Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works

4. 1809

92 4 1809 Beethoven’s critics have always felt a peculiar need to sort his works chronologically. So reflexive has this Periodentrieb become that Maynard Solomon felt moved to caution that Beethoven’s works are “a single oeuvre, which we segment out of a penchant for classification, a need to clarify— and at our peril.”1 Nevertheless, periodization has eased the approach to Beethoven’s baffling music and has stimulated continuing insights as critics have grappled with the inherited models.The real peril perhaps may be that critics will grow complacent and stop seeking new methods of taxonomy. There is nothing complacent about Giorgio Pestelli’s startling schema in The Age of Mozart and Beethoven. In this textbook survey, Pestelli renamed the traditional early, middle, and late periods as “The music up to the French invasion of Vienna (1809),” “Beethoven and early Romanticism,” and “The late works.” Pestelli’s three periods form the moments in a dialectic between Beethoven’s earlier music and Romanticism. The originality of this scheme lies less in the importance granted to Romanticism than in Pestelli’s selection criteria, which have as much to do with political history and sociology as musical style. His broad approach appears in the description of Beethoven’s Romantic crisis: Around 1809, the year of Haydn’s death, Beethoven’s career took a new turn: in the month of March the contract with the three Viennese noblemen confirmed the forty-year-old composer’s enviable position. In May, Vienna was invaded for the second time by foreign troops, and the court and the nobility took refuge in Hungarian castles; Beethoven remained in the city, in his brother’s cellar with his head between pillows so as not to hear the gunshots that were tormenting his afflicted ears. How the student of Rousseau had changed since 1794, when, with his Bonn friends, he 1809 / 93 spoke ironically about the pleasure-loving temperament of the Viennese! Now he railed against the war that was interrupting concert life and those social customs on which music depended so much.2 This dense passage combines biography, economics, political history, and sociology . Here, as elsewhere, Pestelli achieves an admirable balance between inner and outer descriptions of Beethoven’s music. His middle period thus begins not in 1803, where biographers and music historians have lighted, but in 1809, a year marked not only by biographical and stylistic changes, but also by fundamental shifts in the political and economic terrain. Other scholars have based style periods on political history. Most famously , Carl Dahlhaus divided his survey of nineteenth-century music according to major political events. His book thus begins in 1814 with the Congress of Vienna, which articulates the notorious dualism between late Beethoven and Rossini.3 Yet 1809 proves in every way a more illuminating landmark. In this crucial year the confluence of political, economic, and musical events shows an entirely new direction in Beethoven’s political aesthetic . a change of heart The war of 1809 marked a new era of popular patriotism in Austria. Previously the emperor and his ministers had conducted the struggle against Napoleon as a traditional dynastic war. After the defeat of 1805, however, members of the imperial court and family worked to foment a levée en masse among the Austrian people, along the same lines as Stein and the reform party in Prussia. Counts Stadion and Hormayr sponsored an official nationalist movement, whose products included a citizen militia, numerous political tracts, historical plays, poetry and novels, and even the revival of native Austrian Tracht. (One fruit of this movement was Hormayr’s own Österreichischer Plutarch, a twenty-volume gallery of national heroes that inspired August von Kotzebue’s play König Stephan, supplied with incidental music by Beethoven in 1811.) Patriotic poets and playwrights clustered to the salon of Caroline Pichler, while costumed audiences cheered patriotic songs in the Redoutensaal. The Nazarene painters published their manifesto calling for a “new-German, religious-patriotic art.” This nationalist movement was thoroughly conservative in aim, at least in the minds of its sponsors: Hormayr and Stadion, a Tyrolean and Swabian, respectively, 94 / 1809 sought to restore the old Reich in order to safeguard their petty aristocratic domains. Nevertheless, their success can be judged from a remark by the French chargé d’affaires, who reported that “in 1805 the war was in the government , but not in the army or people; in...