the na-
ture of musical representation (of which more
later), it dates from more than ten years after
the event to which it relates.37 Chronologically
it is much closer to other reviews in Slonimsky’s
Lexicon, many of which might seem highly
applicable to Wellingtons Sieg (“It is not sur-
prising that Beethoven . . . should have mis-
taken noise for grandeur”)38 but in fact relate to
that most improbably canonic of works, the
Ninth Symphony. As for the second dissenting
voice, it is that of Johann Wenzel Tomaschek,
a composer and resident of Prague who visited
Beethoven in 1814 and attended the 29 No-
vember concert where both op. 91 and (for the
first time) op. 136 were given. Tomaschek re-
corded in his autobiography that he was “very
painfully affected to see a Beethoven, whom
Providence had probably assigned to the high-
est throne in the realm of music, among the
rudest materialists.”39 But again some care needs
36
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Criti-
cal Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time (2nd
edn. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), p. 45.
37
Note, however, that in the footnote referred to in n. 49
below, Weber claims to have originally formulated his cri-
tique in 1816.
38
Letter to the editor in the Quarterly Musical Magazine
and Review (1827), quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musi-
cal Invective, pp. 45–46.
39
This translation is taken from Thayer’s Life of Beethoven
(p. 565), but a more extensive selection is given (in a dif-
ferent translation) in Beethoven: Impressions of Contem-
poraries, ed. O. G. Sonneck (London: Oxford University
Press, 1927), pp. 100–07 (the relevant passage is on p. 107).
Tomaschek adds that “when the orchestra was almost
7
 19 TH to be exercised in interpreting this much an-
CENTURY
MUSIC thologized quotation. Not only does the auto-
biography date from more than thirty years
after these events,40 but this is also the man
who by his own admission “found it impos-
sible to take a liking” to the Seventh Sym-
phony and who harshly criticized Fidelio.41 It is
hard, then, to avoid the impression that what is
represented in the literature as an anticipation
of today’s exclusion of the works of 1813–14
from the Beethovenian canon might be better
read as a lingering resistance to the works of
Beethoven’s middle period.42
Then again, there is the question of what
Beethoven’s own views on these compositions
might have been. The answer is predictably
hard to come by, but once more a small num-
ber of quotations circulate and gain the aura of
fact through mere repetition.43 First among them
entirely submerged by the godless din of drums, the rat-
tling and slambanging, and I expressed my disapproval of
the thundering applause to Mr. von Sonnleithner, the lat-
ter mockingly replied that the crowd would have enjoyed
it even more if their own empty heads had been thumped
in the same way.” If this is true, Sonnleithner may have
been a less than impartial observer: his own Die
Weihe der Zukunft, written in honor of Franz I and set to
music by Joseph Wiegl, had been performed at the
Kärntnertortheater earlier in the same year (Ladenburger,
“Der Wiener Kongreß,” p. 284).
40
Its date is given as 1845–50 in The Beethoven Compen-
dium: A Guide to Beethoven’s Life and Music, ed. Barry
Cooper (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 54.
41
Beethoven: Impressions of Contemporaries, p. 106;
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 597 (where the date of
Tomaschek’s account is given as 1846).
42
A similar point might be made concerning what is prob-
ably the third most frequently quoted dissenting voice,
that of the police informer whose report on the 29 No-
vember 1814 concert stated that “in contrast to
Razumovsky, Apponyi, Kraft, who deify Beethoven, there
exists a substantial majority of knowledgeable people who
want to hear no music whatsoever by Herr Beethoven”
(trans. in Robbins Landon, Beethoven, p. 282; original in
August Fournier, Die Geheimpolizei auf dem Wiener
Kongress [Vienna: Tempsky, 1913], p. 288). Ladenburger
describes this evaluation as “interesting but too tenden-
tious” (“Der Wiener Kongreß,” p. 305); Esteban Buch puts
it down to hostility to Beethoven within “certain official
Austrian circles” (Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History,
trans. Richard Miller [Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2003], p. 81).
43
In his discussion of op. 91, Ludwig quotes one piece of
evidence that looks conclusive, but is in fact quite mis-
leading, claiming that Beethoven “must have recognized
what slight value the work had, for he wrote a friend: ‘In
order to gain time for a great work, I must first do plenty
of scribbling for the sake of money, so that I may have
8
is the sentence from Tomaschek’s autobiogra-
phy following the one I have just quoted: “I
was told, it is true, that he himself had declared
the work [op. 91] to be folly, and that he liked it
only because with it he had thoroughly thrashed
the Viennese.” Thayer not only quotes this
claim, but also, like Moscheles, reveals his own
investment in the topic through gratuitous de-
fensiveness, immediately adding: “There is no
doubt that this was so; nor that they, who
engaged in its performance, viewed it as a stu-
pendous musical joke, and engaged in it con
amore as in a gigantic professional frolic.”44
Thayer’s graphic image predictably resonates
through the popular accounts of writers like
Sullivan and Scott,45 in which it is simply stated
as known fact. (Solomon and Kinderman, as
befits scholarly writers, are explicit in quoting
Thayer but offer no commentary.) The attrac-
tion of such an account is obvious: as I sug-
gested in relation to Plantinga, it enables op. 91
to be understood as an example of Romantic
irony, or of what Rey Longyear (following
Friedrich Schlegel) terms “really transcenden-
tal buffoonery.”46 Once again we have the mak-
ings of a viable interpretation, one that brings
Beethoven at least partly into line with present-
day expectations. For instance, the quasi-fugato
treatment of “God Save the King,” with which
Wellingtons Sieg ends, might be considered a
textbook example of the juxtaposition of dis-
cursive registers characteristic of certain types
of Romantic irony, much in the manner of the
finale of the Ninth Symphony.47 In this way
the resulting possibility, following Richard
enough time to carry me over’” (Beethoven, p. 204). The
problem is that this letter (Anderson, letter no. 903, in a
different trans. = BG no. 1259) dates from 1818.
44
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 565.
45
Sullivan, Beethoven, pp. 197–98; Marion M. Scott,
Beethoven (London: Dent, 1934), p. 70.
46
Rey M. Longyear, “Beethoven and Romantic Irony,” Mu-
sical Quarterly 56 (1970), 648 (647–64).
47
Both Paul Mies (“Stilkundliche Bemerkungen zu
Beethovens Opus 91,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 48 [1927], 509–
10) and Albrecht Riethmüller (“Wellingtons Sieg oder Die
Schlacht bei Vittoria, Op. 91,” in Beethoven: Inter-
pretationen seiner Werke, II, 43 [34–45]) specifically com-
ment on this link; it is an entertaining thought that, if one
accepts the Moscheles/Thayer line on the fugato treat-
ment of “God Save the King,” then Mälzel should be cred-
ited with a fundamental aspect of the Ninth Symphony
finale.
Taruskin and Lawrence Kramer, might be
termed a “resisted” Wellingtons Sieg.48
Under normal circumstances, however, the
evidence of someone who had lost sympathy
with Beethoven’s music and who was recount-
ing what he had been told more than thirty
years before might be considered weak and cir-
cumstantial, and it is hard to find corrobora-
tion for this kind of interpretation.49 Indeed,
Beethoven’s notoriously angry reaction to
Weber’s critique of op. 91 was prompted pre-
cisely by the suggestion that it could be re-
garded as a joke: it is at this point that Beethoven
wrote “nothing but an occasional work” in the
margin of his own copy of Caecilia, adding
“pitiful scoundrel, my shit is better than [any-
thing] you have ever thought.”50 Matthias
Wendt sees this as direct evidence of the sig-
nificance Beethoven attached to Wellingtons
Sieg;51 an alternative argument might be that
the very strength of Beethoven’s reaction may
reflect repressed doubts that, by 1825, the com-
poser had come to entertain about the work.
But neither interpretation supports the idea that
Beethoven saw it as a joke, which would also
entail a particularly cynical interpretation of
his letter of thanks to the participants at the
first performance: “Every individual was in-
spired by the single thought of contributing
something by his art for the benefit of the fa-
therland. . . . We were all filled with nothing
48
That is, one that embodies a critique of its own affirma-
tive message: Richard Taruskin, “Resisting the Ninth”
(this journal 12 [1989], 241–56); and Lawrence Kramer,
“The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in
Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’” (this journal 22 [1998], 90 [78–
90]).
49
Although in no sense corroboration, there is a resonance
with Weber, who recorded in a footnote to his article “Über
Tonmalerei” his relief on discovering that op. 91 had been
written for mechanical instruments and therefore might
be taken as a joke (Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, pp.
284–85 [279–88]; the article first appeared in Cäcilia 3
[1825], 154–72). Given the much later date of Tomaschek’s
biography, it is conceivable that his reminiscence is in
reality a distorted version of Weber’s footnote.
50
Translated in Kinderman, Beethoven, pp. 177–80; the
original is reproduced as Kinderman’s plate 13 and as Abb.
4 in Röder, “Beethovens Sieg,” p. 255.
