Beethoven and His Others BF

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Beethoven and His Others: Criticism, Difference, and the Composer’s Many Voices
A voice! a voice! It was grave,

profound, vibrating, while the
man did not seem capable of
a whisper.
—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
Nicholas Mathew
Beethoven’s Voice
“E

ven if there were no name on the title page, none other could be
conjectured—it is Beethoven through and through!” Thus wrote
Brahms upon seeing the rediscovered manuscript of Beethoven’s early
Funeral Cantata for Joseph II.1 Like many critics before and since, Brahms expressed
absolute confidence in the singularity and power of Beethoven’s musical voice—a
voice that pervades each of the composer’s works and all of his œuvre. To Brahms,
Beethoven was as unmistakable as “Beethoven”; hearing his voice was as reliable
a test of authenticity as reading his signature. As Romain Rolland declared some
years later: “Each work of Beethoven bears one name alone—Beethoven.”2
Yet, even as critical tradition has heard Beethoven’s voice as perhaps the most
individual and forceful in Western music—at times even heard it as the voice of
Western music itself 3—a recurring theme of Beethoven reception has also been a
negative or confused reaction to his music’s contrasts and disjunctions, its apparent
cacophony of musical voices, its tendency to “harbor doves and crocodiles at the
same time,” as one Parisian critic put it in 1810.4 Despite Beethoven’s supposedly
1. Thayer-Forbes, p.120.
2. Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Garden City Pub-
lishing, 1937), p.55.
3.That Beethoven has often come to stand for all Western music is a premise of Scott Burnham’s
Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton up, 1995).
4. Cited and translated in Leo Schrade, Beethoven in France:The Growth of an Idea (London: Oxford
up, 1942), p.3.
Beethoven Forum
Fall 2006,Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 148–187
© 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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149 Beethoven and His Others: Criticism, Difference, and the Composer’s Many Voices
unmistakable presence, it seems that the sound of foreign voices in his music is hard
to ignore; indeed, some critics have implied that there are moments, even in the
course of his most famous compositions, when Beethoven is barely recognizable
as Beethoven at all.
“Not These Tones”
As, for example, in the finale of the Ninth. Critics have often heard even this most
canonical of movements as a confused bustle of voices—a relatively common as-
sessment of Beethoven’s late music in the nineteenth century. After all, the finale
makes its way through recitatives from the cellos and basses, famously interspersed
with recollected excerpts from earlier movements, and through variations on the
tune that eventually sets Schiller’s “An die Freude”—a setting that itself incorporates
boisterous choruses, mystical pseudo-plainsong, and learned double fugue.
Perhaps the most foreign voice in the movement is heard with the earliest
departure from D major/minor, which dominates the opening 330 measures.The
pregnant silence that follows the majestic common-tone turn from the global
dominant to a sustained F–major chord with the line “und der Cherub steht vor
Gott” (and the cherub stands before God) is broken by a curious kind of grunting
from the bassoons and bass drum.This grunting becomes increasingly rhythmical
until, with the entrance of a small wind band, along with triangle and cymbals,
a Bb march based on the Joy theme begins—a disjunctive, perhaps even comical
moment amid the hitherto sublime discourse of the movement. Moreover, the
dotted rhythms of the march and its jangling and tooting instrumentation sig-
nal the topical language of what contemporary critics and musicians considered
Turkish Janissary music. It has not been lost on recent critics that, in the midst
of one of Western music’s most canonical works, Beethoven appears to allude to
the Orient—the voice belongs to “one of [Europe’s] deepest and most recurring
images of the Other,” as Edward Said put it.5
Granted, whether Beethoven intended this moment to be overtly exotic is open
to question, given the prevalence of the Janissary topic in contemporary Viennese
music.6 Nonetheless, an important 1824 review of the Ninth by the writer and
5. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:Vintage Books, 1979), p.1.The exoticism of this moment
is the starting assumption of Lawrence Kramer’s article “The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and
Greek Love in Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’,” 19cm 22 (1998), 78–90.
6. Stephen Rumph is the most recent critic to take issue with Kramer, arguing that the Alla marcia
in the Ninth finale is militaristic but not exotic, and that the topics of Turkish music were no longer
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150 n ic hol a s m at h e w
musician Friedrich August Kanne—a confidant of Beethoven’s circle, as well as

one of the composer’s many collaborators—unequivocally identifies an “Oriental
percussion orchestra” in the finale and betrays considerable anxiety about it.7 In fact,
Kanne is the earliest of many critics eager to show that Beethoven’s own voice is not
lost amid all the outward musical commotion.8 First, Kanne insists that Beethoven
is obviously putting on a voice: “The authentically Turkish lies in the arbitrariness
with which a composer erases all the artistic laws accepted by cultivated nations,”
he writes, whereas in the finale “[Beethoven’s] imagination is always in charge”
(seine Phantasie schafft immer fort). Second, Kanne suggests that Beethoven’s imagi-
nation is palpable as an overarching Besonnenheit or self-awareness—a controlling
authorial force that brings together the disparate voices of the diverse finale: the
piece brings “the stamp of classicism” to its “almost resistant materials” through
the “organic interweaving” of its parts.9 To hear Beethoven’s voice is to hear the
agent of musical unity.
The instinct to make a unified whole from Beethoven’s multiple musical voices
marked as Oriental or exotic by the time of the Ninth; see Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanti-
cism in the Late Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 2004), p.187.There is no doubt that
the idea of Turkish music was a fluid one in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embracing all
varieties of militarism, whether overtly identified as Other or not. By the same token, it also seems
clear that a particular kind of hypermasculine militarism in music, especially when accompanied by
noise-making percussion instruments, was always marked as in some sense exotic—its noisy extrem-
ity pushing it into the realms of Otherness. Among the wide literature on musical exoticism and
orientalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Mary Hunter, “The Alla Turca Style in
the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio,” in The Exotic
in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern up, 1998), pp.43–73; Matthew Head,
Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association, 2000); and
Eric Rice, “Representations of Janissary Music (Mehter) as Musical Exoticism in Western Composi-
tions, 1670–1824,” Journal of Musicological Research 19 (1999), 41–88.
7. F. A. Kanne,“Academie des Hrn. Ludwig van Beethoven,” in Ludwig van Beethoven, die Werke im
Spiegel seiner Zeit: gesammelte Konzertberichte und Rezensionen bis 1830, ed. Stefan Kunze with Theodor
Schmid, Andreas Traub, and Gerda Burkhard (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1987), p.481. The review first
appeared in the Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 8 (1824).
8. Nicholas Cook makes this argument in his Beethoven: Symphony No.9 (Cambridge: Cambridge
up, 1993), pp.38–39, 92, and 103. See also Robin Wallace on Kanne and the Ninth in Beethoven’s Critics
(Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1986), pp.73–76. David Levy discusses Kanne’s reviews of the Ninth in
Beethoven:The Ninth Symphony (rev. edn. New Haven:Yale up, 2003), pp.134–33 and 139–43.
9. Kanne, “Academie des Hrn. Ludwig van Beethoven,” pp.481 and 480. Besonnenheit—which
one might also translate as “reflexivity” or “self-possession”—is an important concept in Beethoven’s
Romantic reception, particularly in the Beethoven writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, where it denotes
Beethoven’s commanding authorial presence and formal control.
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has since informed many studies of the Ninth’s finale—from the analyses by Hein-
rich Schenker and Rudolph Réti to Maynard Solomon’s compelling reading of the
entire symphony as Beethoven’s personal and philosophical “search for order” and
Ernest Sanders’s theories about the finale’s sonata form.10 The impulse to perceive
unity in Beethoven’s disparate fragments holds fewer attractions in today’s more
or less postmodern critical climate. Nicholas Cook has been the most prominent
critic to take issue with what he considers the critical domestication of Beethoven’s
musical disjunctions, arguing that the Janissary music in the Ninth “deconstructs”
Schiller’s poem by intruding upon the foregoing imagery of the divine.11 Cook
even suggests that Schiller prompts this “deconstruction” with the incongruity of
the poetic language in “An die Freude”; the juxtaposition of worm and seraph
that precedes the Turkish music is one of the clearest examples: “Wollust ward
dem Wurm gegeben, Und der Cherub steht vor Gott” (ecstasy was granted to the
worm, and the cherub stands before God).12
Suggestive as Cook’s observations are, it is nevertheless hard to maintain that
Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony with anything other than a grand
unifying intent. The Enlightenment aesthetic of the symphony had long been
founded on the principle of unity in diversity—an aesthetic that was surely the
ideal complement to Schiller’s famous paean to brotherhood: “The closer things
cohere in their variety, the more delicate will be the enjoyment they provide,”
pronounced Johann Georg Sulzer’s encyclopedia.13 Indeed, as many critics have
argued, the utopian urge to unify is what makes the Ninth a bold gesture of
Enlightenment nostalgia.14 Besides, even among the earliest conceptions of the
10. Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, trans. and ed. John Rothgeb (New Haven:
Yale up, 1992); Rudolph Réti, The Thematic Process in Music (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp.11–30;
Solomon, “The Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order,” Essays, pp.3–32; Ernest H. Sanders, “Form
and Content in the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” mq 50 (1964), 59–76 and “The Sonata-
Form Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” 19cm 22 (1998), 54–60. See also James Webster’s
tabular summary of the leading explanations of the form of the finale of the Ninth in his article
“The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” Beethoven Forum 1 (1992), 33.
11. Cook, Symphony No.9, p.103; see also pp.92–93.
12. Ibid., p.103.
13. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (Leipzig, 1792), vol. III, “Mannig
faltigkeit”; trans. from Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment, ed.
and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1995), p.47.
14. See, for example, Solomon, Beethoven, pp.404–45. Stephen Rumph has recently taken issue
with this reading, situating the Ninth in the intellectual context of a more reactionary political
Romanticism. Rumph argues nonetheless that the Ninth presents a pre-Enlightenment vision of
mystical unity rather than (say) Romantic fragmentariness:“there is no reason to doubt that Beethoven
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piece, one finds Beethoven sketching an “overture” in which unity emerges from
opening fragments: “selected lines from Schiller’s Joy brought together into a
whole,” he noted to himself.15 That the finale contains such a variety of musical
voices need not be evidence of Beethoven’s “deconstruction” of the idea of mu-
sical unity—rather, it might reveal the extent of his compositional ambition: the
success of the symphony’s utopian vision of oneness would surely be proportional
to the diversity of its elements. For Kanne, Beethoven introduced the Turkish
music precisely because his aim was to unite the most heterogeneous musical
and poetic materials.16 To be sure, Cook might argue, like more than a handful of
nineteenth-century critics, that Beethoven’s attempt to transform his materials into
the semblance of a unified whole is ultimately unsuccessful.17 But he is perhaps
less convincing when he maintains that Beethoven deliberately casts doubt upon
the ideal of unity itself—that he is intentionally both “earnest and ironical,” as he
puts it.18 First, this idea groundlessly infers authorial intention from Beethoven’s
alleged failure to unify his materials. Second, it manages to reinscribe precisely the
univalent and singular conception of the composer’s voice that Cook resists by
creating an ironic distance between the composer and his more extreme moments
of Otherness.
In any case, the presence of musical contrasts alone does not amount to a “de-
construction.” It seems to me that a critical approach that takes into account Cook’s
important arguments about the finale and its reception without also recasting
Beethoven’s intentions as ironic might lead to more radical conclusions; indeed,
one might observe—in a more thoroughly “deconstructive” spirit, perhaps—the
contradictions and suppressions from which Beethoven’s finale and its critics have
set out in pursuit of a unified musical whole.
intended anything less than a totalizing vision in the Ninth Symphony.” See Rumph, Beethoven After
Napoleon, p.220.
15. In the Petter sketchbook of 1811–12; see jtw, pp.209 and 215. The dotted-rhythm thematic
material that Beethoven jotted down in conjunction with this idea ended up as the introduction to
the Overture in C Major, op.115.
16. Kanne,“Academie des Hrn. Ludwig van Beethoven,” p.481; see also Cook’s reading of Kanne’s
review in Beethoven: Symphony No.9, p.39, and Levy’s reading in Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony,
p.142.
17. Levy argues that Cook’s doubts about the structural integrity of the finale are as old as the
critical desire for unity that he rejects; see Beethoven:The Ninth Symphony, p.143.
18. Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No.9, p.105. Stephen Hinton has also argued that the Ninth finale
is ironic, although in the sense appropriate to contemporary Romantic philosophy and literature;
see “Not Which Tones? The Crux of Beethoven’s Ninth,” 19cm 22 (1998), esp. pp.75–76.
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Schiller’s Ode provides a good starting point. If one could take the injunction
to the multitude to be embraced—“Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” (Be embraced,
ye millions!)—as representing the core sentiment of Beethoven’s finale,19 then a
second passage gives an unsettling glimpse of how a magnificent synthesis might
be achieved:
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen! Mische seinen Jubel ein!

