Beethoven within Grasp: The Nineteenth-Century Reception of ‘Adelaide’

Reception studies of Beethoven’s works have often privileged the heroic style and a corresponding biographical myth; cases that trouble this paradigm thus offer valuable insights into the more varied ways that Beethoven’s music has been understood. The nineteenth-century reception of Beethoven’s Adelaide, Op. 46, is one such case. Adelaide was Beethoven within grasp: light, lyrical, and his most popular solo vocal work of the century. However, it presented a problem to German critics who sought to confirm a heroic, weighty, and at times nationalist view of Beethoven across the long nineteenth century. While numerous aspects of Adelaide played a role, it was the work’s generic hybridity that largely drove these developments. On the one hand, from the start it was possible to think of Adelaide as a German lied. Yet, on the other, the work resembled the ascendant Italianate aria in two movements. In general, this hybridity contributed to the composition’s widespread success. As the century wore on, however, German critics increasingly sought to explain away the song’s Italianate elements; related perspectives from prominent German performers, as well as changing publishing and concert practices, eventually confirmed the song’s place in the German lied canon. The now firm generic categorization of the song, as well as other current issues in song scholarship and performance, have diminished the status of the song in recent decades.