Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works

Introduction

Beethoven was a political composer. Like few other musicians in the Western canon, he stubbornly dedicated his art to the problems of human freedom, justice, progress, and community. Beethoven found his voice in Bonn with a cantata memorializing the enlightened reforms of Joseph II, and he crowned his public career in Vienna with the Ninth Symphony’s hymn to universal brotherhood. No intervening work drew more labor or revisions from him than Fidelio (née Leonore), the first political opera to remain in the permanent repertory. The Third Symphony, probably Beethoven’s most influential work, centers around a funeral march evoking patriotic ceremonies from the French Revolution; and there remains, of course, the famous and problematic relationship of the symphony to Napoleon. In an entirely different vein come such ephemera as the Ritterballett, assorted patriotic songs, and the marches for various national militias. The biographer, unlike the critic, cannot fail to mention Wellingtons Sieg and the choral extravaganzas for the Congress of Vienna, works that, however trivial in modern estimation, swept Beethoven to a pinnacle of acclaim unsurpassed within his own lifetime. To this list we may also add the second Bonn cantata in honor of Leopold II; the incidental music to Egmont, König Stephan, and Die Ruinen von Athen; and the aesthetic utopias of Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus and the Choral Fantasy. Clearly, if we want to understand this music we need to learn something about the composer’s politics. 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. The political note in Beethoven’s music echoes the cataclysmic times in which he lived. Beethoven was eighteen when the Bastille fell. For the next 1 Introduction 2 / Introduction quarter of a century armies battled almost continuously throughout Europe; republics sprang up and withered; Napoleon rose and fell; the Holy Roman Empire vanished from the map. Beethoven twice suffered the French siege of Vienna and later regaled the allied victors meeting to engineer the Restoration. James Sheehan has described the impact of these events on Germans: As a distant spectacle or, more often, as a forceful intrusion into their lives, revolutionary politics demanded contemporaries’ attention, affected their careers, reshaped their sense of the possible. The romantics’ awareness of emotional power, like the philosophers’ search for an alternative system of belief, was a response to the political passions and commitments that swept across central Europe from the French side of the Rhine. Burden or opportunity, disaster or triumph, occasion for celebration or lament, politics in the revolutionary era was everybody’s Schicksal.1 “La politique est le destin . . .” The words belong to Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who appeared to incarnate every tendency, good or ill, of the age. Revolution and tyranny, enlightened reform and lawless violence, heroic striving and base egotism—these antipodes assumed flesh and blood in the Corsican conqueror, whose ambitions dictated European politics for some fifteen years. Napoleon seems also to have captivated Beethoven’s imagination, engendering a sense of identification that, as Maynard Solomon has suggested , combined elements of hero worship, competition, and demonization. Striking affinities connect the two men, born just over a year apart. Both were possessed of enormous drive and ambition, and both rose far above their hereditary station. While Napoleon was gathering laurels in Italy and Egypt, Beethoven was conquering the salons and halls of Vienna, undertaking a “deliberate campaign to annex all current musical genres,” as Joseph Kerman put it. Beethoven may have rent the dedication page of the Eroica Symphony on learning that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, yet the synchrony between symphony and coronation remains fascinating: at precisely the same moment,composer and ruler were kicking away the ladder of the past, each claiming absolute power within his own domain. Felix Markham might as well have been describing the Beethoven of 1803 when he wrote that Napoleon “was not of the generation which made the Revolution, but was a product of the revolutionary age—a time when the mould of tradition and custom was broken, and nothing seemed impossible in the face of reason, energy and will.”2 Not surprisingly, recent political studies of Beethoven have focused upon Introduction / 3 the Eroica and the other “heroic” works from the Napoleonic years. Constantin Floros, Peter Schleuning, and Keisuke Maruyama have explored the political resonances of the Prometheus...