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  • Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works
  • William Kinderman
Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works. By Stephen Rumph. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [ix, 295 p. ISBN 0-520-23855-9. $45.] Index.

Stephen Rumph's Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works tackles a vitally important topic: the relation of the music to its political context. The pieces that come under consideration [End Page 1010] include the Third and Ninth Symphonies and Fidelio, as well as the Egmont music, a number of sonatas and quartets, some of Beethoven's patriotic songs and marches, and particularly his "Battle Symphony" from 1813, Wellingtons Sieg. As the author rightly states in his introduction, "a political study of Beethoven can scarcely be regarded as a curiosity for interdisciplinary studies: it belongs squarely within musical criticism, alongside biography, sketch studies, and formal analysis" (p. 1).

Rumph frames his argument in relation to the movement known as politische Romantik ("political Romanticism") led by such figures as the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Heinrich von Kleist. He emphasizes their "grievances against French cultural hegemony" and their "virulent reaction to all things French and enlightened." This "ideology of political Romanticism," he claims, was "no passing fad for Beethoven" but "exercised a profound and enduring influence on his later style" (p. 5). There is scant documentation of Beethoven's connection to these writers, and although Rumph acknowledges that his study is speculative, he aims to convey a " 'new way of seeing' ... [that] incarnates the ideological in specifically musical structures" (p. 8).

In the opening chapters of the book, Rumph impressively draws upon the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller, a writer whom Beethoven admired. Schiller's notion of artistic activity as Spieltrieb ("play drive") and his famous distinction between "naïve" and "sentimental" poetry are explored. Emanuel Kant's theory of the sublime serves as context for thoughtful comments on Beethoven's treatment of "das Erhabene" in his song "Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur," from the Gellert Songs, op. 48.

Another influential writer who receives attention here is E. T. A. Hoffmann. Rumph is particularly interested in Hoffmann's famous critique of the Fifth Symphony from 1810, in which Beethoven's music is regarded as revealing "an unknown kingdom, a world that has nothing in common with the outer sensory world" (p. 9). Rumph's strategy is to invert Hoffmann's view. He seeks to show that Beethoven's late works represent a kingdom that is very much of this world, one that actually reflects the reactionary turn in the politics of post-Napoleonic Europe.

Such an argument has originality, and goes against the grain of much Beethoven scholarship. Rumph admits that "the young Beethoven embraced an ideological world view diametrically opposed to the ethos of political Romanticism" (p. 35). Nonetheless, he sees a decisive shift in Beethoven's attitude beginning in 1809, when Napoleon's armies besieged and occupied Vienna. Rumph finds that Beethoven's letters "from 1809 to 1813 trace an unbroken arc of resentment, in which Beethoven pins the full blame for his economic vicissitudes on the war with France" (p. 96). Against this historical background, Rumph sets forth the "main point of [his] entire book," namely that "the same ideology that shaped Beethoven's late style helped create the Restoration" (pp. 106–07).

A key work to address in this context is surely Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. Unfortunately, Rumph does not investigate thoroughly some aspects of the opera that do not conform to his thesis. Fidelio is closely bound up with French models and Enlightenment ideals, and its extensive final revision took place in 1814, several years after Rumph sees Beethoven as having renounced these principles. While he acknowledges that "Leonore wears the pants in this opera of conjugal love" (p. 164), he does not recognize her full importance as a symbol of liberty, which was enhanced unforgettably in the section added to Florestan's aria in the revision (a passage influenced in turn by Egmont's vision of Clärchen in the Egmont music, from 1810). It is not far-fetched to see in the character of Leonore an affinity to the feminine...

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