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Theology, Music, and Modernity
Theology, Music, and
Modernity
Struggles for Freedom

Edited by
JEREMY BEGBIE
DA N I E L K . L . C H UA
M A R K U S R AT H EY

1
 1
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 List of Illustrations

1.1. Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–5).  15

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum © Photo Austrian Archives/Scala, Florence.

1.2. Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784).  16

Paris, Louvre © Photo Scala, Florence.

1.3. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787).  17

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art © The Metropolitan Museum
of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

1.4. Willibrord Joseph Mähler, Portrait of Beethoven with Lyre (c.1804).  21

Vienna, Wien Museum © Wien Museum.

1.5. Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons
(1789). Paris, Louvre © Photo Josse/Scala, Florence. 22
1.6. Example 1: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55,
first movement, bs. 1–8. 30
1.7. Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Eroica, Op. 55, first
movement, bs. 275–83. 32
2.1. Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 2, No. 2, second movement, bs. 58–68. 55
7.1. J.S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, 1. Chorus ‘Kommt, ihr Töchter’, mm. 1‒3. 151
7.2. J.S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, 65. Aria ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’,
mm. 1‒5. 152
7.3. J.S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, 34. Recitativo ‘Mein Jesus schweigt’,
mm. 1‒3. 154
7.4. J.S. Bach, St. Matthew Passion, 51. Recitativo ‘Erbarm es Gott’, mm. 1‒5. 155
9.1. Anon., Portrait of Richard Allen (1813).  213
Philadelphia, Mother Bethel AME Church © Portrait provided by the
Archives of Mother Bethel AME Church, Philadelphia; Margaret
Jerrido, Archivist.

10.1. Pavel Petrovich Svin’in, Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting

(1811‒c.1813).  224
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art © The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York; available under the creative commons licence: https://
creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
 List of Contributors

Imogen Adkins studied music at the University of York, and musicology and theology at
the University of Cambridge. Her PhD, overseen at Cambridge by Jeremy Begbie and Ben
Quash, brought musical perception into conversation with kenotic theology. She teaches
Philosophy and Religion at Stowe School and has written an interdisciplinary textbook
with Richard Bourne, entitled Full-Bodied Theology: Experience and Encounter
(Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2020). She is currently co-editing, with Stephen Garrett, the
T&T Clark Companion to Theology and the Arts.

Awet Andemicael is Associate Dean of Marquand Chapel and Assistant Professor (adj.) of
Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music. An award-winning
soprano, she has performed across North America, Europe, and Japan, and led music mas-
ter classes and workshops in the US and France. As a theological scholar, she has served as a
Visiting Lecturer at Yale University and the Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo
(DRC), and a Visiting Scholar at Stellenbosch University, South Africa and the School of
Theology, University of the South. Awet’s current research focuses on the second-century
theologian Irenaeus of Lyons as a resource for con­tem­por­ary theologies of glory and trans-
formation. Publications include essays in the Anglican Theological Review, Worship,
Pneuma, The Christian Century, and Forced Migration Review, as well as chapters in several
edited volumes. Awet holds degrees from Harvard University, UC Irvine, the University of
Notre Dame, and Yale University. For further information, visit: www.awetandemicael.com.

Charrise Barron is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music at Brown University.
She earned her PhD from Harvard University in African and African American studies,
with a secondary field of study in ethnomusicology. She subsequently held postdoctoral
fellowships at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) and at Brown University.
Additionally, she holds a Master of Divinity summa cum laude from Yale Divinity School,
where she was also a student in the ISM. While her research, writing, and presentations
have explored a range of topics in African American religion, music, and history, her cur-
rent book project centres on contemporary gospel music. She is a Forum for Theological
Exploration (FTE) Doctoral Fellowship alumna and a member of the Harvard University
Society of Horizons Scholars.

Jeremy Begbie is Thomas A. Langford Research Professor in Theology at Duke Divinity

School. He is also a Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated
Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. He is Founding Director
of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts and his books include A Peculiar Orthodoxy:
Reflections on Theology and the Arts, Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts: Bearing Witness
to the Triune God, Theology, Music and Time, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the
World of Music, and Music, Modernity, and God. He is an ordained minister of the Church
of England and a professionally trained musician who has performed extensively as a
x List of Contributors

pianist, oboist, and conductor. He tours widely as a speaker, specializing in multimedia

performance-lectures. Recent engagements have included preaching, speaking, and
­performing in universities and churches in North America, Hong Kong, and Australia.

Daniel K. L. Chua is the Mr and Mrs Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts and Professor
of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the
School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College,
Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London.
He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal. He is currently the
President of the International Musicological Society (2017–22). He has written widely on
music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on
Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, phil­oso­phy,
and theology.

John Hare is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He has
published a hundred articles and seven books, including The Moral Gap (Oxford 1996),
which develops an account of the need for God’s assistance in meeting the moral demand
of which God is the source, and God’s Command (Oxford 2015), which develops an
account of how God’s command is differently seen in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but
how all three faiths tie this command to moral obligation. His interests extend to ancient
philosophy, medieval Franciscan philosophy, Kant, Kierkegaard, con­tem­por­ary ethical
theory, the theory of the atonement, medical ethics, and international relations (he has
worked in a teaching hospital and for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives) and aesthetics (he is a published composer of church music). He received
his BA from Oxford, and his PhD from Princeton, and he has taught at Lehigh University,
University of Michigan, and Calvin College.