Ja—wer auch nur eine Seele Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle weinend sich aus diesem Bund.
(Whoever has won a noble wife, let him mingle his rejoicing [with ours]!
Yes—also he who has only one [kindred] soul to call his own in the entire
world!
But he who has never known these [joys], let him steal weeping from this
circle.)
In other words, amid this general coming together, an outcast steals away. Trou-
blingly, this idea suggests that Beethoven’s and Schiller’s vision of inclusivity is
founded on, or at least creates, a kind of exclusivity.20 Thus, just as the Ninth re-
flects one of the central ideals of Enlightenment liberalism—namely, an inclusive,
ideologically neutral vision of unity in diversity—it also snags itself on one of the
most enduring problems of the modern liberal worldview, a problem as relevant
as ever in present-day Europe and America: is there a model of integration that
does not also involve overtly or covertly suppressing difference?
Following Schiller’s weeping outcast, the critic is introduced to a range of char-
acters who have also been exiled from the Ninth. Beethoven edited and reorganized
Schiller’s Ode, of course, and the casualties are notable: there are fewer boisterous
drunkards who formerly made the poem into an elevated drinking song, and there
are no radicals who long for “rescue from the chains of tyrants” (Tyrannenketten).21
Further, besides the drinkers and the revolutionaries, the weeping outcast also lives
out his exile among beggars—the only people whom Beethoven had mentioned
in his earliest ideas for the composition: “selected lines like Fürsten sind Bettler
[Princes are beggars] etc.,” he scribbled in the Petter sketchbook. The actual line,
19. James Parsons has examined the aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological contexts of this senti-
ment in his “‘Deine Zauber binden wieder’: Beethoven, Schiller, and the Joyous Reconciliation of
Opposites,” Beethoven Forum 9 (2002), 1–53.
20. Solomon has consequently suggested that the “weeping heretic” may be, for present-day crit-
ics, the “hidden hero” of the Ninth; see “The Sense of an Ending: The Ninth Symphony,” in Late
Beethoven: Music,Thought, Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 2003), p.225.
21. Remarked upon in Solomon, Beethoven, p.409.
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from the 1785 version of the Ode, reads “Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder” (beggars
become the brothers of princes); Beethoven’s rendering of the line was either a
mistake or a joke. In any case, by the 1820s, Beethoven was working with a version
of the poem that had already been edited by Schiller himself. Many critics have
observed how the 1803 Ode removes or softens some of the more inflammatory
sentiments of 1785: it was at this time that “Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder” became
the more familiar “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” (All men become brothers). In
other words, what is perhaps the grandest unifying sentiment of the Ninth, repeated
again and again by chorus and soloists, conceals a small act of expurgation: “all
men” does not truly mean all men. In Schiller’s case, the politics of this alteration
were plain—by the start of the nineteenth century he had openly deplored the
consequences of the French Revolution and repudiated many of its ideals; in 1802
he sought and received a patent of nobility.22
One could argue that Beethoven’s music effects several analogous expulsions,
which critics have often reenacted in their pursuit of musical unity and an attendant
conception of the composer’s singular voice. After all, the expulsion of unsettling
musical Others is one of the basic narratives of the symphony, even as it strives
toward a synthesis. Indeed, the finale of the Ninth, perhaps more than any other
composition by Beethoven, makes use of the rhetoric that Rudolf Bockholdt has
characterized as “nicht so, sondern so” (not like that—but like this).23 Like much
of Beethoven’s music, it sets up obstacles in order to overcome them: D triumphs
over Bb, the major mode triumphs over the minor, and the Joy theme triumphs
over most of the preceding thematic material in the symphony. In Beethoven’s
sketches, the opening recitatives in the cellos and basses, which famously comment
on the recollected fragments from earlier movements, are even translated into verbal
dismissals: “This is a mere farce,” wrote Beethoven of the scherzo reminiscence;
“this is too tender,” he remarked of the Adagio.24 The utterance Beethoven penned
for the entrance of the baritone after the reprise of the stormy opening fanfare in
22. See Solomon, “Beethoven and Schiller,” Essays, pp.205–15.

23. Rudolf Bockholdt, “Freiheit und Brüderlichkeit in der Musik Ludwig van Beethovens,” in
Beethoven zwischen Revolution und Restauration, ed. Helga Lühning and Sieghard Brandenburg (Bonn:
bh, 1989), p.98.
24. The sketches in question are from Landsberg 8, bundle 2; see jtw, pp.292–98. These readings
of Beethoven’s words are Gustav Nottebohm’s, translated in Solomon’s “Sense of an Ending,” p.220.
There is some disagreement over the correct reading of Beethoven’s commentary; see Stephen
Hinton’s brief summary and literature review in “Not Which Tones?” p.68. Hinton nevertheless
concludes that “the sketches make explicit that the quotations from the earlier movements are being
rejected.”
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m.208—a passage structurally parallel to the earlier recitatives in cellos and basses,
of course—plainly restates the theme: “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!” (O friends,
not these tones!).
Thus, just as the weeping outcast reveals the pattern of exclusion that is the
corollary of Schiller’s vision of brotherhood, so Beethoven’s rhetoric of expulsion
belies his vision of symphonic synthesis. In this rhetorical context, the Turkish Janis-
sary music is an unwelcome foreign incursion, destined to be expunged. After the
sudden swerve to an F–major chord, through which the previous tonic region of
D yields to Bb major, the lofty musical register becomes a lowly one, and Western
music becomes Eastern—until an instrumental fugato modulates back to a grand
homophonic reprise of the Joy theme in the chorus, along with the opening stanza
of Schiller’s Ode. Sanders has described the process by which the movement pacifies
the tonal area and pitch of Bb as “developmental elimination”: Beethoven almost
literally “composes out” Bb—that is, purges it from his finale.25
There is no reason to think that Beethoven would have wanted anyone to un-
derstand his aesthetic enterprise in these terms, of course. Indeed, it is safe to say
that critics remain more or less true to the Ninth’s artistic aspirations when they
base their interpretations of the finale on moments that appear to bring about
a kind of synthesis. Nevertheless, although certain passages might reasonably be
understood as symbolic of the ideal of synthesis, whether one believes that a syn-
thesis has actually been achieved often depends on the metaphors that one chooses.
For example, some critics describe the pianissimo dominant-minor-ninth chord
on “über Sternen muß er [ein lieber Vater] wohnen” (he [a loving father] must
dwell beyond the stars) as a “synthesis” because the pitch of Bb appears to gain a
place, albeit a peripheral one, in the tonal context of D minor-D major.26 But one
could just as easily describe this passage as the moment in which the progressive
expulsion of Bb is completed: the pitch has been reduced to a dissonant inflection
atop the structural dissonance of the global dominant, whose function is precisely
to revert to the concluding section of D major that follows.27
25. Sanders, “The Sonata-Form Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” p.58.

26. See Burnham’s reading of this moment and its place in the larger “pitch story” of Bb in “How
Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist
(Oxford: Oxford up, 1999), pp.208–12. Hinton augments the story a little in “Not Which Tones?”
pp.63–64. See also Kinderman, Beethoven, pp.279–81.
27. Not only do the following sections avoid Bb, but they apparently strive to eliminate any residual
influence it might have. This might be a reason for the soloists’ cadenza-like turn to B major before
the Prestissimo—a harmonic digression that seems to “correct” the flat-side, and thus minor-mode,
tendencies of the earlier music.This view of the passage sits well with Hinton’s notion that the sub-
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This is not to say that there are no unambiguous moments of synthesis in the
finale.The most palpable synthesis is surely the double fugue, which superimposes
a subject derived from the Joy theme onto the subject of the Andante maestoso
on “Seid umschlungen.” Precisely because its musical synthesis is so demonstra-
tive, however, some critics have been encouraged to consider the double fugue
as, to all intents and purposes, the conclusion and culmination of the movement.
Schenker is not alone in arguing that the subsequent sections “manifest only ca-
dential character”—thus suggesting that they serve merely to reinforce and repeat
the foregoing resolution.28 Given the aesthetic ambitions of the Ninth, Schenker
is on one level justified; one might legitimately conceive of the double fugue as
the “symbolic” culmination of the piece.29 But this symbolic conception of the
conclusion is contradicted by the actual behavior of the music. James Webster has
convincingly argued that only the very last sections achieve complete tonal and
gestural closure.30 Indeed, from an empirical perspective, one might argue that
Beethoven, rather than concluding his symphony with synthesis, is compelled to
end with the kind of ruthless reductionism familiar from the Fifth Symphony—a
systematic tonal and thematic purification that casts out any element that might
interfere with the business of closure. In the final twenty-one measures of Prestis-
simo, beginning with the resolution of a firm authentic cadence, the music expands
to the limits of the available instrumental resources, but at the same time contracts
into a rapidly narrowing tonal and thematic space: the Joy theme is reduced to a
compressed symbol of itself, reiterating over a string of tonics and dominants—a
fragment circling around the third and fifth scale degrees. After an urgent doubling
of the rate of harmonic change, this fragment is reduced even further—ultimately
to a hammering series of two-note slur figures, which fall from the fifth to the third
scale degree. All that remains is a flourish in the woodwind and a final upbeat-
downbeat fall of a fifth—the ultimate musical compression, marking the very end
of the end; only silence can follow.31
sequent repeated falls from B natural to A in the orchestral stringendo are an overt “correction” of
the Bb to A fall so prominent in the fanfare that opens the finale; see “Not Which Tones?” pp.63–64.
See also Levy’s account of the B-major “cadenza” in Beethoven:The Ninth Symphony, pp.117–19, and
Webster, “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” pp.50–54.
28. Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, trans. and ed. John Rothgeb (New Haven:
Yale up, 1992), p.225.
29. This is how Levy conceives of it; see Beethoven:The Ninth Symphony, p.115.
30. Webster, “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” esp. pp.28 and 60.
31.Webster invokes Lawrence Kramer’s description of closure in the Fifth Symphony—an ending
that “cannot be followed” (Kramer’s emphasis). See Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry:The Nineteenth
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To be sure, critics more commonly describe closure in Beethoven’s music as

completion in the most emphatic sense—the provision of a necessary syntactical
element that the music has previously denied us. Closure conceived along these
lines is something like the resolution of a large-scale cadence.32 Walter Riezler,
perhaps alluding to Schenker’s more reductive theories of the 1930s, described the
falling fifth that concludes the Ninth as if it were a microcosm of the cadence-like
progress of the entire piece, echoing and resolving the falling fourth of the work’s
very opening theme: “The whole work at once seems to be spanned by a great
arch stretching from the first note to the last,” he wrote.33 But even this metaphor
of architectural enclosing cannot conceal an attendant gesture of expulsion: pro-
jecting Beethoven’s closing tonal and thematic purifications onto the entire work,
Riezler’s inclusive rhetoric implicitly substitutes the diverse content of the Ninth
for a single quasi-cadential operation.
Ironically, the subtractions implicit in these conceptions of musical synthesis
might seem to impede the critical pursuit of Beethoven’s single authorial voice:
once critics have followed what seems to be Beethoven’s lead and eliminated all
alien voices from the finale, the composer’s unadulterated voice is rarely identifiable
in the inconsequential musical residue. To be sure, when Riezler takes the final
cadence of the Ninth as emblematic of the entire work’s progress, his cultural mes-
sage is clear—just as it is in the most reductive Schenkerian theories: Beethoven’s
authentic voice, like an authentic cadence, is one of the most fundamental sounds
in Western music; Beethoven is the home key of the musical canon, so to speak.
Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1984), p.235;Webster, “The Form of the
Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” pp.61–62 and p.62n41.
32. Nicholas Marston provides a further list of possible meanings of the term “closure” in music
criticism (derived from literary critic Don Fowler) in his essay “‘The Sense of an Ending’: Goal-
Directedness in Beethoven’s Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley
(Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2000), p.85. Webster’s account of the finale of the Ninth as through-
composed depends on a conception of closure as completion, although his resistance to reduction-
ism and advocacy of a multivalent approach to analysis suggest that he would accept that various
conceptions of closure (and perhaps also open-endedness) in the Ninth can coexist. Indeed, although
the idea of through-composition privileges both unilinear temporal progression and end-oriented-
ness, Webster also articulates connections between the various sections of the finale of the Ninth in
a quasi-spatial manner—connections that do not depend on temporal succession to be analytically
valid; see “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” pp.35–36.
33. Walter Riezler, Beethoven, trans. G. D. H. Pidcock (London: M. C. Forrester, 1938), p.216.
Schenker’s most reductive theories were formulated some years after his own monograph on the
Ninth, of course.
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But this sentiment still risks eradicating Beethoven’s unique voice altogether by
universalizing it.
One might maintain that Riezler’s “great arch” spanning the Ninth is in es-
sence a formalist translation of Kanne’s idea of an ever-present Besonnenheit—an
authorial structure that shelters the diverse voices of the symphony within it.Then
again, as we have seen, the composer’s voice is most palpable when it intervenes to
evict unwanted Others rather than invite them in: when an actual voice enters the
symphony for the first time uttering Beethoven’s own words, it delivers a negative
injunction—“not these tones.” Generations of critics have cast about both within
and without the Ninth in search of the tones that Beethoven rejects; among the
candidates are the dissonant fanfare that opens the finale, all earlier movements
of the symphony, and, in Wagner’s famous interpretation, all instrumental sym-
phonic music.34 But the identity of these Others is perhaps less important than
the rhetoric of rejection itself. That so many critics have treated this moment as
the hermeneutic crux of the finale perhaps suggests that Beethoven’s voice is
less perceptible as a constant authorial presence than as a constitutive gesture of
rejection—a gesture that becomes meaningful only in relation to everything that
it is not.35 Indeed, one is tempted to say that, rather than shaping or superseding
all Others in the finale of the Ninth, Beethoven’s voice paradoxically manifests
itself primarily as difference—a perpetual nicht diese, which constantly defers the
moment of authorial presence until the moment of silence.36
Even the Turkish music is not wholly banished; the clattering percussion returns
in the closing Prestissimo.37 In any case, while Beethoven might have intended
34. See Hinton’s summary in “Not Which Tones?” p.67.

