Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works

9. A Modernist Epilogue

222 9 A Modernist Epilogue This study ends where it began, amid the pages of musical criticism. This is a fitting homage to a lively and creative tradition. For two centuries the evolving image of Beethoven has taken shape in the passionate echolalia of critical prose, no less than in the concert hall, the classroom, or the sculptor’s studio. E. T. A. Hoffmann stands at the head of this line as its first great genius . His reviews and literary rhapsodies translated the heroic style into Romantic terms, bequeathing the nineteenth century a compelling portrait of Beethoven as mystic visionary and conquistador of the spirit world. Hoffmann’s was, of course, a distorted image; like any interesting critic, he brought strong prejudices to his material. In particular, his allegiance to the transcendent metaphysical realm blinded him to the enlightened aspects of the heroic style. Yet even this distortion proves illuminating. As we watch Hoffmann tailoring the Fifth Symphony to his specifications, we see a fascinating preview of the way Beethoven himself would rework his style as he fell under the Romantic spell. Beethoven’s late works did not enjoy the same journalistic coverage. Not until a century after the composer’s death did a literature arise dedicated specifically to the late period.This critical tradition emerged in tandem with modernism, the objectivist, anti-Romantic movement bounded roughly by the end of World War I and some time in the recent past. At the same time that avant-garde composers were turning back to classical forms, that pioneers of the early-music movement were challenging Romantic interpretations , that formalism was ousting metaphysics from musical aesthetics—at just this time critics became intensely interested in the late works of Beethoven. The modernists rediscovered Beethoven’s late music, analyzed its style, and cleared a space for criticism. I shall thus conclude this study with a brief, irreverent tribute to my penates.1 A Modernist Epilogue / 223 Irreverent, I say, but not incredulous. It is true that the modernist critics entered Beethoven’s shrine burdened with devout hopes and fears; and, granted, they did at times resort to rather odd readings to sustain their faith. Yet, as Hoffmann’s review teaches, those very moments when a critic’s agenda strains most clearly against the musical text possess their own hidden wisdom.At such moments we glimpse the affinity between Beethoven’s late works and the modernist age, and gain musical insights that perhaps lay too close to the bone for the critics themselves to articulate. beyond romanticism A convenient entrance into the political thought of modernism leads through the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. His monograph Politische Romantik (1925) offered readers an influential introduction to, and denunciation of, Romantic political thought. Schmitt’s attack began with the Jena school and extended to the entire nineteenth century.The peculiar vice of Romantic politics, according to Schmitt, was promiscuity. He condemned the ease with which Romantic artists could transfer their loyalties from revolutionary republicanism to reactionary monarchism (Wagner comes in for special abuse),without the least damage to their underlying beliefs . Schmitt blamed this fickleness on “subjective occasionalism,” the Fichtean tendency to endow the Ich with absolute transformative power over reality. The Romantic subject, he explained, “treats the world as occasion and opportunity for his Romantic productivity.”The sovereignty of the individual subject, in turn, mirrors the underlying structure of bourgeois society: Only in a society dissolved into individualism could the artist, the aesthetically producing subject, misplace the spiritual center in himself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the spiritual realm, that exiles him into himself, and that loads him down with the entire burden that formerly was shared among different hierarchical functions in the social order.2 Romantic thought thus indicts the malaise of an entire society whose traditional structures have dissolved into anarchic individualism. Schmitt does not offer any aesthetic solutions, but his political remedy was unambiguous: he avidly embraced Nazism, authoring such apologetics as “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (1934), a perverse response to the Night of the Long Knives. In 1927 the musicologist Arnold Schmitz published another influential 224 / A Modernist Epilogue polemic, Das romantische Beethovenbild, drawing openly upon Schmitt’s critique of bourgeois individualism.Schmitz set out to smash four images of Beethoven, perpetrated by four of his most eloquent critics: the portrait of composer as Rousseauian “nature child...