51
Matthias Wendt, “Die Zeit der großen äußeren Erfolge:
Die Auseinandersetzung um Beethovens Opus 91,
Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria,” in
Beethoven: Mensch seiner Zeit, ed. Siegfried Cross (Bonn:
Röhrscheid, 1980), p. 85 (73–96).
but the pure love of country and of joyful sacri- NICHOLAS
COOK
fice of our powers for those who sacrificed so The
much for us.”52 Other
Beethoven
Nor is it easy to be sure quite what Beethoven
himself thought of Der glorreiche Augenblick.
Solomon quotes the claim of the possibly unre-
liable Moscheles (again in his translation of
Schindler’s certainly unreliable biography) that
Beethoven “attached no value” to the work.
But as Solomon himself points out,53 in the
letter of 12 June 1825, Beethoven chides Tobias
Haslinger for his failure to publish this and
other works and asks Haslinger to lend him
“the score of the cantata for a few days, be-
cause I should like to compose a kind of over-
ture to it,” presumably with a view to reviving
it (perhaps with a new text). 54 In short,
Beethoven may have seen op. 91 as an occa-
sional piece, but that does not mean he saw it
without value, and there is no reason to believe
that he saw op. 136 as either.
There is little definite, then, to set against
the solid evidence of both the critical esteem in
which the works of 1813–14 were held in their
own time and their widespread popularity, and
this is, after all, the nub of the conundrum:
here are works whose ambition and contempo-
rary success might have been expected to
ensure them a prominent place in the
Beethovenian canon, but which figure—if at
all—as little more than a source of critical em-
barrassment. Beethoven’s own claim in 1823
that Wellingtons Sieg was “received with ex-
traordinary applause both in London and every-
where else” might be considered self-interested,
given that it was contained in a letter in which
he complained to King George IV of England
52
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 567.
53
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 224.
54
Anderson, letter no. 1388 = BG no. 1992; Haslinger was at
that time employed by Steiner, who had acquired the rights
to op. 136. There is also a reference in a further letter to
Haslinger (11 Nov. 1826, Anderson, letter no. 1539 = BG
no. 2227), which Ladenburger suggests may refer to plans
to replace Weissenbach’s text for purposes of publication
(“Der Wiener Kongreß,” p. 304). When the publisher Steiner
first issued the work to the public in 1837, Weissenbach’s
text was replaced—presumably because of its occasional
nature—by Friedrich Rochlitz’s poem “Preis der Tonkunst”
(though Weissenbach’s text was used in the three de luxe
copies of op. 136 printed in 1836 and presented to the
Holy Roman Emperor, Czar of Russia, and King of Prussia).
9
 19 TH about the king’s failure to acknowledge the
CENTURY
MUSIC dedication of the work to him.55 But other evi-
dence ranges from Louis Spohr, not always
Beethoven’s greatest admirer, who described
one of the concerts at which Wellingtons Sieg
was presented as “attended with the most bril-
liant success,”56 to the girl selling cherries who
(according to Czerny’s story) would accept no
money from Beethoven, saying, “I’ll take noth-
ing from you. We saw you in the Redoutensaal
when we heard your beautiful music.”57 Less
memorable but more tangible is the evidence
of the reviews quoted by Thayer with such
liberality as to render extensive repetition re-
dundant. Of the December 1813 concerts (in
which Wellingtons Sieg was first given, along
with the Seventh Symphony), Thayer writes
that “the Wiener Zeitung, Allg. Mus. Zeit. of
Leipzig, and the Beobachter, contained exces-
sively laudatory notices of the music and vivid
descriptions of its effect upon the auditors,
whose ‘applause rose to the point of ecstasy’.”
(At the repetition of the program on 2 January
1814, the Wiener Zeitung reported, “the ap-
plause was general and reached the highest ec-
stasy. Many things had to be repeated, and there
was a unanimous expression of a desire on the
part of all the hearers to hear the compositions
again and often, and to have occasion more
frequently to laud and admire our native [!]
composer for works of his brilliant invention.”58)
Thayer also quotes another and more notorious
Wiener Zeitung report, of the 29 November
1814 concert at which Der glorreiche
Augenblick was first given: “At noon yester-
day, Hr. Ludwig v. Beethoven gave all music-
lovers an ecstatic pleasure. In the R. I.
Redoutensaal he gave performances of his beau-
tiful musical representation of Wellington’s
Battle at Vittoria, preceded by the symphony
[the Seventh] which had been composed as a
companion-piece. Between the two works an
55
Anderson, letter no. 1142 = BG no. 1579; Beethoven makes
similar claims in Anderson, letter no. 546 = BG no. 810
(June 1815).
56
Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions of Contemporaries,
p. 98.
57
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 576, reference to the con-
cert of 27 February 1814.
58
Ibid., p. 566. Wiener Zeitung, 9 January 1814, trans. in
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 571.
10
entirely new . . . cantata, Der glorreiche
Augenblick.”59
Despite the evident dangers of this kind of
selective quotation, and of attempting to inter-
pret such criticism without due consideration
of the social and literary conventions of the
day, it is hard to dismiss Schindler’s character-
ization of the period 1814–15 as “one of the
most important times in the master’s life when,
with the exception of a few professional musi-
cians, all the voices that up to this moment
had been at odds finally united in unanimous
acclaim.”60 A page later, Schindler underlines
his point: “It took a work like the Battle sym-
phony to unify the conflicting opinions and
thus stop the mouths of the opponents of every
type.” There is a deep irony here: it took what
is now seen as one of the leading contenders for
the title of Beethoven’s worst work to silence
the critical grumbling that had always accom-
panied Beethoven’s music, resulting in what
Wallace, perhaps echoing Thayer’s “exces-
sively,” describes as “a new and rather unfortu-
nate genre in Beethoven criticism. Here, for the
first time, any hint of adverse comment disap-
pears. . . . Critical poise is lost, and with it
critical purpose.”61 If, as I suggested, Wellingtons
Sieg largely bankrolled the works of the final
period, then it may also have generated the
acclaim, the emotional investment, necessary
for the prolonged critical and hermeneutic ef-
fort by which the late works were subsequently
claimed for the canon.62
In particular one might note the absence in
the critical reception from 1813 to 1814 of any
adverse comment on what nowadays appear to
be gross contrasts of genre or critical register
between the works performed. Even leaving
aside the description of the Seventh Symphony
as a “companion-piece” (Begleitung) for
59
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 599; the original Wiener
Zeitung review (30 Nov. 1814) is reprinted in Ladenburger,
“Der Wiener Congreß,” pp. 303–04. Thayer adds: “All the
contemporary notices agree . . . that the Cantata, notwith-
standing the poverty of the text, was, on the whole, wor-
thy of the composer’s reputation and contained some very
fine numbers” (pp. 599–600).
60
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 167.
61
Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics, p. 36.
62
This is essentially the claim advanced by Wendt in “Die
Zeit der großen äußeren Erfolge.”
Wellingtons Sieg,63 here is a general readiness
to set the pieces side by side, even drawing
comparisons between them without concern
for their incommensurability. Perhaps the only
contemporary review that betrays a hint of re-
sistance in this respect—a resistance presum-
ably reflecting the perceived subordinate status
of illustrative music—is one in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung (1814), which observed:
As for the Battle, if one were to attempt to describe
it in musical notes, one would have to do it just as it
is done here. Once one accepts the idea, one is plea-
surably surprised at the result, and especially at the
ingenious and artistic way it is achieved. The effect,
even the illusion, is quite extraordinary, and leads
one to conclude without hesitation that there is no
work equal to it in the whole realm of tone-paint-
ing.64
“Once one accepts the idea”: this small pro-
viso, apparently met without difficulty, stands
for the gulf between the works today included
in the Beethovenian canon and those excluded
from it. In the remainder of this article, I trace
the hardening of categories of reception that
63
This was of course factually incorrect in that the Sev-
enth Symphony had been completed in 1812.
64
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 168; original
review rpt. in Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, pp. 269–71.
The review nevertheless ends by commenting that the
connoisseur will prefer the Seventh Symphony; similarly,
an 1813 review in the Wiener allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung comments on the lower status of illustrative mu-
sic, suggesting that Beethoven’s venture into it must be
explained by his friendship with Mälzel, but still calls it a
“marvellous” symphony (Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven,
p. 268). There were some dissenting voices (for examples,
see the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reports of 1814
and 1816 in Kunze, cols. 271–72, the former complaining
that, as battle music, op. 91 is less original and developed
than the work of Peter von Winter, a charge reiterated by
Gottfried Weber but contradicted by an 1816 review spe-
cifically emphasizing Beethoven’s rejection of the worn-
out conventions of battle music: Kunze, cols. 273–74). But
it is suggestive that the group of connoisseurs and sup-
porters who in 1823 urged Beethoven to give Vienna (not
Berlin) the first performances of the Missa solemnis and
Ninth Symphony referred to op. 91 as they did (“For years,
ever since the thunder of the ‘Victory of Vittoria’ died
away, we have waited and hoped to see you once again
distribute new gifts within the circle of your friends from
the fulness of your riches,” BG no. 1784, trans. from
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 274); had the
work become the embarrassment within such circles as
which it is nowadays commonly represented, this refer-
ence would have been out of place.