35. There is perhaps a parallel between this argument and Leo Treitler’s idea that the Ninth
Symphony in some sense demands that its interpretation become a constitutive part of the work;
see “History, Criticism, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” in Music and the Historical Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard up, 1989), chap.1.
36. My use of the term “difference” here alludes to the terminology of Saussurean linguistics
and its later appropriation and critique in the work of Jacques Derrida. Saussure maintained that
words become meaningful and functional not because of any inherent property of sound or sense
but because of their difference from all other words. Several writings by Derrida expand on this
idea and use it to deconstruct the metaphysical assumptions of meaning itself, suggesting that even
foundational ideas such as being or presence are constituted by an idea of what they are not; see
“Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: u Chicago p, 1982), pp.3–27 and Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins up, 1976), chap.2.
37. Webster lists the Turkish percussion as one of several multivalent connections between the
Bb Alla marcia and the rest of the finale; see “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” p.35;
see also Kramer, “The Harem Threshold,” pp.89–90. Levy argues that the presence of the Turkish
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the final inclusion of the percussion instruments to symbolize a kind of synthesis,

their meaning is by no means plain: they might more strongly recall, even in the
very last measures, the voices that have been cast out of the finale; or perhaps their
persistent jangling suggests that the composer can only speak when he borrows
the voices of Others—that his voice, even until the decisive end of his work, is
irreducibly plural.
The Heroic Style and Its Others
I will return to the Ninth and its ambiguous Turkish percussion. First, however,
I want to suggest that the critical mind-set that has shaped the reception of the
Ninth has constructed Beethoven’s entire œuvre and its place in the Western canon
in much the same way. After all, just as the internal story of the Ninth has been
retold as a series of overcomings, so the entire symphony has been portrayed as a
victory in a wider historiographical story of conquest—“the shining hour of music
history in which the Ninth began its glorious march around the globe,” to use the
bombastic image of one critic.38 The Ninth has come to be seen as the summation
and culmination of Beethoven’s defining musical register, “the crowning work of
the heroic style,” as Solomon puts it.39
The heroic style—a label traceable to the florid writings of Romain Rolland—
has come to describe not only Beethoven’s music in its most triumphant vein, but
also the cultural triumph of this music. The idea of the heroic style is inseparable
from Beethoven’s most canonical works: the dramatic and often densely thematic
pieces that, with the exception of the Ninth itself, were composed in or around
the first decade of the nineteenth century (or, more precisely, from around 1803 to
1812)—the odd-numbered symphonies from the Eroica onward and the overtures
from Prometheus to Egmont, many of which are associated with real or mythic he-
roes.40 In his landmark 1995 study of Beethoven’s cultural preeminence, Beethoven
percussion is yet another example of the synthesis that the Ninth achieves—although the relevant
percussion instruments are all that ultimately survive of the tonally wayward Janissary march; see
Levy, Beethoven:The Ninth Symphony, p.119.
38. Karl-Heinz Köhler, “The Conversation Books: Aspects of a New Picture of Beethoven,” in
Beethoven, Performers, and Critics: The International Beethoven Congress Detroit, 1977, ed. Robert Win-
ter and Bruce Carr (Detroit: Wayne State up, 1980), p.154; cited in William Kinderman, Beethoven
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1995), p.282.
39. Solomon, Beethoven, p.292; See also Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His
Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon p, 1991), p.xxiii.
40.The only book-length study of Beethoven’s heroic music in the form of a conventional style
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Hero, Scott Burnham argues that these works have colonized and conditioned
all musical thought: “The values of Beethoven’s heroic style have become the
values of music.”41 Burnham’s thesis warrants particular attention because, in its
terse encapsulation of what it claims to be received critical wisdom, it portrays
Beethoven’s voice as an agent of unity—not only on the level of individual works,
but also on the level of musical culture as a whole, unified under Beethoven’s
dominion.
Consequently, even as Burnham pursues his argument from a standpoint asso-
ciated with ideology critique—that is, he reveals how a contingent and localized
set of values has become Just the Way Things Are—he tends to make the heroic
style appear unassailable.42 The conversation continues to be monopolized by talk
about a few pieces of Beethoven, only it has turned to why we must talk about
them. Burnham goes as far as to suggest that critics might be incapable of talking
about anything else: “It may in fact be impossible to say anything new about this
music (or any music) when all that we say about music in general is conditioned
by this very music”—an open admission of a hermeneutic dead end.43
Burnham’s guiding concept, which he infers from the heroic style and its
reception history, is “presence”—the presence of an overpowering voice within
the heroic style, as well as the omnipresence of this voice in Western musical
culture.44 Burnham explains how Beethoven came to be omnipresent with what
he describes as a “phenomenology”—an empirical account of the qualities of
“presence and engagement” in the heroic style.45 “Phenomenology” connotes an
approach that purports in some way to circumvent or at least minimize theoreti-
cal mediation—a model of criticism that ostensibly matches the immediacy of
its subject with the immediacy of its response.46 Thus, although Burnham writes
history is Michael Broyles, Beethoven: The Emergence and Evolution of Beethoven’s Heroic Style (New
York: Excelsior, 1987); the most influential article on the subject remains Alan Tyson, “Beethoven’s
Heroic Phase,” Musical Times 110 (1969), 139–41.
41. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p.xiii.
42. Burnham seems to accept this and is careful to avoid giving the impression that his argument
is a critically facile exercise in debunking: “my motivation here is not to critique and then dismantle
the status quo” (Beethoven Hero, p.xix).
43. Ibid., p.xix.
44. Ibid., p.31. For Burnham’s model of presence, see chap.1, passim; and, used as a critique of
process-oriented accounts of the heroic style, pp.162–67.
45. Ibid., chap.2.
46. Valentine Cunningham polemicizes against the idea that one can engage directly with a
text without the mediation of theory in his (hence punningly titled) Reading After Theory (Oxford:
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that he does not intend to stake out “some sort of neutral level of purely musical
significance,” he nonetheless implies that his observations preempt the medi-
ated reflections of more conventional musical analysis. Despite this, many of his
central claims depend upon existing analytical conceptions of musical form and
syntax—his contention, for example, that Beethoven expands and comments on
what he calls “classical-style form,” surely one of the most pored-over construc-
tions of modern analysis and historiography. In fact, Burnham’s writing is much
like Tovey’s or Kerman’s insofar as it artfully mixes technical description and vivid
imagistic language. For example, he writes of the “complex instance of nonclo-
sural falling motion”—the falling semitone articulated by two falling thirds—that
opens the Fifth Symphony, but continues: “The force of assertion does not lift
anything up, does not push open a space to be explored, in short, does no such
day work, but instead thrusts downward, pushes below, falls like night.”47 The
potential problem here, in my view, is not the brilliant combination of technical
description and vivid imagery, but the claim that Burnham seems to make for
it.Vivid prose might aspire to match the immediacy of the listening experience,
but vividness alone does not create a phenomenology. It merely makes striking
language the proxy of presence.
In short, Burnham’s promised shift of critical position is a function of rhetoric.
When he uses his “phenomenology” to ground a metatheory of music analysis in
his third chapter, uniting the theories of A. B. Marx, Schenker, Réti, and Riemann,
he necessarily grants his own analytical reflections ontological priority.48 Burnham
accepts that “each generation projects onto Beethoven a somewhat different aes-
thetic concern,” but his main aim is to demonstrate that “the musical values of the
heroic style . . . are preserved in the axioms of the leading theoretical models of the
last two centuries”—to reveal once again Beethoven’s omnipresence.49 Beethoven
speaks with one imperious voice, and so do the theorists, since Beethoven speaks
through them. Indeed, like the finale of the Ninth, Burnham’s story of Beethoven’s
cultural presence becomes one of grand synthesis: under Beethoven’s direction, all
critical voices join together in a chorus of consent.50
Blackwell, 2002). Burnham does not reveal all the sources of his musical phenomenology, although
he mentions David Greene’s Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music (New York: Gordon and Breech,
1982).
47. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, pp.xvii, 62, 33.
48. Ibid., chap.3.
49. Ibid., pp.111 and 110.
50. Burnham’s unifying spirit here reveals the influence of Hans Eggebrecht’s monograph Zur
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By articulating the structure of Beethoven’s dominance—even in the context of

