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2. The Heroic Sublime
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
While Hoffmann and Beethoven may have reached a common destination, they started from distant origins. Beethoven grew up in Bonn, a hub of enlightened thought ruled by the brother of Joseph II. His companions included intellectuals from the newly founded university, a forum for the most liberal strains of philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence (where Beethoven enrolled briefly in 1789). He associated with a progressive Lesegesellschaft, or reading society, whose members included his patron Count Waldstein, as well as his teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, himself a member of the free-thinking Orden der Illuminaten. On a commission from the Lesegesellschaft Beethoven composed the Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II, in which he joined his librettist in praising the absolutist reformer and denouncing religious fanaticism. Around the same time the composer conceived the idea of setting Schiller’s An die Freude, with its indictment of tyranny and call for an egalitarian society. It is safe to say that the young Beethoven embraced an ideological worldview diametrically opposed to the ethos of political Romanticism. By the time Beethoven reached Vienna, the liberal mood of the Josephine era had already swung far to the right in the wake of the French Revolution. The sudden death of Leopold II cut short the final chapter of the Austrian Enlightenment.1 Franz II, under the thumb of a reactionary cabinet, reversed the attainments of the previous decades, while Count Pergen and the new Ministry of Police stifled a lively tradition of free speech. Yet Beethoven by no means abandoned the ideals of his youth. As is well known, he recycled a melody from the first imperial cantata in Leonore, at the moment of Florestan’s liberation, a strain that originally accompanied the quintessentially enlightened words “Da stiegen die Menschen ans Licht” (Then mankind ascended to the light). A verse from Schiller’s ode 35 2 The Heroic Sublime 36 / The Heroic Sublime also surfaces in the finale of the opera. These reminiscences represent only the tip of an iceberg. The following two chapters will argue that Beethoven continued to give musical expression to his early convictions long after many of his peers had retreated into mysticism and reactionary medievalism . As late as 1808 he remained a steadfast, even anachronistic, proponent of Aufklärung. Such an argument requires a mediator between music and political thought, a link that partakes of both yet remains separate from either. The sublime, das Erhabene, beckons. This central category of eighteenthcentury aesthetics moved within Beethoven’s lifetime to the forefront of ethical and political thought. The sublime also figures in contemporary writing on music and has recently accumulated a substantial musicological literature. Here is a sturdy bridge over which even the most skeptical reader might be persuaded to cross from music into the realm of political thought. Beethoven has attracted students of the musical sublime ever since Paul Henry Lang claimed of the late works that “Beethoven was the musician who found the way to the last confines of Classicism and thus passed from the realm of the beautiful into that of the sublime.” Carl Dahlhaus has identified the rhetoric of the sublime in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s criticism of Beethoven, noting the association between the symphony and the exalted Pindaric ode in German music criticism. Eberhard Müller-Arp more recently invoked the theory of the sublime in his discussion of the Pathétique Sonata, and Richard Taruskin has marshaled it in the “authenticity” debates , opposing the rugged grandeur of the Ninth Symphony to the antiseptic beautification projects of Beethoven’s early-music enthusiasts. William Kinderman made the Schillerian dialectic of the sublime and beautiful the heart of his recent survey of Beethoven, while Roland Schmenner has devoted an entire book to the sublime thunderstorm in the Sixth Symphony. And Beethoven’s shadow doubtless looms behind James Webster’s suggestion that “we think of the entire great flowering of music between 1780 and 1815 as the age of Haydn’s sublime.”2 Given this burgeoning literature, it seems odd that nobody has examined the one movement that Beethoven actually marked “sublime.” The words Majestätisch und erhaben head the famous fourth song from the Sechs Gellert-Lieder, op. 48, “Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur” (known to Anglophone musicians as“The HeavensAreTelling the Glory of God”).The neglected Gellert songs contain intriguing clues to Beethoven’s conception of the sublime. Completed in 1802, on the cusp of the Eroica breakthrough, they also suggest broad ramifications for...