has resulted in this situation, and ask what it NICHOLAS
COOK
might mean to attempt to hear such works, as The
Matthew Head puts it, “outside of the ideologi- Other
Beethoven
cal framework of Viennese Classicism.”65
Resisting the Heroic
and Reexperiencing Beethoven
While much recent musicological work has
gone into the institutional aspects of the pro-
cess of canon-formation that took place in the
earlier part of the nineteenth century, it is with
its internal aspect—the patterns of listening
and thinking associated with it—that I am con-
cerned here. This ground is well trodden, too,
and so I can move quickly by making reference
in particular to the work of Scott Burnham. For
Burnham, the concept of “Beethoven Hero” is
more than just an image of the composer in
light of which his music can be heard and un-
derstood. It is that, of course, and as such it is
embodied in the hermeneutic literature that
developed around Beethoven’s symphonies in
the first half of the nineteenth century; the
music is heard to speak, as it were, with
Beethoven’s voice. But underlying this, accord-
ing to Burnham, is the model of subjectivity,
“an ennobling and all-embracing concept of
self,” that also developed in the early part of
the nineteenth century: music is heard in terms
of an ethically charged process of self-develop-
ment precisely corresponding to the contempo-
raneous genre of the Bildungsroman.66 This in
turn involves a conception of time as progres-
sive and teleological, a temporal modality that
becomes directly perceptible in the sustained
Beethovenian line heard (as Burnham puts it)
as “both weighty and inexorable, initiated with
an exhortation, continued with wavelike mo-
mentum, and concluded with monumental as-
severation.”67 Heard this way, as a mode of
65
Matthew Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s
Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000),
p. 127.
66
Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), pp. 112, 116–19.
67
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 149; Dahlhaus links such
a conception to the eighteenth-century understanding of
the Pindaric ode (Beethoven, p. 73). Reinhold Brinkmann
presents it in a more abstract and interdisciplinary context
in his essay “In the Time of the Eroica,” trans. Irene
11
 19 TH subjective presence, music was experienced as
CENTURY
MUSIC unmediated and yet could take on as many
meanings as there were listeners or occasions
of listening. And all this lies at the core of the
new seriousness that took hold of audiences
from around 1820 on, a mode of listening spe-
cifically associated with Beethoven and docu-
mented in images like Eugène Lami’s “La
première audition de la Septième Symphonie
de Beethoven.”68
Burnham explains the multiplicity of musi-
cal meaning as follows: “The music is not so
much about anything in a directly referential
sense but acts as a disembodied yet compelling
force that attracts whatever is at hand as long
as it is remotely commensurable.”69 The music
shapes meaning, in other words, by drawing it
out of whatever interpretive materials are to
hand, and the result (in Leon Botstein’s words)
is that “in its very structure Beethoven’s in-
strumental music could be personalized by the
listener.”70 This personal quality, intimately
linked with values of sincerity and authentic-
ity, is central to the Beethovenian canon, and
accordingly to the exclusion from the canon of
works that do not measure up to such values.
Zedlacher, in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham
and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), pp. 1–26; see also Leon Botstein’s discussion
of Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition in his contribution
to the same collection (“The Search for Meaning in
Beethoven: Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics in Historical
Perspective,” pp. 332–66); and Lawrence Kramer’s brief
but suggestive critique, with further references, in Classi-
cal Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 64–65.
68
Reproduced in, e.g., James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris:
A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1995), p. 263. Johnson’s book is the
only in-depth study of listening practices at this time, and
it is hard to know how closely the developments he charts
were aligned to those in other musical centers; Leon
Botstein’s study of Viennese audiences concentrates on
the second half of the century (see e.g., “Listening through
Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience,” this
journal 16 [1992], 129–45).
69
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 31. For an attempt to for-
mulate a general model of musical meaning on this basis,
see Nicholas Cook, “Theorizing Musical Meaning,” Mu-
sic Theory Spectrum 23 (2001), 170–95.
70
Botstein, “The Search for Meaning in Beethoven,” p. 343;
hence the sense of possession Thomas Clifton identified
as one of music’s key aesthetic characteristics (Music as
Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983], chap. 7).
12
An essential component of it is complexity, the
“difficulty and confusion” that Botstein sees as
integral to Beethovenian pathos and deep pas-
sion.71 One can construct music’s meaning for
oneself and hence take possession of it only if
the meaning is not self-evident in the first place,
and so music that bears its meaning on its
sleeve eludes the interpretive process.
In terms of the paradigm of Beethovenian
subjectivity, then, the meaning of works like
op. 91 and op. 136 was too obvious to be taken
seriously. And it is this, translated into the
language of contemporary criticism, that un-
derlies Solomon’s comparison between the last
movement of the Ninth Symphony and Der
glorreiche Augenblick. The Ninth Symphony
succeeds where Beethoven’s other avowedly
ideological music failed, Solomon writes, “by
compelling its message to emerge from power-
ful opposing forces. . . . It succeeds, primarily,
because of the rich ambiguity of a message
which manages to transcend the particularities
of its origin and to arrive at a set of universal
paradigms.”72 Beethoven’s political music is
then, to borrow Herriot’s word, doubly “odi-
ous”: first, because the once rebellious
Beethoven now lent his support to the forces of
reaction and conformism (more on this later),
and second, because he composed explicitly
political music at all, music that forces its mes-
sage on the listener and so betrays what might
be termed the Beethovenian contract with the
listener. This is the exact musical equivalent
of Wolfgang Iser’s characterization of political
literature; no wonder that, ten years after
Herriot’s book, Leopold Hirschberg was pro-
posing that copies of ops. 91 and 136, along
with the Third and Ninth Symphonies, be air-
dropped to the mustering German troops in
order to fortify their patriotic sentiments.73
71
Botstein, “The Search for Meaning in Beethoven,” p. 344.
72
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 313.
73
In a 1939 article in the Berliner Tageblatt entitled “How
Beethoven Sang of War and Victory,” cited in David B.
Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics 1870–1989 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 68–69; for ex-
amples of politically motivated performances of op. 136,
see Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, pp. 205, 235. On political
literature, see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory
of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1978), p. 152.
 Burnham’s historical account of the devel-
opment of the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm has
a further dimension, tracing the manner in
which the experience of the sustained
Beethovenian line became increasingly central
to the entire music-theoretical project. As he
puts it, “The musical process that seems to
press inexorably forth to transcendent and ex-
haustive closure brings about an emphasis on
the notion of necessary and organic unity.”74
Most relevant to my argument is his demon-
stration of the way in which turn-of-the-cen-
tury conceptions of music as rhetoric, embod-
ied for example in Koch’s writings, gave way in
succession to A. B. Marx’s model of music as a
dialectical engagement between “the will to
motion and the will to closure,” and to the
wholly unitary conceptions of Riemann and
Schenker—unitary in the sense that music is
understood as the composing out of a funda-
mental structural principle, with the absence
of any residue becoming a criterion of value.75
Parallel to this, and again represented by the
contrast between Marx and Schenker, is the
transition from a search for extramusical or
spiritual content aligned in some manner with
the music to an insistence that content lies
within the music itself. The conjunction of
these two developments means that, in
Burnham’s words, “the vaunted wholeness of
the heroic-style work is not just the inhering
integrity of a self-sufficient object, or of an
objectified, sufficient self. Wholeness is instead
a result of completion, the result of an all-
consuming temporal process brought to un-
equivocal closure.”76
This point is relevant to my argument be-
74
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 67.
75
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, chap. 3; his most telling quo-
tation is Riemann’s claim that “in Marx’s composition
treatise the Gang [open-ended motion] is the opposite of
the Satz; it is a formal fragment without any distinct
caesurae. The concept was a crutch, because Marx did not
penetrate the problems of periodic construction sufficiently
enough to be able to explain more complicated configura-
tions in terms of a unifying principle” (p. 81, from the
entry for Gang in Riemann’s Lexicon). Traces of dialecti-
cal thinking remain in Schenker’s work; see e.g., Michael
Cherlin, “Hauptmann and Schenker: Two Adaptations of
Hegelian Dialectics,” Theory and Practice 13 (1988), 115–
31.
76
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 150.
cause it enables me to make a distinction be- NICHOLAS
COOK
tween the dominant Romantic-modernist con- The
struction of Beethoven’s music and an alterna- Other
Beethoven
tive construction that might with equal justice
be termed premodern or postmodern. “The one
thing Bakhtin demanded of the novel,” Ken
Hirschkop writes, “is that it be fundamentally
incomplete, in the sense that it could only be
comprehended as a contribution to an ongoing
dialogue. What this precluded was the ideal of
a self-contained aesthetic totality, that central
fetish of bourgeois culture.” And, in language
parallel to Head’s reference to the ideological
framework of Viennese Classicism, Hirschkop
continues: “The ideal of a ‘classical’ music tra-
dition, which was established in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, shares
the ideological strategy of poetic-monological
discourse.”77 Without needing to enter too
deeply into Bakhtinian dialogic and its applica-
tion to music, we can draw a contrast between
experiencing music in terms of a unified, all-
embracing notion of self—Hirschkop’s “poetic-
monological discourse”—and experiencing it in
terms of a diversity of discursive registers, a
polyphony of voices. And it is the latter that is
characteristic of many contemporary responses
to Beethoven, represented most picturesquely
by G. G. Cambini’s well-known observation
from 1810 that in his first two symphonies
Beethoven “takes at times the majestic flight
of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways.