a deft and tactful cultural critique—Burnham reinforces, even exaggerates, existing
distinctions between Beethoven and his critically maligned or marginalized musical
Others: the heroic style “dictates the shape of alterity,” he writes.51 Without doubt,
one can point to a proliferation of oppositions that seem to support his contention.
One only need consider the frequently gendered opposition of Beethoven and
Schubert—the active, teleological, and developmental versus the passive, digres-
sive, and melodic. Or Beethoven and Mendelssohn—the struggling, avant garde,
and revolutionary versus the facile, retrospective, and Biedermeier. Or Beethoven
and Rossini—the authentic, challenging, and textual versus the compromised,
populist, and performative. Further, each of these personified binary oppositions
implies a number of musical ones: vocal music versus instrumental music; sonata
and symphony versus opera and potpourri; inviolable works versus mutable per-
formances; themes and development versus tunes and repetition. And, of course,
such musical oppositions in turn imply wider cultural frames of reference: serious
versus light; structure versus decoration; rational versus capricious; German versus
Franco-Italian; masculine versus feminine; straight versus gay.
Despite Burnham’s insistence on the impregnability of Beethoven’s dominance,
however, he ultimately expresses frustration with critics who “simply display the bina-
ry opposite of each term of the Beethoven paradigm” when they discuss Beethoven’s
musical Others. Susan McClary’s gendered readings of the Schubert–Beethoven
opposition are singled out for criticism: “With such a model [of the feminine] we
seem not to have progressed beyond Adam’s rib in the way we conceptualize the
feminine in tonal music.”52 His epilogue recommends an intriguing alternative: a
Geschichte der Beethoven-Rezeption: Beethoven 1970 (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Lit-
eratur, 1972), which aims to show how Beethoven reception has been dominated by a limited number
of tropes and topics that he calls “reception constants.” Burnham approvingly quotes Eggebrecht’s
claim that the history of Beethoven reception reads like “one book written by one author”—a
deeply revealing textual metaphor (Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p.xiii; Eggebrecht, Zur Geschichte der
Beethoven-Rezeption, p.38).This image transforms Beethoven’s diverse critics into something singular
and transhistorical—something with the coherence and permanence of a book. Indeed, Eggebrecht’s
book itself makes this metaphor literal: historical voices become a text, produced by a single author,
and with all of the Autorität that Eggebrecht sees critics repeatedly perceiving in Beethoven’s music
(p.41). Beethoven criticism thus ends up as the mirror image of Beethoven’s timeless works.
51. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p.155.
52. Ibid. See Susan McClary’s arguments about Schubert in “Constructions of Subjectivity in
Schubert’s Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Gary
Thomas, and Elizabeth Wood (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.205–33.
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composer such as Schubert might help critics to see the value and distinctiveness
of music that has often been defined as “merely” non-Beethovenian; critics might
thus strive to conceive of Schubertian and Beethovenian aesthetics as parallel and
equally valid modes of musical thought rather than a hierarchical opposition.53
The desire to transcend such binary oppositions is grounded in a kind of inclu-
sive liberal pluralism—the belief that all kinds of music could comfortably coex-
ist if only critics and listeners tried to understand what is unique and admirable
about each of them.Without our Beethovenian preconceptions “we will ask why
we value the presence of any given music and how we are present in the experi-
ence of that music,” argues Burnham.54 Perhaps the reader is to assume that these
questions can be answered with a musical phenomenology unencumbered by the
Beethovenian preconceptions of conventional analysis; having given a complete
phenomenological description of Beethoven’s heroic style, one might go on to
describe Schubert’s piano sonatas, Rossini’s arias, or Mendelssohn’s overtures.
And yet, this pluralism may be as reductive as the binary oppositions it seeks
to transcend. Indeed, Burnham observes that McClary’s essentializing arguments
about Schubert remain parasitic on the Beethoven paradigm, yet goes on to imply
that McClary is not essentializing enough: after all, Burnham appears to argue
that critics should instead seek to define what is essentially Schubertian, preferably
without regard to Beethoven at all. In my view, this approach risks turning the
complex negotiations, exchanges, and entanglements that make up musical styles
and musical cultures into a collection of merely adjacent, self-contained “values”;
it reduces an intricate, hybrid musical culture to a series of ghettos. Nor is it obvi-
ous that the principled critic should try to engage with Beethoven’s Others as if
the Beethoven paradigm were an irrelevance, especially given the influence that
it exerted, in various forms, on his contemporaries and successors.
53. Burnham’s attempted dissolution of the Beethoven-Schubert opposition has an analogy in the
framing device with which Dahlhaus begins his Nineteenth-Century Music. Echoing Raphael Georg
Kiesewetter, Dahlhaus writes of the “twin styles” of Beethoven and Rossini that inaugurated the
century’s music—a formulation that, in Dahlhaus’s hands, is designed to avoid an evaluative hier-
archy within the opposition. Indeed, with a characteristically inclusive gesture, Dahlhaus maintains
that today’s critics need not choose between the aesthetics of Rossini and Beethoven, which can
comfortably coexist. See Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: California up, 1989), pp.8–15. Several scholars have argued that Dahlhaus is far
from even-handed in his treatment of opera; see, for example, Philip Gossett, “Carl Dahlhaus and
the ‘Ideal Type’,” 19cm 13 (1989), 49–56; and James Hepokoski,“The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-
Musicological Sources,” 19cm 14 (1991), 221–46.
54. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p.167.
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Further, and crucially, Burnham’s notion that Beethoven’s heroic “master trope”
dictates the shape of its Others contradicts one of the most important lessons of
recent political theory and cultural criticism: master tropes, no less than master
races, gain coherence as much by identifying and excluding foreign elements as by
any inward-looking method of self-definition.55 Burnham endeavors to provide
precisely such a definition with his “phenomenology”—an explanation of the
mastery of the heroic style inferred with minimal mediation from anything outside
of the style itself. Given the inherent circularity of this task, it is not surprising that
Burnham should generate his self-grounding image of the heroic master trope from
an exceedingly narrow selection of an already small collection of works—short
samples even of the music that critics have traditionally associated with the he-
roic style. Lewis Lockwood has observed that Burnham’s book is “primarily an
analytical study of the Eroica and the Fifth Symphonies”—and one might add
that Burnham, like many of his critical predecessors, focuses almost exclusively
on the Eroica’s first movement.56 Besides these two symphonies, Burnham devotes
extended discussion only to the Egmont and Coriolanus Overtures. Despite this
narrowness of focus, however, Burnham never actually defines the heroic style.57 To
be sure, by his own reckoning he has no need to: it is surely unnecessary to define
something that has come to define all of music—something that is omnipresent
in our language about music. Nevertheless, given the supposed omnipresence of
the Beethovenian master trope, it is perhaps revealing that Burnham must remove
almost all of Beethoven’s œuvre in order to talk about it with any assurance.
Granted, Burnham recognizes that Beethoven’s own music is often resistant
to the Beethoven paradigm: “Although the heroic style quickly became a master
trope, it is only one of the stories Beethoven tells,” he observes, illustrating his
55. Lawrence Kramer has called this the “logic of alterity”; see Classical Music and Postmodern
Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1995), p.34.
56. Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven:The Music and the Life (New York:W.W. Norton, 2003), p.516n14.
For a more developed critique of Burnham’s use of the designation “heroic style,” see Lockwood’s
“Beethoven, Florestan, and the Varieties of Heroism,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham
and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton up, 2000), pp.27–47, esp. pp.38–41.
57. At the very opening, Burnham writes of “two symphonies, two piano sonatas, several over-
tures, [and] a piano concerto” that can “lay unequivocal claim” to the heroic style (Beethoven Hero,
p.xiii). This formulation seems to refer directly to the Eroica and the Fifth; the “Waldstein” and the
“Appassionata”; the Fifth Piano Concerto; and the Coriolanus and Egmont Overtures, and the Leonore
Overtures Nos.2 and 3. Burnham adds in a footnote that one might also include “earlier or later”
works—thus implicitly acknowledging that the heroic style was largely confined to the first decade
of the nineteenth century. His additional examples are the “Pathétique” Sonata; the “Hammerklavier”;
the Piano Sonata, op.111; and the Ninth Symphony (Beethoven Hero, p.169n1).
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claim with a brief discussion of the Pastoral Symphony, the languid Other of the
dramatic Fifth.58 Nonetheless, this recognition yet again reinforces existing dis-
tinctions between Beethoven and his Others—only in this case Beethoven is his
own Other. Moreover, one might ask whether a composer’s voice can be so easily
compartmentalized. Indeed, a closer look at the idea of the heroic style as it has
persisted in Beethoven criticism since Rolland reveals a critical category that is
itself ambiguous and divided—a concept that is shaped by a constant awareness
of its Others.
The Absent Heroic Style
The greatest obstacle to any secure definition of the heroic style is its position in
an unappetizing critical smorgasbord of Beethovenian styles, periodizations, and
historiographical narratives—the traditional tripartite conception of Beethoven’s
creative life foremost among them. Both William Kinderman and Solomon treat
the heroic style as the emblematic musical manner of Beethoven’s middle period.59
Solomon gives Beethoven a heroic period and a heroic decade—a slightly more
formal version of the heroic phase conjectured by Alan Tyson.60 Nevertheless, all
critics assume that Beethoven’s heroic music is foremost defined by a style—a
style that is foreshadowed in some early works, such as the Funeral Cantata for
Joseph II, and recalled in some later ones like the Ninth.61 Many critics assume a
broad continuity between the heroic style and Beethoven’s “symphonic” musical
thought: Solomon has the heroic style congealing in the genre of the symphony in
the aftermath of a big bang created by the epic emotional scale of heroic subjects
colliding with sonata principles.62 Dahlhaus only loosely distinguishes the heroic
style from what he calls the “symphonic style”—the thematically propulsive, devel-
opmentally dense, dramatic yet monumental manner typified by the first movement
of the Eroica.63 To this extent, the heroic style provides a label for a traditionally
58. Ibid., p.153. The comments on the Pastoral continue on pp.154–55. Burnham’s subsequent
discussion leads to the most radical subversions of his own earlier account of the heroic paradigm.
59. See Kinderman, Beethoven, chaps.4 and 5; Solomon, Beethoven, chaps.12 and 14.
60. Part III of Solomon, Beethoven is called “The Heroic Period,” while chaps.12 and 14 are called
“The Heroic Decade” I and II respectively.
61. See Solomon, Beethoven, pp.68 and 406; also Solomon, “The Creative Periods of Beethoven,”
Essays, p.119.
62. Solomon, Beethoven, esp. pp.250–52.
63. See Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, esp. pp.29–30; see also chap.4 for
his full discussion of the “symphonic style.”
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selective conception of Beethoven’s symphonic writing. Dahlhaus himself observes

that music historians have habitually taken the Eroica and the Fifth as symbolic
of Beethoven’s symphonic procedure rather than the Fourth, the Pastoral, or the
Eighth.64 One might add that even within the privileged odd-numbered sym-
phonies the critical emphasis has tended to fall on sonata-type movements with
dramatic and teleological patterns of thematic development—a tendency that has
led to the relative critical neglect of the variation finale of the Eroica.65 Moreover, to
complete the circle of classification, this bias intersects with traditional Beethoven
periodization: many critics have treated only certain edited symphonic highlights
as emblematic of Beethoven’s entire middle period.
The farther one gets from the first movements of Beethoven’s odd-numbered
symphonies, therefore, the more problematic it becomes to talk of the heroic
style. The invocation of the term in connection with chamber works including
the first “Razumovsky” Quartet, op.59, or the Piano Sonatas, ops.53 and 57,
stems in part from a widespread perception of their seriousness, compositional
ambition, and quasi-symphonic scope.66 Meanwhile, the widespread discus-
sion of the Fifth Piano Concerto with reference to the idea of the heroic style
appears to issue from the same impulse that has led many critics to regard the
piece as a kind of honorary symphony.67 The majority of Beethoven’s overtures
are considered examples of the heroic style, of course, because they combine a
monumental and dramatic manner with unambiguously heroic literary subjects.
More serious problems arise in the case of vocal music and stage works, however,
where heroic subjects might abound, but instances of “symphonic” writing tend
to require special pleading. Even though most Beethoven scholars recognize the
importance of Leonore–Fidelio to any conception of the heroic style, the discus-
64. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p.76.The even-numbered symphonies “are not in the main
line of Beethoven’s spiritual development,” concluded J. W. N. Sullivan; see Beethoven: His Spiritual
Development (London: Unwin Books, 1964; first published 1927), p.78.
65. This neglect has been partially redressed in recent years with studies such as Elaine Sisman’s
“Tradition and Transformation in the Alternating Variations of Haydn and Beethoven,” Acta 62, 2/3
(1990), 152–82.
66. See, for instance, Joseph Kerman’s peerless essay on op.59, no.1, which couples the quartet
with the Eroica Symphony, in Quartets, chap.4. Kinderman cites Wilhelm von Lenz’s notion of the
“symphonic essence” (symphonistisches Wesen) of the “Waldstein” Sonata. See Kinderman, Beethoven,
p.97; Lenz, Kritischer Katalog sämtlicher Werke Ludwig van Beethovens mit Analysen derselben (Hamburg:
Hoffmann and Campe, 1860), p.273.
67.“In Beethoven’s ‘Emperor,’ concerto and symphony virtually merge,” writes Lockwood in his
Beethoven, p.249.
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sion of its music in this connection (aside from its multiple overtures) is scanty.
Searching for the heroic style in Beethoven’s opera, a critic has little more to go
on than the heroic rescue story and the monumentality of much of the music in
the last scene. The oratorio Christus am Ölberg presents even more of a problem.
Few have argued that its music contributed substantially to the emergence of
the heroic style, even though its earliest version and later revision practically
frame the heroic decade—and Tyson points out that its suffering Christ–hero
is consistent with the themes of heroism that run through Beethoven’s heroic
phase.68 And yet, as Lockwood has since observed, even the portrayal of heroism
itself in Beethoven’s heroic phase is irreducibly diverse—from the quiet endur-
ance of Florestan to the public sacrifice of Egmont and the triumphant inner
will of Leonore.69
Every critical doubt or outright exclusion implies yet more doubts and exclu-
sions on a larger scale. It hardly needs saying that the uncertain status of Christus am
Ölberg and Leonore–Fidelio within the heroic style reflects the idea, widespread even
during the composer’s lifetime, that Beethoven is in essence a writer of instrumental
music; certainly, the cantatas and all of the songs (with the possible exception
of An die ferne Geliebte) also appear inessential to most critical definitions of his
musical voice. Likewise, the Pastoral Symphony points to a marginal repertoire of
tuneful and expansive sonata-type works that nonetheless eschew dramatic and
teleological thematic development.70 Some critics have described what they take
to be a neglected lyrical episode in Beethoven’s creative life—the period of six
years or so from around 1809 that produced the Piano Sonatas, ops.78 and 90, as
well as the String Quartet, op.74, and the Piano Trio, op.97.71 That these composi-
tions—in particular the cantabile rondo of op.90—have often been described as
“Schubertian” is symptomatic of their marginal status.72 Solomon even questions
whether the musical features of these pieces “are hallmarks of a distinct style” and
implies instead that their supposedly untypical style is evidence of a composer in
the midst of a transition.73 In other words, Beethoven is not his authentic self in
68. Tyson, “Beethoven’s Heroic Phase.”

