When did German Music Lose its Innocence?

Stephen Rumph is mad at E. T. A. Hoffmann. And not just Hoffmann alone – he also has a beef with (in alphabetical order): Adorno, counterpoint, historicism, longing, lyricism, medievalism, modernism, mysticism and Romanticism. What could possibly bind together such a motley group of suspects? In Rumph's eyes, they are all implicated in either the creation or the continued sponsorship of a conservative world-view manifested in Beethoven's late compositions. Hoffmann is under the gun because his famous – and famously influential – promotion of a musical kingdom 'not of this world' fundamentally misrepresents Beethoven's political resonance, and helps obfuscate what Rumph sees as the composer's abandonment of his own liberal ideals.¹ (For this reason, Rumph is also mad at Beethoven himself.)

Although Rumph's ire is focused exclusively on the mystical cult of late Beethoven, his fundamental concern is not unique. Indeed, it constitutes part of a growing interest in music and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century, and in particular within the very Austro-German context that so forcefully pro-claimed music's separation from politics and everyday concerns to start with.² All three authors considered in this review article focus solely on the first 40 years of the century. And the portrait they paint is in many ways revelatory: instead of late Beethoven as a dreamy inward turn, the Bach revival as a simple rediscovery of musical heritage, and the Mendelssohn oratorios as an innocent celebration of Protestant theology,we are left with a musical world that was anything but untouched by nationalism, political reaction and anti-Semitism.

This revised historiography lessens the distinction between the beginning of the century and its end – and thus challenges head on the quixotic assumption that music's entanglement with politics by the century's close represents something of a fall from grace. But if the collective effect of these monographs is a more sober account of the early nineteenth century, the terms of this revision differ drastically between the three volumes, particularly when it comes to the treatment of historical evidence. If anything, this musicological move towards politics is actually a move towards history, the latter serving as a kind of explanatory mechanism for why particular works were written, performed and received as they were. All three volumes rely heavily on contemporaneous sources, and to varying degrees (and with varying success) secondary literature from intellectual, cultural and political history. And in this sense the questions these books raise are not limited to Germany, or even the nineteenth century; more broadly, they suggest some of the ways that musicology and history can work with – and against – each other.

Battling hagiography

The most ambitious of the volumes is Rumph's book, which embodies many of the rewards and pitfalls that often accompany as polemical an intervention as Rumph attempts. His thesis that 'the same ideology that shaped Beethoven's late style helped create the Restoration' (p. 107) still remains to be demonstrated, but it is undeniable that Rumph's attempt to open up the hermetic casing surrounding late Beethoven is long overdue. There is arguably no other set of works in the canon that has so consistently been granted a free pass when it comes to questions of political allegiance, and this exemption from ideological scrutiny is all the more surprising given the bare facts of Beethoven's career: the early renown of his 'Joseph' cantata; the murky, if intensely felt, political allegories in Fidelio; the celebratory works for the Congress of Vienna; and the initial impetus behind the Missa solemnis as a celebration of Archduke Rudolf's...