He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy,
and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous
chords. He seems to harbor together doves and
crocodiles.”78
Similar but more overtly negative views were
expressed about Beethoven’s late music during
much of the nineteenth century, as for instance
in the complaint of an American newspaper of
1868 that the finale of the Ninth Symphony
opens with “a commonplace theme, very much
77
Ken Hirschkop, “The Classical and the Popular: Musical
Form and Social Context,” in Music and the Politics of
Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin’s,
1989), pp. 287–88 (283–304). Hirschkop is using the word
“classical” in a broader sense than Head and indeed sug-
gests that much popular music embodies the same ideo-
logical strategy.
78
Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, p. 42 (from
Tablettes de Polymnie, March 1811, pp. 310–11).
13
 19 TH like Yankee Doodle . . . it appeared to be made
CENTURY
MUSIC up of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt, the
ferocious, and the screechy, with the slightest
possible admixture, here and there, of an intel-
ligible melody. . . . The general impression it
left on me is that of a concert made up of
Indian war-whoops and angry wildcats.”79 The
reviewer’s exasperation presumably issues from
the expectation of a monological discourse into
which the music proves impossible to assimi-
late: he hears no coherent subjectivity in it, no
composer’s voice. And this is merely an unusu-
ally late example of the widespread difficulties
encountered by nineteenth-century audiences
and critics in assimilating the music of
Beethoven’s final period to the “Beethoven
Hero” paradigm. These difficulties were solved
in the first instance by hearing the music in
terms of an expanded subjectivity—its disjunc-
tures and contradictions being so to speak em-
braced within huge quotation marks, as in
Adorno’s image of a hermetic Beethoven alien-
ated from his own middle-period work—and
subsequently, at least within the scholarly com-
munity, through the development of analytical
methods powerful enough to show how even
the silences and irruptions of the late works
could be understood to conceal an underlying
organic unity. One might say that the Sulzerian
sublime, which Dahlhaus sees as an integral
element of the Viennese classical style,80 is in-
corporated within an overarching Hanslickian
concept of beauty.
Hirschkop argues that the “‘classical’ kind
of musical discourse” refers not so much to a
body of works but to a manner of experiencing
them, and he adds that “this apparently natural
harmony of musical law or structure with hu-
man ‘subjective’ expression is an aesthetic ef-
fect today so deeply ingrained that it is hard to
see what might be ideological about it.”
Burnham’s claim that “the values of
Beethoven’s heroic style have become the val-
79
Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, p. 52 (from a
Providence, R.I., newspaper, cited in The Orchestra, Lon-
don, 20 June 1868).
80
Dahlhaus, Beethoven, pp. 67–76. Röder specifically in-
vokes the concept of the sublime (this time with reference
to Burke) as relevant to the aesthetic attitude within which
battle pieces, and evocations of war generally, were and
indeed still are received (“Beethovens Sieg,” pp. 241–43).
14
ues of music” amounts to much the same
thing.81 And Burnham goes on to argue that the
dominance of the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm
has not only constrained our ability to make
sense of composers whose music is not domi-
nated by the same teleological drive (he cites
Schubert), but also marginalized such of
Beethoven’s music that does not conform to
it.82 He has the Pastoral Symphony in mind,
but it is of course my claim that Wellingtons
Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick are the most
conspicuous examples of works excluded by
the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm. Whereas the
development of canons is usually charted in
terms of progressive inclusion, such as the la-
borious and ultimately highly successful incor-
poration of the late works within the
Beethovenian canon, here the emphasis is on
how the rise of canonic discourses turned hith-
erto successful works into what commentators
from Weber to Kinderman have seen as “aber-
rations.”83 Postmodernist commentators have
offered readings of canonic works that attempt
in effect to deconstruct their status as “poetic-
monological discourse,” to repeat Hirschkop’s
term, demonstrating the extent to which mean-
ing emerges out of generic and registral dis-
junctures. Kramer’s recent reading of the “Ode
to Joy,”84 for instance, is based on a concerted
attempt to reexperience the Otherness of the
Turkish march and, through it, a polyphony of
cultural references masked by the overwhelm-
ing construct of “Beethoven Hero.” The possi-
bility I wish to suggest is that similar strate-
gies, aiming as much to revive premodern
modes of listening as to impose postmodern
ones, might result in a revaluation—by which I
81
Hirschkop, “The Classical and the Popular,” p. 288;
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. xiii. When Burnham refers
to “the values of music” it might be more correct to say
“the values of the concert hall” (rather than the opera
house).
82
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, pp. 167, 154. For further com-
plaints about the restrictiveness of the “Beethoven Hero”
paradigm, see Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven, Florestan, and
the Varieties of Heroism,” in Beethoven and His World,
pp. 27–47.
83
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 13.
84
Kramer, “The Harem Threshold.” For other examples of
such strategies, see his Classical Music and Postmodern
Knowledge (esp. chap. 8), and with specific reference to
Turkish elements in the classical tradition, Head,
Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music.
refer not so much to a value judgment as a
reexperiencing—of works excluded from the
Beethovenian canon.
WELLINGTONS SIEG:
Reconstructing the Occasion
What, then, might it mean to hear ops. 91 and
136 outside of the ideological framework of a
retrospectively constructed Viennese Classi-
cism? Posed so broadly, the question is daunt-
ing, but it is at least possible to identify aspects
of these works that the “Beethoven Hero” para-
digm has disenfranchised. “Beethoven’s piece
would be no more embarrassing than many
another such occasional victory salute of the
period that has sunk without trace,” writes the
reviewer of a recording of Wellingtons Sieg,
“were it not by Beethoven and has therefore
survived.”85 And one of the main strategies
adopted by the work’s few apologists is to em-
phasize its links with established repertories
and in particular the historical tradition of battle
pieces,86 thereby demonstrating that within its
proper context it is not an aberration at all. But
the embarrassment to which the reviewer re-
fers has another source: the literal representa-
tion that formed the object of Weber’s 1825
critique.
“Once one accepts the idea,” wrote the 1814
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reviewer
whom I have already cited, “one is pleasurably
surprised at the result,” but that is precisely
what Weber was not prepared to do. He makes
two principal complaints. The first is that tone-
painting is an essentially regressive tech-
nique; the appearance of the French march
(“Marlborough”) in F
minor to symbolize de-
feat might be acceptable as a kind of musical
joke, he says, but it is out of place in a serious
and ambitious work of instrumental music. The
second complaint undercuts the first. Beethoven
is not genuinely engaged in tone-painting at
85
Review of Accent ACC8860D, Gramophone, February
1990, www.gramophone.co.uk/cdreviews.asp. Weber simi-
larly commented that if op. 91 had not been by Beethoven
nobody would have taken it seriously (Kunze, Ludwig van
Beethoven, p. 286).
86
See esp. Röder, “Beethovens Sieg”; and Wendt, “Die Zeit
der großen äußeren Erfolge,” p. 82.
all, Weber argues, because that implies the use NICHOLAS
COOK
of music to express emotions (the courage and The
terror of war, for example), whereas Beethoven Other
Beethoven
offered little more than a literal transcription
of the sounds of battle.87 The argument is simi-
lar to Lizst’s perhaps disingenuous insistence
that his “Revolutionary” Symphony was a rep-
resentation not simply of a particular battle
but of the “glorious feelings aroused by revolu-
tion in general,”88 and indeed bears a resem-
blance to Beethoven’s famous comment on the
Sixth Symphony (“more an expression of feel-
ing than painting”). What is at issue, however,
is not a theory of musical representation but a
claim about subjectivity: extramusical refer-
ences of whatever nature become aesthetically
viable only to the extent that they are medi-
ated by the composer and so assimilated within
a “poetic-monological discourse.” This is just
what Solomon finds lacking when he writes
that “one can scarcely blame Beethoven for
portraying the historical events of 1812–15 in
unmediated terms and raw primary colours.” It
is also at the root of Einstein’s complaint that
Wellingtons Sieg “remains merely naturalistic,
patriotic, and occasional”:89 seen this way, mu-
sic transcends the circumstances of its origin
precisely to the extent that it is mediated,
subjectivized, universalized.
But if, as Einstein says (and as Beethoven
himself noted in the margin of Weber’s article),
Wellingtons Sieg is an occasional piece, then it
belongs to a genre to which Weber’s, Solomon’s,
and Einstein’s aesthetic assumptions are not
appropriate. If anything indisputable emerges
from contemporary accounts of the work, other
than its overriding success, it is that op. 91 was
heard as not just a “daring musical character
picture,” as Bertuch described it in his diary,90
but an astonishingly realistic evocation of the
87
In Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, pp. 284–86; see also
Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics, p. 71. Weber offers a striking
analogy: it is as if instead of painting a sunrise, he says,
Claude Lorrain simply made a hole in the canvas and held
it up to the sun.
88
Quoted in Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Mu-
sical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 214.
89
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 222; Einstein, Essays on Music,
p. 244.
90
Robbins Landon, Beethoven, pp. 282–83.