69. Lockwood, “Beethoven, Florestan, and the Varieties of Heroism,” p.43.
70. It also raises a nexus of problems surrounding Beethoven’s “characteristic” and pictorial music,
of course.
71. See Dahlhaus, Beethoven, p.203; Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, pp.80–81. See also Solo-
mon, “The Creative Periods,” p.119, and Elaine R. Sisman, “After the Heroic Style: Fantasia and the
‘Characteristic’ Sonatas of 1809,” Beethoven Forum 6 (1998), 67–96.
72. See, for example, Kinderman on op.90 in his Beethoven, pp.182.
73. Solomon, “The Creative Periods,” p.119.
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these pieces, even though tuneful sonata movements—not least rondo finales—are
common in his œuvre; one only need consider the Piano Sonatas, ops.7, 22, and
31, no.1.
Moreover, one could argue that, within Beethoven’s canonical works, critically
marginalized moments of Otherness point to broader patterns of critical exclusion.
There is no clearer case than the Janissary march in the finale of the Ninth. The
wind and percussion share their critical exile with other examples of Beethoven’s
Turkish exoticism—entire pieces that lie far from the heroic canon. At the farthest
remove is surely the chorus of dervishes from the incidental music for August von
Kotzebue’s play Die Ruinen von Athen (The Ruins of Athens)—a short drama that,
along with König Stephan (King Stephen), was part of the opening ceremony of
Pest’s Imperial Theater on Kaiser Franz’s birthday (12 February) in 1812.74 This
chorus has been expurgated from critical constructions of Beethoven’s œuvre just
as the Turkish music has been critically expurgated from the Ninth. It incorporates
almost every obvious kind of musical exoticism: the score calls for “all available
noise-making instruments, such as castanets, bells, etc.”; the harmony is dominated
by primitivist open fifths and octaves; violins and violas shadow the vocal line with
triplets that oscillate between the principal note and its lower chromatic neighbor,
creating the impression of an exotically wavering pitch. Kotzebue’s text, meanwhile,
indulges in the sort of image-rich bosh often reserved for the depiction of magi-
cal rites, prominently incorporating a pair of Islamic signifiers: “Du hast in deines
Ärmels Falten / Den Mond getragen, ihn gespalten, / Kaaba! Mahomet!” (Thou
hast taken the moon into the folds of thy sleeve and split it. Kaaba! Mahomet!).
The dervish chorus led to yet another musical representation of the Islamic Other,
which Beethoven arranged from the theme of his Piano Variations, op.76—a Janis-
sary march that appears almost domesticated after the whirling dervishes, and
somewhat closer in style to the Turkish music in the Ninth.75
One is hardly inclined to hear Beethoven’s overbearing presence in his dervish
chorus, of course, or even in the subsequent march, although one might perhaps
echo Kanne’s defense of the Turkish music in the Ninth: despite a superficial
foreignness, Beethoven’s imagination is always in charge. Beethoven merely puts
on a mask; the complete concealment of his voice is crucial to the scene, after
74. The opening had been planned for the Kaiser’s name day (4 October) the previous year and
is still sometimes mistakenly cited as having been performed on this date; the project suffered several
delays, however.
75. Lawrence Kramer comments on the dervish chorus in Die Ruinen in the context of his dis-
cussion of the finale of the Ninth in “The Harem Threshold,” pp.86–88.
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all, which at once titillates and horrifies with its vision of an irrational, fanatical
Other trampling on the very origin of enlightened European culture. And yet, it
is unclear when the mask comes off. To be sure, the musical exoticism leaves the
stage with the Turks, but, for the modern critic in particular, Beethoven’s voice
does not obviously reassert itself in the remaining movements of the score. The
sacred march to the altar that opens the final scene perhaps aims to set to rights
the grotesque march of the Turkish Janissaries, just as the final oath chorus in praise
of the Kaiser seeks to counterbalance the horror of Islamic ruination, emphasiz-
ing the continuation of enlightened values in the city of Pest. But many critics
have been reluctant to identify Beethoven’s voice with this concluding musical
propagandizing, which ostensibly supplants a more authentic mode of authorial
expression—and perhaps even, given the succession of blandly affirmative tonics
and dominants in the choral finale, encourages a musical language almost as crude
and generic as the Islamic exoticism to which it is opposed. As early as 1829, a
critic from Vienna’s Allgemeiner musikalischer Anzeiger formulated a dismissal of Die
Ruinen that has since become commonplace: the piece is worthless because it did
not arise from the composer’s “inner urge” (aus innerem Drang).76 In this piece, the
critic implies, Beethoven could not be his authentic self.
Thus, one might get the impression that the dervish chorus, for all the staginess
of its exoticism, is actually an Other at the heart of an Other—merely the most
palpable moment of foreignness in a composition in which Beethoven consistently
speaks a language that is foreign to him. Indeed, the score of Die Ruinen belongs
to a yet broader category of Otherness: a group of compositions written in the
years of the Befreiungskriege and the Congress of Vienna, which most critics have
hitherto marginalized, largely because of Beethoven’s overt propagandizing: in
1811, the incidental music for Die Ruinen and König Stephan; in 1813, the notorious
battle piece Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria (Wellington’s Victory or the
Battle of Vittoria); in 1814, the closing chorus “Germania” for a patriotic drama
by Georg Friedrich Treitschke, a chorus to mark the entry of the allied princes
into Vienna (though there is no evidence that it was ever performed), “Ihr weisen
Gründer glücklicher Staaten” (Ye Wise Founders of Happy States), and a cantata
for the Congress of Vienna, Der glorreiche Augenblick; in 1815, yet another chorus for
the conclusion of a Treitschke drama, “Es ist vollbracht!” (It Is Accomplished!).77
76. Reprinted in Beethoven, die Werke im Spiegel seiner Zeit, ed. Kunze, p.91.
77. The principal studies of these compositions as a more or less coherent group or period are:
Nicholas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14,” 19cm 27
(2003), 3–24; Ingrid Fuchs,“The Glorious Moment: Beethoven and the Congress of Vienna,” in Den-
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Several equally obscure compositions from the period also hover on the fringes
of this festive and bellicose group: the incidental music to Johann Friedrich Leo-
pold Duncker’s Leonore Prohaska (which was never performed with the drama); a
triumphal march and introductory music to the second act of Christoph Kuffner’s
Tarpeja; the Overture in C Major, op.115, known as “Zur Namensfeier” (Name
Day), which was performed on Kaiser Franz’s name day (4 October) in 1815; one
or two marches and simple songs on patriotic texts; and perhaps even the Cantata
Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, op.112 (Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage), a setting
of two Goethe poems for chorus and orchestra.
The consciously public, patriotic, and often bellicose tenor of many of these
pieces frequently prompts grand musical rhetoric, massive orchestral and choral
sonorities, and showy or bizarre musical effects. Beethoven himself remarked that
the dervish chorus was a “good signboard to attract a mixed public” when he made
Die Ruinen von Athen available to the organizers of a charity concert in Graz.78 It
is worth noting that the Janissary instruments crop up in a number of composi-
tions from the period—not only the Turkish sections of Die Ruinen but also the
chorus of warriors in the last movement of Der glorreiche Augenblick and, of course,
the greater part of Wellingtons Sieg.79 Like most mechanical curiosities of the time,
Johann Nepomuk Mälzel’s Panharmonicon, for which Beethoven initially composed
his battle piece, would have consisted primarily of mechanical winds and Turkish
percussion; around two years after the premiere of Wellingtons Sieg, Steiner commis-
sioned an arrangement by Diabelli entirely for wind and percussion—“the Schlacht
which has been translated into the purest Turkish,” as Beethoven described it.80
mark and the Dancing Congress of Vienna: Playing for Denmark’s Future, Exhibition Catalog Christiansborg
Palace (Copenhagen, 2002), pp.182–97; and Kinderman, Beethoven, chap.7. The entire “problematic”
period around 1809–17 is given particular attention in the book of essays Beethoven zwischen Revolu-
tion und Restauration, with the implication of transition clearly maintained in the “zwischen” of its
title. Michael Ladenburger’s essay in the collection deals with Beethoven’s Congress compositions
and their context; see “Der Wiener Kongreß im Spiegel der Musik,” esp. pp.293–306. Esteban Buch
deals with the Congress period as a context for the aesthetic and political background to the Ninth
in Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: u Chicago p, 2003), chap.4.
78. Letter to Joseph von Varena, March 1813. Anderson I, no.411; Briefwechsel II, no.630. Unless
otherwise stated, all translations from the letters are Anderson’s.
79. Cook calls the Turkish percussion the “implicit” Other of Wellingtons Sieg; see “The Other
Beethoven,” p.18.
80. Beethoven’s emphasis. Letter to Steiner of 1815. Anderson II, no.578; Briefwechsel III, no.837.
On contemporary orchestra machines, see Emily Dolan, “The Origins of the Orchestra Machine,”
Current Musicology 76 (2003), 7–23.
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Although Wellingtons Sieg brought Beethoven to the peak of his living fame,
later generations of historians have habitually described the years of the Congress
of Vienna as a period of decline, bringing the heroic decade to an undistinguished
close. Again and again, they have diagnosed a loss of creative energy during the
years of the Congress—a weakening or exhaustion of the composer’s voice itself
as much as a quantitative decline in productivity. Metaphors of aridity and liminal-
ity accordingly dominate the critical writing about the period. Rolland proposes
that Beethoven temporarily lost his voice during these years, which he character-
izes with the Napoleonic metaphor of exile.81 Wellingtons Sieg is evidence of this
exile—Beethoven’s most un-Beethovenian work, “the only one of his works that
is unworthy of him,” as Rolland puts it.82 Sullivan, framing the last years of the
heroic decade entirely in the language of decay, likewise maintains that Beethoven
was “singularly unproductive” in the decade from 1809—a questionable conten-
tion, surely projecting an ingrained critical indifference to Beethoven’s output
from this period onto historical fact.83 Solomon writes of the “dissolution of the
heroic style”—the waning of Beethoven’s most distinctive and lasting musical
voice, until its recrudescence in the Ninth.84 Dahlhaus also sees Wellingtons Sieg as
the end of the heroic style; “it has been described as the unhappy outcome of a
creative block,” he adds.85 Lockwood dubs the period from 1813 to 1817 “the fallow
years”—a “twilight zone” between the middle period and the late music.86 Even
Kinderman, one of the few Beethoven biographers to give these works sustained
and serious consideration, defines them by the drastically weakened presence of
the composer’s voice: “Beethoven may have felt it appropriate to dilute much of
the strength of his musical style in order to please and flatter his listeners without
really demanding their attention,” he suggests.87 The implication is usually that these
pieces can be removed from Beethoven’s œuvre, as they are not truly Beethovenian.
Solomon questions whether the “patriotic potboilers” even belong “within the
81. Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, p.2.

82. Ibid., 184.
83. Sullivan, Beethoven, p.85; chap.5 of his study is entitled “The End of a Period.”
84. Solomon, Beethoven, chap.17.
85. Dahlhaus, Beethoven, p.xxiii.
86. Lockwood, Beethoven, p.333; chap.16 is entitled “The Fallow Years.” Incidentally, Lockwood
calls the middle and late periods Beethoven’s second and final “maturities”; see n.95 for the various
musicological contexts of this choice of nomenclature.
87. Kinderman, Beethoven, p.177.The only other Beethoven biography to tackle the patriotic and
occasional pieces as directly is David Wyn Jones’s The Life of Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge up,
1998); see esp. chap.5.
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boundaries of any of Beethoven’s authentic style periods”—which is to imply that

the years from 1813 onward comprise inauthentic Beethoven.88 “They should be
set aside as negligible by-products, not as works in the main line,” recommends
Lockwood.89
But these injunctions remain constitutive of the critical construction of Beethoven’s
œuvre—that is, critics tend to construct the composer’s voice in the very gesture of
rejecting what it is not. Indeed, the compositions of the Congress appear in many
studies of Beethoven’s music only to be rhetorically expunged: not only are Wel-
lingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick now “notorious,” but they have come to
symbolize the waning of Beethoven’s defining heroic voice; they are the sound of
the silence of the heroic style. Some studies consequently accord these pieces surpris-
ing prominence: Kinderman’s biography mentions Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche
Augenblick before any other composition; by the third page of his study, one has
encountered Wellingtons Sieg three times, Eroica only once.90 Wellingtons Sieg is also
the first piece to be mentioned in Lockwood’s Beethoven study, immediately before
his thoughts turn to the heroic decade.91 Given that, as we have seen, Beethoven
criticism tends to present us with a heroic style that is either awkwardly plural or—as
in Burnham’s study—narrow almost to the point of absence, one might say that the
singular and dominating presence of the heroic style, much like the presence of the
composer’s voice in the Ninth, is sustained in part by the dynamic of difference: nicht
diese Töne.
In fact, the wise warning that concludes Solomon’s essay on Beethoven’s cre-
ative periods implies as much:“In a sense, all of Beethoven’s work is transitional, in
process, constantly pressing toward new metamorphoses. And his œuvre is a single
œuvre, which we segment out of a penchant for classification, a need to clarify—and
at our peril.”92 Solomon leaves us with the choice between a Beethovenian œuvre
whose unity and coherence are shored up with exemptions—the supposedly in-
authentic music of the Congress of Vienna foremost among them—or an œuvre
that becomes singular only when one conceives of it as a kind of perpetual mo-
tion, a total development as processive as Beethoven’s heroic music itself. Solomon
almost suggests that, within Beethoven’s complete works, if we are not to hear the

89. Lockwood, Beethoven, p.347.
90. Kinderman, Beethoven, p.2.
91. Lockwood, Beethoven, p.xix. Lockwood mentions the Cello Sonata, op.69, earlier (p.xvii), but
in an autobiographical rather than critical context.
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composer’s voice as irreducibly plural, then we must conclude that it manifests itself
almost entirely as transition—the dynamic of difference that defers the moment
of authentically Beethovenian plenitude until the composer’s silence.
Resistance and Collaboration
Even during his own career, Beethoven was portrayed as a composer in transition:
Tia DeNora has shown how Beethoven and his aristocratic supporters helped to
popularize early narratives of his transition from novice into Great Composer—an
heir and rival to Haydn.93 The posthumous organization of Beethoven’s work into
its traditional three stages retains this symbolic moment of transition within its
plateaux: the moment in which the composer throws off the shackles of appren-
ticeship and takes a “new path” into his heroic period.94 This moment guarantees
the idea of an “early period” a marginal yet essential position in Beethoven his-
toriography, insofar as it represents what Beethoven must leave behind in search
of his own voice. Beethoven’s emerging authorial identity is bound up with this
increasing capacity to reject: as Beethoven matures, he must discount voices that
are alien to his nature and subsume or supersede musical voices that would drown
out his own. Until he has found his voice, he is reliant on models and mentors,
and incapable of absolute sincerity.95 Thus Sullivan, for example, alleges that “stock
93. Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna 1792–1803
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1995), esp. chap.5.
94. Czerny reports that Beethoven used the phrase “new path” to describe the Piano Sonatas,
op.31. Most commentators substantiate Czerny’s report with a letter from Beethoven to Breitkopf
(dated 18 October 1802) about the Variations ops.34 and 35, which promises pieces “worked out in
quite a new manner.” See Anderson I, no.62; Briefwechsel I, no.108. Dahlhaus in particular endorses
the idea of a “new path” beginning around 1802—although he is more cautious about the idea of
a “heroic” or “middle” period; see his Beethoven, chap.9, esp. p.167. See also Hans-Werner Küthen,
“Beethovens ‘wirklich ganz neue Manier’—Eine Persiflage,” in Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik,
ed. Sieghard Brandenburg and Helmut Loos (Munich: Henle, 1987), pp.216–24, and Peter Schleuning,
“Beethoven in alter Deutung: Der ‘neue Weg’ mit der ‘Sinfonia Eroica’,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft
44/3 (1987), 165–94.
95. On the value judgments embedded in Beethoven periodization, in particular with reference
to the idea of “earliness,” see Webster, “The Concept of Beethoven’s ‘Early’ Period in the Context
of Periodization in General,” Beethoven Forum 3 (1994), 1–27. It is worth noting that, until its twen-
tieth-century, modernist-led rehabilitation as the pinnacle of Beethoven’s achievement, perhaps also
inspired by Wagner’s view of late Beethoven, the late music was routinely disparaged as a descent into
eccentricity and obscurantism, with the heroic music thus becoming the central peak of Beethoven’s
career; see K. M. Knittel,“Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style,” jams (1998),
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poetic situations” mar Beethoven’s early works, citing the Largo from the Piano
Sonata, op.10, no.3.96
But, even with the onset of maturity, the struggle has no end. For when Beethoven
has found his voice, he must fight to keep hold of it, wresting it from forebears and
contemporaries, influence and fashion, cooption and coercion. In many biographies,
it appears that the composer’s voice becomes his own partly in the act of forcibly
reclaiming it: the critical construction of Beethoven’s overweening authorship is
sustained by a constant note of polemic—anecdotes in which Beethoven reasserts
his ownership of his works. The author’s power is ultimately one of veto: “I don’t
write for the galleries!” said the composer as he withdrew the revised 1806 Leonore;
“I want my score back” (at least, these were the words the singer Joseph August
Röckel claimed to recall).97
If most critics are to be believed, this struggle for ownership takes place even
on the page: Beethoven’s copious sketches and revisions are its traces; each work
is a fresh triumph. In the minds of many scholars, Beethoven remains the Great
Expurgator—the composer who rewrites and rejects until the perfected work,
and the Complete Works in their turn, stand before us. Leonard Bernstein, ex-
amining the sketches of the Fifth Symphony, paints a picture of Beethoven as a
kind of sublime editor:“Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after
movement, symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet after concerto. Always
probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection.”98 The completed works and
the Complete Works, Bernstein seems to be saying, achieve their completeness
through an unceasing process of excision. Again, the Beethovenian author resists:
nicht diese Töne. And, as we have seen, it is this kind of authorial voice that many
heroic works portray in their musical rhetoric—not least the finale of the Fifth,
with its vast C–major purification after the reprise of the minor-mode scherzo.
If resistance sustains the Beethovenian model of authorship, then its opposite is
collaboration—the knowing collusion with Other voices: Beethoven falls silent
when he fails to resist. It is hardly surprising that critics should have all but excised
49–82. Lockwood prefers to write of Beethoven’s first, second, and final “maturities,” surely an attempt
to make the periodization of Beethoven’s mature music value-neutral (although it retains, and even
reinforces, the distinction between “mature” and “immature” works, which here comprise—with
adequate justification, it must be said—everything pre-dating Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna). See
Lockwood, Beethoven.
96. Sullivan, Beethoven, p.69.
97. Thayer-Forbes, p.398.
98. Leonard Bernstein, “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” in The Joy of Music (London: White Lion,
1974), p.93.
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Beethoven’s Congress music from his œuvre: such collaborations are not merely out
of character, but also in a sense not even by Beethoven.Writers have seized on any
suggestion that this is literally so: Ignaz Moscheles’s recollection that Wellingtons
Sieg was conceived and even in large part composed by the inventor Mälzel has
been reiterated by critics from Thayer to Charles Rosen,99 although an examination
of the manuscript sources has since shown that Mälzel’s musical input was most
likely confined to the more generic fanfares and trumpet flourishes.100 Even so,
critics continue to insinuate that Wellingtons Sieg is not entirely Beethoven’s work:
“Beethoven gave in to Mälzel’s blandishments,” writes Lockwood.101 To be sure,
such critics have one undeniable fact on their side: much of the musical material
in Wellingtons Sieg derives from elsewhere—the French and English marches with
which it opens, and the variations and fugato on “God Save the King” with which
it ends. Such intertextuality signals the erosion of the very authority that defines
an author and is only the most noticeable symptom of a more fundamental com-
promise that conditions Beethoven’s Congress compositions: the subordination
of the composer’s voice to Others—to his audiences, to his contemporaries, and,
above all, to political ideologies.
This is nowhere clearer than in “Es ist vollbracht,” the strophic song for bass
and chorus that Beethoven composed as the finale of Treitschke’s patriotic drama
Die Ehrenpforten (The Triumphal Gates). The generic character of the piece, with
its direct harmonies, festive dotted rhythms, and boisterous alternation of soloist
and chorus, perhaps already weakens any sense of a guiding authorial voice; but in
the short coda this voice is almost submerged altogether. The orchestral interlude
after the last strophe unexpectedly moves to a portentous pause on the dominant
(m.130), and, breaking the pregnant silence, a delicate passage of woodwinds in-
troduces a direct melodic quotation from Haydn’s 1797 song of Habsburg loyalty
“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (God Save Kaiser Franz). The bass soloist soon
joins them, singing the entire last eight-measure period of Haydn’s melody to the
99. Moscheles made this claim in his 1841 annotated English translation of Schindler’s Beethoven
biography. For a reprint and affirmation of Moscheles’s comment, see Thayer-Forbes, p.561; Thayer
remarks that Beethoven “for once consented to work out the ideas of another.” For an echo of this
claim as received wisdom, see Charles Rosen, The Classical Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972),
p.401.
100. See Hans-Werner Küthen,“’Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria’: Beethoven und
das Epochenproblem Napoleon,” in Beethoven zwischen Revolution und Restauration, pp.262–63; see
also Cook’s summary of the idea and the reasons behind its propagation in “The Other Beethoven,”
p.6.
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words “Gott sei Dank und unserm Kaiser” (Praise be to God and to our Kaiser).
Finally, the chorus adds its voice in a series of overlapping entries, bringing the
song to yet another dramatic pause on IV (m.143), after which it ends with a more
urgent Presto. The quotation—in part a rather obvious musical gimmick, in part
a citation that makes the message of the chorus unmistakable—thus breaks the
already fragile impression of authorial control: it is as if the composer yields to
existing musical orthodoxies in the recognition that he has little to say that “Gott
erhalte” could not say for him.
It is this apparent multiplicity of voices in Beethoven’s Congress pieces that
leads Nicholas Cook, in an essay on Der glorreiche Augenblick and Wellingtons Sieg,
to draw on Bakhtinian literary criticism to distinguish the monological discourse
of Beethoven’s canonical heroic works from the dialogical collaborations of the
Congress of Vienna.102 Cook argues that when critics such as Kinderman bemoan
the lack of a subtle unifying principle in Wellingtons Sieg and other Congress pieces
they fail to understand that such compositions function something like musical
collages, and thus inevitably resist the unifying impulses of most critical methods.103
Moreover, consistent with some of his arguments in his earlier study of the Ninth,
Cook condemns what he considers the domestication of Beethoven’s dialogical
music by a monological critical outlook, arguing that the Romantic–Modernist
organicism of A. B. Marx and his critical heirs is less appropriate to many of
Beethoven’s compositions than Enlightenment notions of musical rhetoric, as one
finds in the writings of Koch.104 On this basis, Cook suggests that the Ninth and
Wellingtons Sieg are more similar than most critics would like to think.105
Nevertheless, this claim appears to contradict a line of argument that Cook has
pursued earlier, in which he distinguishes the voice of Beethoven’s heroic works
from the weakened voice of the Congress of Vienna: the music of the Congress
period, argues Cook, has been marginalized because it is not internally diverse
and complicated enough. If one is to hear Beethoven’s music as “a mode of sub-
jective presence,” he contends, the music must be sufficiently complex to elicit
102. Cook, “The Other Beethoven,” esp. pp.12–15. His appropriation of Bakhtin comes via Ken
Hirschkop, “The Classical and the Popular: Musical Form and Social Context,” in Music and the
Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), pp.283–304. For Mikhail
Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia and his conception of the “polyphony” of voices in literary texts,
see his four essays on the novel, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (Austin: u Texas p, 1981).
103. Cook, “The Other Beethoven,” p.17; see also Kinderman, Beethoven, p.172.
104. Cook, “The Other Beethoven,” p.13.
105. Ibid., pp.13–14.
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varying interpretations—to permit listeners to make the music their own. The
sense of a singular authorial presence in Beethoven’s monological heroic works
is actually produced by unrestrained musical diversity. He concludes: “In terms of
the paradigm of Beethovenian subjectivity, then, the meaning of works like op.91
and op.136 was too obvious to be taken seriously.”106 In this way, Cook makes the
supposedly dialogical Congress compositions sound decidedly univalent.
In short, although Cook is correct that Beethoven’s Congress collaborations sit
uncomfortably with the unifying impulses of most analytical strategies, his expla-
nation of the source of this discomfort is incomplete. Cook allows that broadly
analytical observations are both possible and valid, but queries their relevance to
what he calls the “central aesthetic qualities” of the repertoire in question; such
analysis does not lead to “a convincing reading” of the music, he writes.107 I would
add that Beethoven’s Congress collaborations often make analysis appear redundant
not because they are resistant to it but because they accommodate it with excessive
ease: while one can elucidate the tonal plan of Wellingtons Sieg, for example—the
opening clash of the marches in Eb major and C major, say, which much of the
ensuing Schlacht appears to negotiate through the mediating key of C minor—it
is harder to make this plan perform any meaningful hermeneutic work.108 One
cannot make such analysis “speak,” as it were.The point becomes clearer still when
one focuses on shorter compositions such as Beethoven’s strophic Schlußchöre from
Treitschke’s Congress dramas of 1814–15, or his contributions to Kotzebue’s patriotic
dramas of 1811–12. Conventional methods of analysis are unkind to these genres,
of course—not because they necessarily reveal them to be badly constructed or
incoherent, but because they appear unable to advance from mere description to
explanation, as Leonard Meyer and Alan Walker once put it.109 Faced with a piece
as simple as Beethoven’s closing chorus from Treitschke’s 1814 Die gute Nachricht
(The Happy Message), one struggles to imagine what analysis might even seek to
explain. (Table 1 parses the movement.)
Here, unity is to all intents and purposes the same as uniformity: a reductive
harmonic perspective on the movement shows only that, within a structure whose
most adventurous maneuver is the secondary dominant first heard in mm.10–11,
Beethoven organizes the four principal phrases that make up his song in such a
way that the first pair (A and B in Table 1) end on the dominant, and the second
pair (C and R) on the tonic. It is hard to escape the impression, therefore, that
106. Ibid., pp.11–12.
107. Ibid., p.17.
108. Cook writes of the tonal plan of Wellingtons Sieg; ibid., pp.16–17.
109. Cited in Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1987), p.230.
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Table 1: “Germania,” WoO 94, in Bb major; 61 measures (from Treitschke’s
Die Gute Nachricht).
Main Strophe:
Feurig, jedoch nicht zu geschwind [fiery, but not too fast]; C meter.
Mm.1: Fortissimo triadic fanfare in the winds, with string tremolo.
Mm.2–5: Baritone soloist and strings. Phrase of four measures (A) based on stepwise
motion within the first three scale degrees until concluding fall of a perfect
fifth to the fifth scale degree. Limited melodic compass and intervallic range
reminiscent of trumpet voluntary.
Mm.5–9: Phrase A echoed by homophonic chorus, with full orchestra, on same lines
of text.
Mm.9–13: Baritone soloist and strings. Legato phrase of four measures (B) on next
two lines of text. A pair of identical stepwise ascents to the supertonic (one for
each rhyming line); each describes a move to the dominant from V/V.
Mm.13–15: Baritone soloist and wind. Phrase of two measures (C) resolves to the
tonic, descending stepwise through the first three scale degrees.
Mm.15–17: Phrase C echoed by homophonic chorus, with full orchestra, on same
lines of text.
Mm.17–22: The refrain that concludes each verse (R): “Preis ihm! Heil dir, Germania!”
(Praise him! Hail to you, Germania!). All voices and instruments. Phrase of four
measures, the melody rising to the sixth scale degree and a cadence with six-
four preparation.
Mm.22–28: Orchestral tutti with concluding fanfare refrain.
Final strophe:
Mm.28–38: See main strophe.
Mm.38–40: Baritone soloist, strings, and woodwind. Second half of phrase B rescored
with woodwind and an embellished pause on the dominant/leading tone in
melody.
Più Allegro; alla breve.
Mm.41–44: “Franz, Kaiser Franz! Victoria!” Baritone soloist and full orchestra.
Dramatic triadic ascent with pause on “Franz” accompanied by string flourish.
Mm.45–48: Previous phrase and words echoed by homophonic chorus, with fuller
orchestration and timpani roll.
Mm.48–53: Chorus and full orchestra. Return to R as in mm.17–22, but without the
baritone soloist and with a metrical displacement of the melodic line; an
extension of the line by two quarter notes in mm.51–52 allows the cadence to
resolve on downbeat.
Mm.53–58: Orchestral tutti.
Mm.58–61: All voices and instruments. Fortissimo in voices; fortississimo in orchestra.
Concluding “Germania” on a tonic chord with a timpani roll.
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reductive kinds of analysis are paradoxically an appropriate means of engaging