15
 19 TH sounds of battle. The very next sentence in the
CENTURY
MUSIC 1814 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung review,
after all, was: “The effect, even the illusion, is
quite extraordinary.” Schindler’s account sug-
gests that the illusion must have been even
more striking when the work was performed
not in the university auditorium, as in 1813,
but in the Great Redoutensaal: “This hall af-
forded an opportunity to put into execution for
the first time the many subtleties written into
the Battle symphony. From the long corridors
and opposed rooms one could hear the enemy
armies advance towards each other, creating a
stunning illusion of the battle.”91 It takes an
effort of historical imagination to re-create the
effect of this kind of surround-sound on listen-
ers of the preelectronic era, but some insight
into it may be gained from contemporary re-
viewers’ accounts of the thunder of cannons,
the rattling of rifle fire, and the groaning of the
wounded that they heard in the music.92
What is involved, then, is the attempt not
simply to neutralize the “Beethoven Hero” para-
digm, but to reimagine the perceptions of lis-
teners for whom the clash of steel and the
pounding of cannon meant not period-dress fan-
tasy but a grim and threatening reality. Instead
of measuring Wellingtons Sieg against the
Eroica and thereby repeating Weber’s category
error, it might be better to think of it as a
91
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, p. 169; these spa-
tial effects are a principal topic of the detailed instructions
Beethoven provided in the preface of the score (and which
Ludwig Misch cites as further evidence of the composer’s
regard for op. 91: Beethoven Studies [Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1953], p. 158).
92
A representative example is the 1813 WamZ review, rpt.
in Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, pp. 267–69 (second para-
graph); see also the second 1816 Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung review, rpt. on p. 272. Even the unsympathetic
Weber heard the “whimpering and howling of the wounded
and dying” at m. 260 and the chattering teeth of the French
army at m. 350 (pp. 283, 284). A further factor involved in
recovering period perceptions of this music is the exist-
ence of conventions within the battle music tradition for
the depiction of the different types of artillery, cavalry,
infantry, and so forth, since such depictions, while in one
sense literal, are at the same time highly stylized; for clues,
largely derived from contemporary battle music scores in
which these elements are labeled, as well as for indica-
tions of the various depictions in op. 91, see Röder,
“Beethovens Sieg.” (As Abb. 3 of Küthen’s “Wellingtons
Sieg,” p. 268, shows, Beethoven himself scrawled
“Kavallerie” on the autograph score at m. 108 of op. 91, a
textbook example of the topic.)
16
period equivalent of the opening sequence from
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
Röder invokes a comparison with Star Wars
and emphasizes the manner in which battle
pieces gave bourgeois audiences vicarious ac-
cess to the events of war, much in the manner
of television news coverage or documentaries
today.93 In short, any attempt to recapture a
period perception of op. 91 will need to under-
stand the literal quality of its representation as
central to its generic identity and not as some
kind of deficiency or anomaly.94
Kinderman writes that the neglect of
Beethoven’s patriotic works of 1813–14 is un-
justified “since fascinating aesthetic issues are
raised” by them,95 and he accordingly attempts
a reading of Wellingtons Sieg despite evident
personal ambivalence. Having noted the “in-
sistent repetitions of a few basic figures on a
broad but flat musical canvas” (he calls atten-
tion to the “24 almost undifferentiated repeti-
tions of the single note A ” that depict the
infantry advance at the beginning of the
Sturmmarsch), he makes a determined attempt
to identify “a few finer points to Beethoven’s
musical depiction of the collapse of the French
resistance.”96 In particular he emphasizes the
93
Röder, “Beethovens Sieg,” p. 231; Buch quotes Zelter’s
comment that through battle pieces “women now can
know exactly what a battle really is, even though soon
nobody will know what music is” (Beethoven’s Ninth, p.
72). From this perspective it could be argued that the most
authentic recording of Wellingtons Sieg is that by Neville
Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
(Philips 426 239-2PH), of which the Gramophone reviewer
(Jan. 1991) writes: “Marriner’s new version aims to outdo
even the original in verismo. For the first 50 seconds, we
hear bird-song, bleating sheep, a babbling brook and then
the sounds (from trotting hooves to clinking mess-cans) of
the approaching armies. Beethoven’s music rises against
this background and eventually swamps it, though we do
get plenty of very stereophonic battle ambience later on.”
Riethmüller discusses this recording in “Wellingtons Sieg
oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria,” p. 44.
94
Riethmüller and Wendt also emphasize the verisimili-
tude of op. 91’s representation, stressing its origins in
Mälzel’s inventions and the contemporary fascination with
musical and other automata; Riethmüller quotes E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s anecdote of an officer who found himself grip-
ping his sword at the height of Beethoven’s battle
(“Wellingtons Sieg oder Die Schlacht bei Vittoria,” pp. 44–
45).
95
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 169.
96
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 172; his account is in part
based on Küthen’s.
motif used to signal the French forces from m.
260, itself derived from the opening phrase of
the French march (“Marlborough”) and progres-
sively fragmented as the French resistance col-
lapses. Like many contemporary listeners, in-
cluding Weber, he observes how the final de-
feat is marked by a “limping and forlorn” ver-
sion of “Marlborough” in F
minor. (The Nea-
politan coloring at m. 351, incidentally, makes
it even more dismal.)
This kind of commentary can be developed
further, particularly in terms of key symbol-
ism. Beethoven makes consistent play of the
opposed tonalities announced in the opening
fanfares and marches: E  major for the English
and C major for the French. In this context the
F
minor of the final version of “Marlborough”
represents the furthest possible departure from
the opening position of the French: F
instead
of C, and minor instead of major. But if the
French defeat could hardly be represented more
unambiguously, what the choice of F
minor
does not do is represent it as a specifically
English victory, in the way that a sonatalike
restatement in E  would. It is almost too obvi-
ous to read this as stressing the European per-
spective (the defeat of Napoleon) at the ex-
pense of a specifically English one (Wellington’s
victory), so that the composition might be seen
to be moderating if not subverting its own title.97
Again, the key structure of the Schlacht turns
largely around C minor, the principal interme-
diary between E  major and C major. This be-
comes most evident at m. 146, where the un-
stable six-four chord marks the only time the
English and French rattles—depictions of rifle-
fire—play simultaneously. From m. 162, how-
ever, the two sides (E  and C major) are directly
engaged with one another, with eight measures
of E  being followed directly by four measures
97
Buch points out how “the figure of a leader is totally
absent” from op. 91 (Beethoven’s Ninth, p. 73), as well as
the consciously European politics of the Congress (pp. 76–
78). For a discussion of the European rather than national
image of “the English Jupiter” (Wellington), focused on an
Italian hymn contained in Beethoven’s Nachlass, see
Küthen, “‘Wellingtons Sieg’,” pp. 264–66; Küthen also re-
fers to the “ambivalence” of “Marlborough” as national
symbol of France (p. 267, referring specifically to its ap-
pearance in F
minor), a point discussed in detail by Röder
(“Beethovens Sieg,” pp. 247–48).
of C major, succeeded by one-measure alterna- NICHOLAS
tions between A  (IV of E ) and C-major six-four COOK
The
chords. Neither side yet has a clear upper hand, Other
Beethoven
and the Schlacht ends in another inconclusive
C minor (now in root position). By an early
stage of the Sturmmarsch, however, and fifty
measures before the final French cannon-shot,
the tide has irreversibly turned in favor of the
English. The music could hardly tell the story
more plainly, making successive statements of
the opening Sturmmarsch material in A , A ,
B , and B , then pointedly leapfrogging C for a
final statement in E  that merges into the mas-
sive, triple-fortissimo block of that key with
which the Presto begins (m. 242).98
But while surely valid as far as they go, how
far do analytical observations of this kind
bear upon the central aesthetic qualities of
Wellingtons Sieg? Kinderman, at all events, fails
to construct a convincing reading from them,
concluding that “the occasional subtle touches
do little to relieve the impression of pastiche
and bombast.” There is an “almost complete
absence,” he says, “of a unifying tonal and for-
mal perspective such as we normally find in
Beethoven. Wellington’s soldiers have no need
of subtlety; they force their way heavily and
brutally into the French defences.”99 In saying
this Kinderman hits the nail on the head, but it
is the wrong nail. Because Wellingtons Sieg is
the depiction and celebration of a victory and
not a symphony manqué, it has no call for a
unifying tonal and formal perspective: it might
better be thought of as a kind of collage. The
almost filmic cross-cutting between keys, with
the complete absence during large sections of
the music of contrapuntally based effects of
light and shade, is a direct reflection of the
representational genre. Again Apocalypse Now
may be a more relevant model than the Eroica.
Not surprisingly, then, this music has more
affinities with the harmonic chopping and
changing of opera recitative than it does with
98
Barry Cooper points out this leapfrogging in Beethoven
and the Creative Process, p. 57, and Beethoven, p. 226.
Another striking feature of the music is the thirty-mea-
sure fantasia-style prolongation, in the opening Allegro of
the Schlacht, of a bass that descends mainly chromatically
across two octaves (mm. 74–103).
99
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 172.
17
 19 TH symphonic models of continuity. And param-
CENTURY
MUSIC eters other than keys are also organized around
the developing engagement between the armies:
each side has its own trumpets (whose abrupt
appearance and disappearance from the texture
are inevitably linked to the key structure), its
rattles, and its cannons, the precisely notated
interventions of which are artfully timed to
create pseudo-random effects within the larger
trends of the battle. All these resources are, of
course, deployed within the real space of the
auditorium. The collage-like construction also
extends to generic categories and national asso-
ciations. For one thing, the music annexes the
discourses of outdoor music to those of the
concert hall, evoking the ceremonial occasions
and public celebrations that took place in the
Prater.100 In other words, there is an incorpora-
tion of a range of military and ceremonial genres
within the apparatus of the orchestral tradi-
tion. These are aligned with the explicit Others
of the representation, the English and French,
whereas the orchestra, with its burden of narra-
tive authority, might be seen as representing
Viennese tradition—a not inappropriate paral-
lel to the role that Metternich constructed for
Vienna through the Congress. And apart from
the explicit Others represented by the marches
and anthems, there is also an implicit or intrin-
sic Other, so to speak, represented by the “Turk-
ish” percussion from m. 586 of the Sieges-
Symphonie.101
In short, a fundamental principle of this mu-
sic is intertextuality (what Kinderman calls
“pastiche”), or more precisely the incorpora-
tion of alien discourses within an “own” dis-
100
Such as the victory celebrations that took place on 18
October 1814, illustrated on the title page of Diabelli’s op.
94 (reproduced in Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Congreß,”
Abb. 3, p. 290) and discussed in Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth,
p. 78.
101
“Turkish” in quotation marks because the instrumenta-
tion in question is a stylized Western representation (the
triangle, in particular, was not an authentic Turkish in-
strument at all); for this, and evidence that such minimal
representations were clearly understood in terms of a Turk-
ish topic, see Eric Rice, “Representations of Janissary Mu-
sic (Mehter) as Musical Exoticism in Western Composi-
tions, 1670–1824,” Journal of Musicological Research 19
(1999), 41–88. For a contemporary commentary on op. 91
that specifically relates it to Janissary music, see the 1816
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung review, reprinted in
Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, pp. 273, 278.
18
course that, in consequence, becomes destabi-
lized. Head speaks of eighteenth-century
Orientalism “affording an alienated narrative
vantage-point and celebrating ‘uncivilized’ aes-
thetic experiences in a reverse discourse.”102 In
the case of Wellingtons Sieg, the same kind of
interaction might be discerned across a num-
ber of boundaries: indoor-outdoor, orchestral-
military, high-low. And if there is one ele-
ment of classical-music ideology that this
problematizes above all others, it is that medi-
ated subjectivity that, for Solomon and other
critics, has enabled the Ninth Symphony but
not Wellingtons Sieg to transcend the occasion
of its composition. Seen this way, the basic
simplicity and directness of the latter, in strik-
ing contrast to the interpretation-attracting
complexity of the former, becomes less an act
of condescension on Beethoven’s part (Martin
Cooper’s term) than a concomitant of its genre.
The successive, literal repetitions a semitone
higher in the Sturmmarsch, which ratchet up
the tension without a hint of subjective media-
tion, or the tonal crosscutting of the Schlacht,
may be unthinkable within the heroic main-
stream of absolute music that runs from
Beethoven to Brahms to Schoenberg. (It is tell-
ing that Weber, in his critique of Beethoven’s
literal depiction, specifically comments on the
lack of transition at such points.103) But such
effects fit naturally enough into a number of
other, more marginalized stylistic traditions:
from Liszt, the programmatic symphony, and
the symphonic poem to Mahler and Hollywood
film music, for example, or via a detour through
Tin Pan Alley to contemporary popular mu-
sic.104 The heroic view of music history is by no
means the only possible one.
DER GLORREICHE AUGENBLICK:
The Performance of History
Solomon writes of the Joseph Cantata (1790)
that “the loosely structured cantata form was
sufficient to strike ideological poses and to ex-
102
Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish
Music, p. 14.
103
In Kunze, Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 282.
104
Rosen notes the link between op. 91 and the program-
matic symphony in The Classical Style, p. 401.
press unmediated feelings, but it proved inad-
equate to explore the concepts of heroism or
tragedy.”105 The same might be said of Der
glorreiche Augenblick, which is again a succes-
sion of several more or less independent num-
bers, although it does evince what appears to
be a conscious effort at large-scale tonal organi-
zation: the cantata opens in A major and ends
in C major, and these two keys form the tonal
basis of the first number. (The fugato at m. 45
begins with a large block of C major, offsetting
the equally massive A major of the opening.)
Given that the final number is in C major
throughout, it is the penultimate one that forms
the crux of the tonal relationship: its opening
recitative associates A major with the past (“Der
den Bund im Sturme fest gehalten”) and C ma-
jor with the future (“Ewig, ewig wird der
Ölzweig grünen, den der Chor dieser, die den
Bau jetzt gründen, um Europas Säulen
winden”).106 Apparent reference in the ensuing
A-Major Quartet to the opening of the Cantata
helps to cement this association,107 suggesting
a parallel between musical and historical time.
More conducive to an understanding of the
music than this kind of textual analysis, how-
ever, is one based on the work’s historical con-
text.108 Kinderman invokes a historical perspec-
tive to condemn the work and sees it as a
celebration of “the same monarchs who were
already consolidating their restoration of po-
litical power. Only a few years later Austria
was to suffer the oppressive police state of
Metternich. In historical retrospect, at least,
the ideological content of this work is blatant
and cynical.”109 It is hard to know quite how
cynicism can be retrospective, or to disagree
105
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 53; for a brief discussion of the
origins of the turn-of-the-century cantata, particularly in
the composers of the French Revolution, see pp. 50–51.
106
“He who held the alliance firm throughout the storm”;
“Forever and ever will the olive branch be green, which
the chorus of those who are now building the new struc-
ture winds round Europe’s pillars.”
107
I am referring to the prominent and effectively unpre-
pared V/V–V progression supporting d
2–f
2 in mm. 15–17
of no. 1 and mm. 35–36 of no. 5. The motif recurs at mm.
164–65 of no. 5.
108
For an outline of the historical as well as musical con-
text of the Congress works, see Ladenburger, “Der Wiener
Kongreß.”
109
Kinderman, Beethoven, pp. 176–77.
with Thayer’s comment that “nothing presaged NICHOLAS
COOK
or foreboded the near advent and thirty years’ The
sway of Metternichism”—or indeed with his Other
Beethoven
general argument that “it is . . . difficult for us
to conceive adequately the sensations caused
by the downfall of Napoleon at the time of
which we are writing.”110 Thayer backs up his
argument with a graphic evocation of the hor-
rors of the Napoleonic wars, but in this context
it is necessary only to point out that Vienna
had been occupied by the French as recently as
1809, and that the prolonged period of military
and political instability had provoked a wide-
spread mood of retrospection if not reaction.
As Solomon expresses it, “for many Enlight-
ened members of the Habsburg monarchy, in-
cluding Beethoven, the ‘golden age’ was now
seen as the period of the reign of Emperor Jo-
seph II. Enlightened despotism was converted
from ‘reality’ into wish.”111 There is thus a
clear period context behind what might other-
wise seem pure cliché in the words of no. 5
(“Und die alten Zeiten werden endlich
wiedersein auf Erden”)112 and indeed behind
the cantata as a whole.
Kinderman complains that Der glorreiche
Augenblick contains “no trace of critique” but
only a “mindless obsequiousness”; in other
words, to borrow Solomon’s terminology, it ex-
presses unmediated feelings. Ladenburger ad-
mits this, but excuses it on the grounds that
any expression of personal political opinion
would have been blocked by the censors; this is
in line with his general acceptance of present-
day evaluations of the Congress works and his
attempt to explain their initial impact in terms
of historical contingencies.113 Rather than read-
ing op. 136 as a text from which some kind of
critique or other mediated response might or
might not be extracted, however, it may be
more historically illuminating to understand it
as a script created in order to choreograph a
social process.
110
Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, p. 596.
111
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 52.
112
“And the old times will at last come back to the earth.”
113
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 177. Ladenburger, “Der Wiener
Kongreß,” pp. 304–06; see also Röder’s list of reasons for
the success of op. 91 (“Beethovens Sieg,” pp. 244–46),
though he appears more committed than Ladenburger to
the reconstruction of period perceptions of the music.
19
 19 TH In the first place, and most obviously, the
CENTURY
MUSIC cantata’s function is ceremonial. The visiting
royalty are welcomed and praised; the stylized
fanfares that announce them in no. 3 function
as the musical equivalent of heraldic devices.
The music even appears to embody a hierarchy
within the assembled royalty: the Czar of Rus-
sia and King of Prussia are announced with
both a fanfare and a Maestoso introduction,
whereas the latter is omitted for the Kings of
Denmark and Bavaria. The same applies to the
Emperor Franz I, as befits the host’s modesty,
but the passage that praises him is strategically
placed in terms of the number’s tonal struc-
ture, articulating the return to the tonic; in this
way it supports a more subtle musical repre-
sentation of the Emperor’s impact on the Euro-
pean stage than the overt climax with the men-
tion of his name at m. 188 of no. 5—a moment
that not surprisingly attracts Kinderman’s par-
ticular disgust.114 It is worth noting that no. 3
seems to have particularly impressed
contemporary listeners. After admitting that
Beethoven’s genius did not attain its usual
heights in Der glorreiche Augenblick, Schindler
adds that no. 3 is “the only outstanding num-
ber,” while the Wiener Zeitung report of the 29
November 1814 concert records that “there was
unanimous applause, but when [the allegorical
figure of Vienna] sang ‘was nur die Erde Hoch
und Hehres hat, In meinem Mauern hat es sich
versammelt’ [no. 3, mm. 11–14] . . . there was
such delight among all those who were present
that they burst into the loudest applause.”115
114
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 177; he comments that “this
is an example of the manner in which words and music in
this work have been subordinated to the political adora-
tion of authority.”