only those compositions that resist it. By contrast, music that yields more easily
provides no secure hermeneutic footholds.
Besides, much of Beethoven’s Congress music originated in the diverse and
mutable context of dramatic works and festive events—in other words, this music
is collaborative in conception, sustained by the interaction with the voices that sur-
rounded it. Collaborative music, as Cook implies, can sound hollow or meaningless
when one listens to it with the intention of picking out a singular authorial voice.
Indeed, reductive critical methods encourage such univalent listening when they
excise any remnants of the voices with which this music collaborated—much as
Kanne encouraged his readers to ignore the Turkish exoticism in the Ninth and
concentrate instead on the governing Beethovenian Besonnenheit. Thus, it would
perhaps be more consistent with the “open” aesthetic stance of Beethoven’s Con-
gress collaborations if critics, rather than eliminating unwanted voices, augmented
them instead—which is to say, turned their attention to historical context. Some
music histories, not least those of a contextual bent, might give one the impression
that context merely comprises everything separate from the music under consid-
eration that one nonetheless invokes to explain it. But context is in many respects
woven into the very fabric of Beethoven’s Congress music: the closing chorus of
Die Ehrenpforten,110 to take one example, clearly embraces the voices of Beethoven,
Treitschke, and Haydn—and perhaps even the voice of political orthodoxy itself.
But one can also point to other proximate musical voices: the chorus was but one
part of a musical drama with an overture by Hummel, and a mixture of choruses,
ensembles, and arias by Bernhard Anselm Weber, Joseph Weigl, Ignaz von Seyfried,
Adalbert Gyrowetz, and even Handel—not to mention numbers adapted from
popular tunes of the day. Many voices likewise mingle in Die gute Nachricht: after
Hummel’s overture (actually the same as the overture to the later Die Ehrenpforten)
came numbers by Mozart, Gyrowetz,Weigl, Hummel again, and—nowadays more
famous as a Beethoven exegete—Kanne (Table 2 gives a complete account of the
numbers and their composers in both of Treitschke’s dramas).111
To be sure, Beethoven’s contributions were the culminating numbers; nonethe-
less, Mozart and Handel aside, these numbers mingle with a veritable chorus of
110. One should note that Die Ehrenpforten, first performed on 15 July 1815 after the second
capitulation of Paris, was revived for Kaiser Franz’s name day later that year on 3 and 4 October,
when, among other changes, Beethoven’s “Germania” was used in place of “Es ist vollbracht” (see
Table 2).
111. Manuscript scores of both Die gute Nachricht and Die Ehrenpforten survive in the Austrian
National Library—although as late as the mid-1980s,Willy Hess believed the music to be lost; see his
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Table 2
A: Friedrich Treitschke’s Die gute Nachricht—first performance

in the Kärntnertortheater on 11 April 1814.
Overture by Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

1. Aria (Hannchen): “Ach, wie schleichen Tag und Stunden,” adapted from Mozart’s
song for voice and piano “An Chloe,” K.524.
2. Aria (Bruno): “Ich schlich den Neuigkeiten nach,” by Adalbert Gyrowetz.
3. Trio (Bruno, Robert, Hannchen): “Eile, dich ruft die Ehre,” by Joseph Weigl.
4. Quartet (Süßlich, Bruno, Hannchen, Stürmer): “Ein Jüngling in den besten Jahren,”
by Hummel.
5. Duettino (Hannchen, Stürmer): “Kehre wieder, holde Taube,” by Hummel.
6. Aria (Ruthe/Bruno): “Heut sah man Fahnen sonder Zahl,” by Kanne.
7. Trio and chorus (Bruno, Stürmer, Hannchen): “Kommt, Freunde, blicket all hinauf,”
by Hummel.
8. Chorus: “Germania,” by Beethoven.
B: Friedrich Treitschke’s Die Ehrenpforten—first performance

in the Kärntnertortheater on 15 July 1815.
Overture by Hummel (same as overture to Die gute Nachricht).

1. Chorus: “Ihr Brüder, ihr Schwestern,” by Bernhard Anselm Weber.
2. Aria (Horst): “Unaufhaltsam schnell wie Wogen” by Weigl.
3. Duet (Horst, Walter): “Auf Eichen schwebt des Adlers Tron,” based on a Hungarian
patriotic song.
4. Sextet (Rosalie, Mathilde, Sophie, Walter, Horst, Fröhlich): “O wie schnell ist sie
verschwunden,” by Ignaz von Seyfried.
5. Aria (Teutschmann): “Ich zog mich aus der Stadt zurück,” by Gyrowetz.
6. Duet (Walter, Horst): “Was wir fröhlich angefangen,” based on the “Alexander”
March, one of the most popular tunes of the day.
7. Chorus: “Auf, ziehet her mit Freudenliedern,” by I. von Seyfried.
8. Chorus: “Fall ward sein Loos,” based on “Fall’n is the foe” from act II of Handel’s
Judas Maccabeus.
9. Chorus: “Es ist vollbracht,” by Beethoven.
Performances on 3 and 4 October 1815:

8. Chorus: “Allmächtiger Gott,” based on “Fall’n is the foe” from act II of Handel’s
Judas Maccabeus.
9. Chorus: “Germania,” by Beethoven.
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somewhat marginal contemporaries—figures who nonetheless crop up regularly

on the periphery of Beethoven studies.112 This is not to claim that Beethoven was
directly influenced by these contemporaries, of course; rather, these composers
represent the generic musical and ideological background that Beethoven’s own
Congress music makes no effort to escape.
Thus, it is not merely that Beethoven’s Congress compositions have many voices
while his heroic works have one, as Cook would have it—after all, Bakhtinian
criticism would claim that all texts can ultimately be resolved into a variety of
contesting voices—but that the Congress music appears to welcome in Other
voices, while the heroic works gesture toward driving them out. Collaboration
opposes resistance.These opposed aesthetic stances condition how relevant or useful
reductive critical approaches strike us. On the one hand, the critical expurgation
of the Other voices in Beethoven’s Congress compositions appears unable to leave
Das Fidelio-Buch: Beethovens Oper Fidelio, ihre Geschichte und ihre drei Fassungen (Winterthur: Amadeus,
1986), p.33n28. Accordingly, there has been a little confusion over the authorship of the music in
Treitschke’s Congress dramas, and most literature on the subject is untrustworthy. Hess’s important
work on Treitschke’s dramas relies on Thayer’s imperfect testimony to establish the authorship of the
music; see Willy Hess, “Zwei patriotische Singspiele von Friedrich Treitschke,” bj (1969), 269–319.
Kinsky-Halm seems to have derived the names of the collaborating musicians in Die gute Nachricht
and Die Ehrenpforten from AmZ reports—see AmZ 21 (25 May 1814), col. 351 and AmZ 34 (23 Au-
gust 1815), col. 566—but mistakenly identifies the “Seyfried” of Die Ehrenpforten with the brother
of Ignaz, Joseph von Seyfried, who was primarily a writer and librettist rather than a musician; see
Kinsky-Halm, p.555.
112. The Capellmeister of the Berlin Court Opera, B. A. Weber, was responsible for bringing
Fidelio to Berlin in 1815 (see his letter to Treitschke of 8 April 1815. Albrecht II, no.204; Briefwechsel
III, no.802a). I. von Seyfried was a close acquaintance of the Beethoven circle, and conducted the
premieres of a number of Beethoven’s compositions, including the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and
the 1805 Leonore; see Peter Clive, Beethoven and His World:A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Oxford
up, 2001), pp.335–36. Kanne, of course, was also close to the Beethoven circle. His relationship with
Beethoven, considered separately from his well-known reviews, is summarized in Clive, Beethoven
and His World, pp.181–82; Owen Jander, “Beethoven’s ‘Orpheus in Hades’: the Andante con moto of
the Fourth Piano Concerto,” 19cm 8 (1985), 195–212; and Hermann Ulrich, “Beethovens Freund
Friedrich August Kanne,” Österreichische Musik Zeitung 29 (1974), 75–80. Hummel and Beethoven
were periodically friendly. Hummel led the percussion at the first performance of Wellingtons Sieg
(see Thayer-Forbes, p.567). It seems that Beethoven considered Court Capellmeister (and godson
of Haydn) Joseph Weigl an esteemed acquaintance, though the two men were not friends. Neither
was Beethoven friendly with Gyrowetz—conductor and composer at the court theater—although
in this case Beethoven openly disdained Gyrowetz’s music, as some acerbic commentary in his cor-
respondence shows (see his letter to Treitschke of 27 February 1814. Anderson I, no.467; Briefwechsel
III, no.699). Seyfried, Weigl, Gyrowetz, and Hummel were all pallbearers at Beethoven’s funeral.
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behind any voices at all. On the other hand, in the case of a work like the Ninth,
one might almost say that a reductive critical approach—indeed, the activity of
reducing itself—embodies an aesthetic tension that is constitutive of the composer’s
voice: the critical recognition and rejection of Others trace the dynamic of dif-
ference that many heroic works appear to dramatize. To the extent that criticism
must labor to explain away Other voices, it reenacts the struggle through which
Beethoven’s voice becomes audible.
Beethoven’s Many Voices
Just as the expurgating rhetoric of the Ninth appears to encourage critics and
analysts who would reenact and exaggerate it, so one could argue that Beethoven
himself was in some ways complicit with the construction of his voice as a kind
of resistance. His correspondence is riddled with rhetorical assertions of indepen-
dence that seem to sanction the later constructions of the Beethoven myth: “I
refuse to allow another, whoever he may be, to alter my compositions,” he warned
Treitschke in 1814.113 One could even argue that, just as Beethoven’s control over
each of his completed works manifests itself as the rejection of compromise, so
Beethoven attempted to exert an analogous control over his Complete Works,
denying opus numbers to particular artistic endeavors, as if to exclude them from
his own musical mainstream. Many of the pieces in which Beethoven’s own voice
seems to be threatened by collaboration have no opus numbers—the Schlußchöre
for Treitschke’s Congress dramas, for example, even though they were published in
separate performing transcriptions. Even the monumental Der glorreiche Augenblick
became op.136 only posthumously.
There are notable exceptions, however. It has long been a cause of consternation
that Beethoven granted Wellingtons Sieg an opus number of its own; after all, critics
have habitually insinuated that Beethoven considered Wellingtons Sieg, along with
all his other Congress collaborations, a worthless piece of ephemera—an idea that
originated with Schindler and Moscheles and found its way into the scholarship of
the twentieth century via Thayer. Cook has since shown that Beethoven’s view of
these pieces is by no means so easily established; Beethoven’s correspondence—as
well as other documents, including his intended public notice of thanks to the per-
formers after the premiere of Wellingtons Sieg—certainly do not reveal a composer
disdaining his own creations.114 Given the absence of any substantial evidence that
113. Letter of April 1814. Anderson I, no.478; Briefwechsel III, no.708a.