115
“All that is high and noble in the world is gathered
together within my walls”; Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew
Him, p. 172; and Ladenburger, “Der Wiener Kongreß,” p.
303. Denis McCaldin points out that the combination of
solo soprano, chorus, and solo violin in this number must
have pleased Beethoven, since he used it again in Die
Weihe des Hauses and the Benedictus of the Missa solemnis
(“The Choral Music,” in The Beethoven Reader, ed. Denis
Arnold and Nigel Fortune [New York: W. W. Norton, 1971],
p. 391 [pp. 387–410]). But Tomaschek, ever hard to please,
complained that “Beethoven made a serious miscalcula-
tion when he assigned a solo to the violin to be played in
so gigantic a hall” (the Great Redoutensaal). He adds: “The
cantata did not and could not appeal, for its imperfections
are of a kind which cannot be concealed either by genius
20
In the second place, Der glorreiche Augen-
blick gave social expression to individual sen-
timent. Most obviously, it promoted Viennese
civic pride (but then the whole Congress of
Vienna did that); in the words of the cantata,
“Europa bin ich nicht mehr eine Stadt.”116 More
interestingly, the different numbers channel and
focus communal feeling in different ways. The
first two numbers offer cosmic visions of maj-
esty and historical destiny, addressing them
respectively to the image of royalty and to the
multitude of Europe’s people as represented by
the audience. The listeners are constructed as
delegates of the Volk in a scenario close to that
of Wagner’s unpublished article “The Revolu-
tion” (1849), in which a vision of “the lofty
goddess Revolution . . . rustling on the wings of
storm, her stately head ringed round with light-
nings, a sword in her right hand, a torch in her
left,” appears before “the hundred-thousands,
millions” who are “camped upon the hills and
gaze into the distance.”117 I am not suggesting a
direct influence; both works reflect the wide-
spread imagery and iconography of the period.
Nevertheless, the conjunction of Der glorreiche
Augenblick and Wagner’s explicitly revolution-
ary vision does suggest the possibility of a po-
litically progressive interpretation of the final
words of the first number, “Gib der grossen
Völkerrunde, Auf den Anruf Red’ und Kunde.”118
(Taking the people with them was exactly what
the participants at the Congress failed to do,
and the revolutions of 1848–49 were the conse-
quence.) Following the ceremonial set piece of
no. 3, there is a more overtly communal ex-
pression of emotion in no. 4: another allegori-
cal figure, the Prophetess, evokes the “world
tribunal” (Weltgericht) that will bring peace to
Europe and exhorts the multitude to kneel and
pray. This is followed by a consoling melody
or by fame,”instancing “its declamation and the organic
leading of the voices” (Beethoven: Impressions of Con-
temporaries, pp. 106–07); the otherwise favorable 1814 re-
view in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung similarly
criticizes text-setting in the recitatives (Ludwig van
Beethoven, p. 596).
116
“I am no longer a city, but Europe.”
117
See Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William
Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), VIII, 232–
35.
118
“Give news and tidings of the call to the great mass of
people.”
setting what is in effect a prayer, sung first by
the Prophetess accompanied by four-part strings
with woodwinds picking out phrases or echo-
ing them at cadences (shades of the Ninth Sym-
phony slow movement?), then by the chorus.
The repetition casts the participants in the role
of officiant and congregation, so that the choral
statement becomes a hymn, a ritual enactment
of communal sentiment.
It is perhaps this number in particular that
was responsible for the religious atmosphere
Schindler records at the first performance, a
concatenation of the sacred and the secular
that may have owed as much to the ceremo-
nies of the French Revolution as to the ritual
traditions of the Catholic monarchies: “The
emotions shared by the audience of almost six
thousand and the members of the very large
orchestra and chorus were beyond description.
In a unanimous gesture of respect, the audi-
ence reverently withheld its applause, giving
the whole occasion the character of a religious
service. Each person seemed to feel that such a
moment would never recur in his lifetime.”119
But the most explicit invocation of the com-
munity comes in the last number, where suc-
cessive women’s, children’s, and men’s cho-
ruses—the three estates, so to speak, of an or-
ganic Volk—lead to an extensive closing fugato
section, with the different voices bound to-
gether by a tonic pedal from m. 158 and with
homophonic episodes repeating the words
“Welt! dein großer Augenblick!”120 Such fugal
finales (also exemplified, in a different register,
119
Schindler, Beethoven As I Knew Him, pp. 171–72; his
estimate of the audience is probably exaggerated (3,000 is
generally considered a more likely number), and his ac-
count is hard to square with the “loudest applause” men-
tioned in the Wiener Zeitung report of the same concert.
For modern listeners, this chorus is perhaps the most at-
tractive moment of op. 136: writing in 1997, a reviewer
comments that “the musical Augenblick, the sublime mo-
ment, comes with the chorus’s ‘Den die erste Zahre,’ scored
with deep-rooted strength and sending up tender shots of
melody ‘to Him above in the house of the Sun’”
(Gramophone, Awards [1997], of Koch International Clas-
sics 37377-2), and I would personally agree.
120
“World! Your great moment!” McCaldin offers a rare
present-day example of critical praise of op. 136, describ-
ing this number as “a distinct step forward towards a more
consistent handling of the chorus and orchestra. . . . In
some ways the [fugal] exposition is a model of the tradi-
tional style based on the principles of species counter-
point.” Nevertheless he adds that the fugal subject, which
by Wellingtons Sieg121) form the indispensable NICHOLAS
COOK
climax of grand public music in the eighteenth- The
and nineteenth-century traditions, appropriated Other
Beethoven
again from sacred traditions and transformed
into the musical equivalent of the neo-classical
forms and statuary of contemporary public
buildings.122 They not only crown the sense of
communal purpose and interdependence, but
also imbue the proceedings with qualities of
solemnity and embeddedness in tradition.
We need, however, to qualify this invoca-
tion of community. “In order to enjoy a festi-
val,” one of the planners of French Revolution-
ary festivals wrote, “one must be an actor.”123
In contrast to the Revolutionary festivals, at
which audiences were dispersed across exten-
sive landscapes (much in the manner of
Wagner’s 1849 article), 124 Der glorreiche
Augenblick was performed by professional mu-
sicians before a paying or invited—and seated—
audience. Community, in other words, was en-
acted before rather than by the six (or perhaps
three) thousand auditors. And yet, as Schindler’s
account conveys, it was still enacted. In this
way, if Der glorreiche Augenblick is (in Esteban
Buch’s words) “the artistic representation of a
perfectly closed political universe . . . in which
the population, the peoples, the emperor,
princes, fatherland, Europe, the world, and man-
kind all fit together,” it is also something more:
an actual fragment of that now defunct (and
“directs the tonality too strongly towards the subdomi-
nant,” denies the movement real distinction (“The Choral
Music,” p. 391).
121
Opus 91’s admixture of fugato, national hymn, and a
scherzo-like lightness of touch—the precise combination
that went forward to the Ninth Symphony finale—par-
ticularly enraged Weber; he refers to the inappropriateness
of such “boisterous, popular celebration” forming the con-
clusion of such a work (Ludwig van Beethoven, p. 287),
but one suspects that it was in part the generic mixture
that jarred on him.
122
Dahlhaus calls fugato “a sine qua non of monumental-
ity” (Beethoven, p. 79). On the concatenation of sacred
and secular in the final number of op. 136, see Ladenburger,
“Der Wiener Kongreß,” pp. 302–03; on the historicizing
tendencies of the Viennese “official sublime,” see Buch,
Beethoven’s Ninth, p. 91.
123
Antoine Christophe Merlin, Opinion de Merlin (de
Thionville) sur les fêtes publiques, quoted in Johnson, Lis-
tening in Paris, p. 126.
124
As I write this I have before me the image of the Pacte
fédérative des français le 14e juillet 1790, reproduced in
Johnson, Listening in Paris, p. 127 (figure 10).
21
 19 TH never quite real) universe, the enduring trace of
CENTURY
MUSIC a historical moment.125
“We do not apprehend the presence of poli-
tics in Beethoven’s work,” writes Buch, “by
dividing his œuvre into music that is ‘ideologi-
cal,’ and thus bad, and music that embodies the
composer’s true beliefs and is therefore good.”126
He goes on to emphasize the continuity be-
tween Der glorreiche Augenblick and, as he
puts it, “the political image bank that the Ode
to Joy draws upon.” But the links between op.
136 and the Ninth Symphony go further than
that. There is for one thing the textual imag-
ery, even the vocabulary; it perhaps suffices to
quote “Und zum Bunde friedlicher Brüder sich,
Gelöste Menschheit küsst, Welt! den glorreiche
Augenblick!”127 from no. 3, without citing the
stellar imagery and calls on the assembled mul-
titude to kneel and pray in no. 4. And as in the
Ninth Symphony, the universalist message of
Der glorreiche Augenblick is realized by means
of what might be termed composition with
genres. In each case the “high” genres include
opera seria, the liturgical, the learned style,
and a variety of more or less clearly defined
archaic topics. Where Kramer emphasizes the
Hellenic in op. 125,128 op. 136 tends toward the
Roman, as in the allegorical figure of
“Vindebona,” the old, that is to say Roman
name of Vienna. And then there are the “low”
genres: the buffo resonance of the opening of
no. 6, the orchestration of which could be
straight out of Le nozze de Figaro, or the “Turk-
ish” percussion that enters at m. 50 and as-
sumes an extraordinary prominence in the very
last measures of the cantata. Such moments
are a vivid reminder that it was exactly at this
time that the twenty-two-year-old Rossini, soon
125
Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, p. 85.
126
Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth, p. 86.
127
“And in an alliance of peaceful brothers, scattered hu-
manity embraces, world! your glorious moment!”
128
Kramer, “The Harem Threshold,” esp. pp. 82–83. Where
Kramer reads the Greek and Turkish connotations as op-
positional, some contemporary writers stressed the conti-
nuity between them: Head quotes Heinrich Koch’s Lexi-
con entry for “Janitscharenmusik” (Janissary music), ac-
cording to which Turkish music “undoubtedly preserves
the character of the ancient Greek modes” (Orientalism,
Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music, p. 81).
22
to become Beethoven’s bête noire, was forging
his reputation.
There is perhaps something more here than
the collage-like eclecticism I noted in
Wellingtons Sieg; these “low” topics might be
thought to invoke what Head calls the “farci-
cal register” that was specifically associated
with “Turkish” music.129 And this opens up
the possibility of a reading in terms of down-
ward travesty or burlesque. The masked balls
that offered a carnivalesque inversion of
Viennese culture and society not only featured
“Turkish” dances but also took place in the
Redoutensaal, the venue where Der glorreiche
Augenblick received its first performances.130
The stiff solemnity that repels modern critics
would become a revelation of fragility, just an-
other mask, and in this way we come back
after all to something not so far removed from
the Romantic irony—though Romantic slap-
stick might be a better term—of Tieck.
It is hard to imagine the Royal Festival Hall
or the Gewandhaus doubling as a venue for
raves or fancy dress parties: tragedy and farce,
high and low, are more firmly segregated in the
attenuated culture of present-day “art” music
than they were in Beethoven’s time, and such
cross-overs that occur—one thinks of the Three
Tenors—represent an importation of art-music
icons into the environment of popular culture
rather than real synthesis. Despite the appar-
ent leveling effects of today’s electronic media,
the hierarchy of prestige that existed between
early-nineteenth-century genres—easily bridged
by the 1814 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
reviewer’s phrase “Once one accepts the idea”—
has opened up into a chasm between what is
and is not deemed worthy of serious cultural
129
Head, Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish
Music, p. 11.
130
According to Head it was only in the Roudentsäle that
masks were permitted by the authorities (Orientalism,
Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music, p. 101). Martha
Feldman makes the same point about the theaters in which
eighteenth-century opera seria was performed; there are
several points of contact between the present article and
Feldman’s attempt to reclaim opera seria from the para-
digm of opera as drama, instead reading it in terms of
ritual, the spectacular, and the performative (“Magic Mir-
rors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 [1995],
423–84).
attention. Under such conditions, reinforced
by an ideology that equates artistic integrity
with the expression of subjectivity, it becomes
hard to conceive that public ceremonial is wor-
thy of serious musical attention. Princess
Diana’s funeral said it all: Elton John and John
Tavener (who occupies a parlous middle ground
between the cultures) officiated at this great
state occasion. The Birtwistles and Ferney-
houghs of the world long ago retreated to the
high ground.
Conclusion: The Other Classics
I suppose everybody would agree as a matter of
principle that, if we are to understand the mu-
sic of the past, we must as far as possible ground
our understanding in the values of its own time
rather than of ours. But in practice this is harder
than it sounds, especially in the case of
Beethoven, the values of whose heroic style—
to borrow Burnham’s words again—have be-
come the values of music. Solomon’s demand
that great music (op. 125 but not op. 136) should
“transcend the particularities of its origin and
. . . arrive at a set of universal paradigms”
might be construed as a demand that it con-
form to the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm of
present-day expectations. Wellingtons Sieg and,
in particular, Der glorreiche Augenblick are
revealing in this context because of the way in
which the grandeur of their aspiration coupled
with their exceptional contemporary success
would seem to make them prime candidates
for acceptance within the Beethovenian canon.
The history of their exclusion accordingly re-
veals with particular clarity what Kramer would
term the “logic of alterity” 131 underlying
canonic discourses: any canon involves the con-
struction of an excluded Other in relation to
which cultural identity is defined, so that there
is a sense in which works like ops. 91 and 136
are critical markers of the “Beethoven Hero”
paradigm by virtue of their location just out-
side the boundary. And since this paradigm
revolves around the values of mediated subjec-
131
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 313. Kramer, Classical Music
and Postmodern Knowledge, p. 34.
tivity, my aim in this article has been to sug- NICHOLAS
COOK
gest alternative values—other horizons of ex- The
pectation—that might render more intelligible Other
Beethoven
the extraordinary success of these works in
their time: what might be termed an aesthetic
of hyper-representation in op. 91, and the en-
actment of community in op. 136.
But these works are only examples, if con-
spicuous ones, and such approaches—in effect
reading against the grain of the “Beethoven
Hero” paradigm—may help to rehabilitate oth-
ers of Beethoven’s uncanonic compositions, in-
cluding several that also date from the years
between the so-called heroic and late periods.
There are for example the incidental music to
König Stephan and Die Ruinen von Athen (both
of 1811), and the Namensfeier Overture (1815):
the curiously happy-clappy tone these works
sometimes exhibit is as alien to the mediated
subjectivity of the heroic canon as the hyper-
representationalism of Wellingtons Sieg or the
public ceremonial of Der glorreiche Augenblick,
while Die Ruinen includes some of Beethoven’s
most overtly orientalizing music. Then again,
there are the folk-song settings. Astonishingly,
they fill the biggest box in the Deutsche
Grammophon “Complete Beethoven Edition,”
yet Solomon dismisses them in a single sen-
tence (“Thomson published 126 of Beethoven’s
arrangements and paid Beethoven well for his
work . . . , but the results are of little value”)—
and that, as Barry Cooper points out, represents
more attention than many Beethoven scholars
give them.132 The arguments traditionally raised
against Beethoven’s folk-song settings will by
now be all too familiar—they are potboilers,
the texts are inadequate, Beethoven’s heart was
not in them, the whole project was foisted on
him by Thomson—and it remains to be seen
how much critical impact Cooper’s recent at-
tempt to rehabilitate them will have.133 But
things don’t stop there. After Beethoven’s folk-
song settings there are the equally uncanonical
settings by Haydn to consider, the uncharacter-
132
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 297; Barry Cooper, Beethoven’s
Folksong Settings: Chronology, Sources, Style (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 198.
133
Cooper cites examples of all of these arguments in
Beethoven’s Folksong Settings, pp. 198–202.
23
 19 TH istic gaucheries of which make Beethoven’s
CENTURY
MUSIC seem quite urbane by comparison. These pieces
create the same impression of resisting what
we too easily call the “common-practice” style
as do the melodic banalities, linear barbarisms,
and heterophonic textures sometimes found in
Mozart’s piano variations (the variations on
“Lison dormait,” KV 264, are a particular case
in point). Tinged with a pervasive undertone of
farce, these anomalous repertories are all
poised—like the same composers’ explicitly
orientalizing music—between the musical self
and the Other, between “common practice”
and the foreign idioms predicated on the Turks,
the Celts, and indeed the composers of con-
temporary operatic hits whom Mozart lampoons
in his variations. The result is in each case a
problematizing of the composer’s authentic
voice, or even of the idea that there might be
such a thing, that collides forcefully with the
“Beethoven Hero” paradigm.
I have suggested here that this paradigm—a
creation of the mid-nineteenth century and
later—rendered anomalous repertories that, in
their own time, were no more so than others,
just as it brought into being the convenient but
24
critically vacuous category of the “common-
practice” style. If I am right, then attempting
to bypass or neutralize over-familiar patterns
of perception and resisting the temptation to
make easy value judgments without reference
to historical context are the preconditions for a
more inclusive understanding of the music of
those Other Classics: Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven. l
Abstract.
Among Beethoven’s works are a number that were
highly successful in their own time but that became
an embarrassment to later critics. In this article I
explore the critical strategies used to explain away
the success of two such works, Wellingtons Sieg and
Der glorreiche Augenblick—works marginalized by
the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm that came to regu-
late critical interpretation of the composer’s music
as well as underwriting the Beethovenian canon. I
also explore ways in which such noncanonic works
might be reexperienced, reading Wellingtons Sieg in
terms of an aesthetic of hyper-representation and
Der glorreiche Augenblick in terms of the enact-
ment of community: such approaches, I argue, give
access to aspects of Beethoven’s music that the
“Beethoven Hero” paradigm suppressed.