114. Cook summarizes the history of critical apologetics in “The Other Beethoven,” pp.4–11. For
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Beethoven thought badly of Wellingtons Sieg, critics are given to ruminating on

Beethoven’s mental condition, as if to suggest that he was momentarily incapable
of making a reasoned judgment of the piece; Lockwood, like many others, blames
an unhealthy “yearning for public recognition.”115
Other writers have suggested that Beethoven was unable to concur with the
political message of his Congress collaborations, and that consequently his music
could not be truly authentic; a widespread belief in Beethoven’s Enlightenment
radicalism and even republicanism is responsible here, prompting a majority of
critics to regard the patriotic Congress compositions—as well as earlier pieces such
as the anti-French war songs on poems by Joseph Friedelberg from the 1790s—as
unwelcome or perhaps merely judicious ideological compromises.116 Certainly,
there is an implicit contradiction between Beethoven’s desire to name a symphony
after Napoleon in 1804 and his musical celebrations of the French leader’s defeat
only a decade or so later—a contradiction that has prompted Stephen Rumph to
argue that Beethoven was formulating a new musical-ideological program from
around the French occupation of 1809.117 But the facts lend themselves to multiple
interpretations: Beethoven’s Viennese contemporaries were accustomed to rapid
changes of allegiance during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Hummel,
for example, who composed an enormous quantity of music in celebration of
Bonaparte’s defeat, had produced a grand cantata on 1 April 1810 for the wedding
of Napoleon and Marie Louise. During the Napoleonic era, Vienna witnessed
peace treaties, renewed fighting, and the hardship of occupation, all in the context
of a public sphere closely policed by the state: music reflected this complex and
ever-changing political culture.118
For all that, most of Beethoven’s biographers search for a single political philoso-
phy to match the composer’s single voice. When they fail to find one, they tend
the public notice of thanks, intended for the Wiener Zeitung after the premiere of Wellingtons Sieg,
see Thayer-Forbes, p.567.
116. The most influential portrait of Beethoven as an Enlightenment radical can be found in
Solomon’s Beethoven, esp. chaps.4 and 13. Martin Geck and Peter Schleuning have proposed that
Beethoven was a kind of crypto-Jacobin in their “Geschrieben auf Bonaparte”: Beethovens “Eroica”—
Revolution, Reaktion, Rezeption (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989).
117. Stephen Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon, esp. chap.4.
118. Thomas Sipe gives an account of the complex and evolving relationship of the Habsburg
regime and Bonaparte in the first decade of the nineteenth century in his Beethoven: “Eroica” Sym-
phony (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998), chap.3.
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to project the ambiguous reality of Viennese political culture onto Beethoven’s

mental state: “The weaker works of this time—Wellingtons Sieg and the Congress
cantata—were products of Beethoven’s own ambivalence,” writes Lockwood.119
Dahlhaus describes two Beethovens, a politically idealistic one and a pragmatic
one, equivalent to the heroic works and the Congress collaborations respectively.120
He even portrays Beethoven as a consciously dialectical thinker, whose political
inconsistencies were grounded in the interplay of the idea and its realization:
“Beethoven was of one mind with Hegel: the realized idea, though enmeshed in
the dialectics of its realization, is more substantial than the ‘pure’ idea that remains
untouched by reality. And for that reason, like Hegel, he was able to be both for
and against Napoleon.”121 Such contortions are surely a way of coping with an
awkward fact: Beethoven’s voice is unavoidably plural. Indeed, one is tempted to
reverse Solomon’s aphorism: Beethoven’s œuvre is many œuvres, which we edit out
of a penchant for unity. This is not to say that among Beethoven’s voices, musical
and political, one cannot decide which is the dominant one—or, indeed, which
one Beethoven would have wanted his public or posterity to hear. One can point
to moments in Beethoven’s correspondence in which he rejects the constraints
of collaboration with all the associated rhetoric of the Great Composer, and one
might reasonably surmise that these passages represent his core aesthetic values—
and perhaps also the public image that he wished to create. Nevertheless, if critics
want their Beethoven to speak with a single voice, they must choose which one
is representative—an activity that necessarily involves expurgating the Others.
Further, even if Beethoven himself assisted in the creation of this myth, we do
not have to believe him.We can choose instead to hear the Other Beethoven, even
within the canonical heroic works themselves, whose rejection is constitutive of the
heroic master trope. Indeed, this presents no special challenge: as we have seen in
the finale of the Ninth, Beethoven’s heroic presence is often the gesture of rejec-
tion itself; one need only dwell, therefore, on the multiple, unsynthesized voices
that critics often reject, such as the jangling Bb Turkish music. To be sure, I would
not advocate this kind of listening “against the grain” as an end in itself. Neither
would I claim that it revives an older, rhetorical kind of musical engagement, as
Cook suggests. Rather, attending to the many registers in the finale of the Ninth
reveals to us how the voice of the composer is, to use Judith Butler’s expression,

120. Dahlhaus, Beethoven, p.20.
121. Ibid., p.26.
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“borrowed from elsewhere”—how the Beethovenian subject is constructed only

within the language that he uses.122
Despite the rhetoric of resistance that characterizes both his music and his
professed aesthetic views, Beethoven is in one sense an unwitting collaborator; an
active expunger of Other voices, he is also a passive recipient of them. Although
such a revelation could be couched in deconstructive terms—as the “decentering
of the musical subject,” perhaps—it is nonetheless grounded in some of the more
prosaic facts of music history. Composers have always adapted their voices to the
circumstances in which they speak, and the diversity of their musical registers can
appear problematic in consequence. Moreover, the disempowerment of the author
is surely the very premise of traditional histories of musical style: musical language
exists before the composer, who is always to some extent powerless in the face of
his or her inheritance. Just as composers use musical language, so musical language
uses them.
By listening to the Other voices in the finale of the Ninth, and accepting them
all as Beethovenian voices, one can reach an accommodation with disjunctions
that seem aberrant against the background of the heroic master trope and trace
new connections in Beethoven’s life and works. For instance, rather than view the
Turkish music as the eruption of an Oriental Other, sharing only in the untam-
able Otherness of a number of ignored compositions, one might regard it instead
as yet another strain of the Orientalism that fascinated Beethoven throughout his
life—the Herderian takes on Indian philosophy that fill much of the Tagebuch and
the Egyptian mysticism that prompted him to copy out the ancient inscriptions
from Schiller’s “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses).123 The noted Aus-
trian orientalist Joseph Hammer, having heard that Beethoven intended to compose
a chorus on an Indian text, contacted the composer with the offer of an Indian
pastoral drama and what he described as a Persian Singspiel.124 One can perhaps
hear something of the mystical tone of this kind of Orientalism, so important in
122. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford up, 1997),
p.198.
123. For Beethoven’s Herderian Orientalism, see Solomon,“Beethoven’s Tagebuch,” in Beethoven
Essays, para. 61, with Solomon’s notes. For the context of such thought in German Romanticism, see
A. Leslie Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, N.C.: Duke
up, 1964). The Egyptian inscriptions that Beethoven copied from Schiller’s “Die Sendung Moses”
(The Mission of Moses) and a facsimile of them in Beethoven’s hand can be found in Solomon,
Beethoven, pp.204–06.
124. Albrecht II, no.199; Briefwechsel IV, no.1290.The year of the letter (dated merely “Ash Wednes-
day”) is disputed, but it seems most likely to be from 1815. Details on Joseph Hammer, who later
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the development of German Romantic thought, transmuted into the numinous

deism of the Andante maestoso of the finale of the Ninth, shortly after the warlike
Turkish music.
Of course, one consequence of this kind of critical approach is that the syn-
thesizing aspirations of the Ninth fail. No longer held together by the force of
Beethovenian authorial resistance, the many voices of the finale of the Ninth
separate. In consequence, the liberal vision of synthesis that the end of the Ninth
celebrates appears ideological; rather than produced within the work itself, the
sound of synthesis—as the continued jangling of the Turkish instruments in the
last Prestissimo of the Ninth lets slip, perhaps—is yet another voice “borrowed
from elsewhere,” imposing itself on the others. And to this extent, as Solomon also
observes, it sounds distinctly like the voice of orthodoxy audible in Beethoven’s
collaborative compositions: “Doubtless this is an ‘ideological’ solution—one that
brooks no opposition and admits no nuances of opinion. In this sense, the finale
of the Ninth belongs in the line of compositions that extends from the ‘Joseph’
Cantata of 1790 to Der glorreiche Augenblick of 1814.”125 Thus, what Solomon calls the
“crowning work of the heroic style” is also the crowning work of its opposite.
Yet, to the extent that the symphony fails to live up to its own ideals, it can per-
haps sidestep what Terry Eagleton has called “the contradiction of all utopianism”:
artistic images of harmony tend to be so compelling that they risk reversing the
very radicalism that they seek to promote.126 By contrast, the utopian vision of the
Ninth is undermined by a more realistic pluralism, which is uneasy, fragmentary,
and hierarchical. We must recognize this utopian vision if we are to understand
the piece, of course. But we do not have to believe it.
One might say the same of the “strong” conception of the musical work—the
conceptual precondition for the hermetic vision of synthesis that the Ninth strives
vainly to create.While one can recognize the gestures of resistance by which works
separate themselves from their historical and musical surroundings, one can also
understand how works themselves are constructed by these very surroundings.
The work-concept, much like the heroic style that instantiated it, is crucial to any
understanding of much of Beethoven’s music, of course; yet the musical work, also
like the heroic style, can never be truly present to the critic, because it is not a
inherited the title Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, can be found in Solomon’s article “A Beethoven
Acquaintance: Josef von Hammer-Purgstall,” Musical Times (1983), 13–15.
125. Solomon, Beethoven, p.408.
126. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p.371.
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coherent set of stylistic markers or aesthetic ideals as much as a discursive tension

within the music and its reception.
James Webster has charted the tensions that arise within the finale of the Ninth
as a consequence of what he calls multivalence.127 I would suggest by extension that
one could invoke the concept of multivalence in order to describe the voice of the
composer across his œuvre—the polyphony of registers and genres. But multivalent
criticism or analysis should not become a means of reinscribing the ideal of the
completed work or the Complete Works simply with the commonplace revela-
tion that they are internally diverse. We should remember, perhaps, that the many
intersecting levels of the Ninth extend “outwards,” beyond the individual work
and into musical culture more generally. The sound of the Turkish instruments
in the last measure is the sound of historical context permeating the symphony.
Rather than colonize the more distant corners of the work with analysis, therefore,
a multivalent approach shows that a supplement is always possible: however we
choose to sum up this music, there will always be something residual, something
Other—an outcast who steals weeping from the circle.
127. See Webster, “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” esp. pp.25–28 for multiva-
lence.
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 1̂ 3̂ 8̂

A voice! a voice! It was grave,

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“Not These Tones”

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musician Friedrich August Kanne—a confidant of Beethoven’s circle, as well as

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Wer ein holdes Weib errungen! Mische seinen Jubel ein!

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22. See Solomon, “Beethoven and Schiller,” Essays, pp.205–15.

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25. Sanders, “The Sonata-Form Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” p.58.

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To be sure, critics more commonly describe closure in Beethoven’s music as

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34. See Hinton’s summary in “Not Which Tones?” p.67.

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the final inclusion of the percussion instruments to symbolize a kind of synthesis,

The Heroic Style and Its Others

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By articulating the structure of Beethoven’s dominance—even in the context of

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The Absent Heroic Style

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selective conception of Beethoven’s symphonic writing. Dahlhaus himself observes

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68. Tyson, “Beethoven’s Heroic Phase.”

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81. Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, p.2.

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boundaries of any of Beethoven’s authentic style periods”—which is to imply that

88. Solomon, “The Creative Periods,” p.119.

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Resistance and Collaboration

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reductive kinds of analysis are paradoxically an appropriate means of engaging

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A: Friedrich Treitschke’s Die gute Nachricht—first performance

Overture by Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

B: Friedrich Treitschke’s Die Ehrenpforten—first performance

Overture by Hummel (same as overture to Die gute Nachricht).

Performances on 3 and 4 October 1815:

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somewhat marginal contemporaries—figures who nonetheless crop up regularly

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