Julian Johnson is Regius Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London,

having formerly been Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Anne’s College, Oxford University
(2001–7) and Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex (1992–2001). In the early part
of his career he combined research into musical aesthetics with working as a professional
composer, an experience that continues to shape his thinking. His writing on music his-
tory has focused particularly on musical modernism but he has published widely on
music from Beethoven through to contemporary music, in relation to phil­oso­phy, litera-
ture, visual art and landscape. His books include Out of Time: Music and the Making of
Modernity (OUP, 2015) and After Debussy. Music, Language, and the Margins of Philosophy
(OUP, 2019).

Patrick McCreless is Professor of Music, and formerly Chair of the Yale Department of
Music (2001–7). Previously he taught at the Eastman School of Music, the University of
Chicago (visiting appointment), and the University of Texas at Austin. His early work was
on Wagner and the chromatic music of the later nineteenth century. He has also published
on the history of music theory, rhetoric and music, performance and analysis, musical ges-
ture, and the music of Shostakovich, Elgar, and Nielsen. He is a former President of the
American Society for Music Theory, and was the keynote speaker at its annual conference
in 2010. His work in sacred music is not scholarly, but practical: he has been Music
Director and Organist at the First Presbyterian Church of New Haven since 1999.
 List of Contributors xi

Michael O’Connor, STL (Gregorian), D.Phil (Oxford), is Associate Professor, Teaching

Stream, at the University of St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, where he
teaches in the Christianity and Culture programme. A former Warden of the Royal School
of Church Music (RSCM), he is a Board member of RSCM Canada. His scholarship concerns
early modern Christian intellectual culture, and contemporary debates on music, ritual,
and liturgy. He is author of Cajetan’s Biblical Commentaries (Brill 2017) and co-editor, with
Hyun-Ah Kim and Christina Labriola, of Music, Theology, and Justice (Lexington 2017).
He is active as a choral conductor and occasional composer.

Markus Rathey is the Robert S. Tangeman Professor in the Practice of Music History at
Yale University. His research focuses on the relationship between music, religion, and pol­
it­ics during the Enlightenment. His books include a study on C.P.E. Bach’s political com­
pos­itions (Olms 2009), an introduction to J.S. Bach’s Major Vocal Works (Yale University
Press 2016) and an extensive study of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Oxford University Press
2016). He has published numerous articles on music by Bach, Mozart, Schütz, Buxtehude,
and their contemporaries in scholarly journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Early
Music, Early Music History, Journal of Musicological Research, Bach-Jahrbuch, and Schütz-
Jahrbuch. He frequently serves as a commentator on J.S. Bach and on the relationship of
music and religion for a number of major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal,
The Economist, BBC Radio, and Swedish Radio. Rathey is President of the American Bach
Society and past President of the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship. He currently
serves on the editorial boards of BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and
the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.

Stephen Rumph is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington. He has

published two books with the University of California Press, Beethoven after Napoleon:
Political Romanticism in the Late Works (2004) and Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics
(2011). He is completing The Fauré Song Cycles, also for UC Press, and is co-editing Fauré
Studies for Cambridge University Press. He has published articles on Beethoven, Mozart,
Fauré, eighteenth-century semiotics, and the musical philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch
in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Music Association,
Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and other journals, and has chapters in Mozart
Studies 2 and Mozart in Context (CUP) and the Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. Stephen
also performs regularly as a lyric tenor in opera, concert, and oratorio.

Chris Tilling is Graduate Tutor and Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies at
St Mellitus College. Chris co-authored How God Became Jesus (Zondervan, 2014) and is
the editor of Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul (Cascade, 2014). Chris’s first book,
the critically acclaimed Paul’s Divine Christology (Mohr Siebeck, 2012), is now republished
by Eerdmans (2015). He is presently co-editing the T&T Clark Companion to Christology
(forthcoming, 2019), and writing the NICNT commentary on the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians (Eerdmans, forthcoming). Chris has published numerous art­icles on topics
relating to the Apostle Paul, Christology, justification, the historical Jesus, Paul S. Fiddes,
Karl Barth, the theology of Hans Küng, and more besides. He has appeared as a DVD
media figure for Biologos, GCI, and HTB’s School of Theology and he co-hosts the popular
podcast, OnScript. He enjoys playing golf and chess, and now works as an editor for a
couple of chess publishing houses. He is married to Anja and has two children.
xii List of Contributors

R. Larry Todd is Arts & Sciences Professor at Duke University. His books include
Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, ‘likely to be the standard biography for a long time to come’
(New York Review of Books), and Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, which received the
Slonimsky Prize. A Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, he edits the Master Musician
Series (OUP). He studied piano at the Yale School of Music and with Lilian Kallir, and
issued with Nancy Green the cello works of the Mendelssohns (JRI Recordings). He has
recently co-authored with Marc Moskovitz Beethoven’s Cello: Five Revolutionary Sonatas
and Their World.

Bettina Varwig is University Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge and Fellow
of Emmanuel College. Previously she was Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College
London, where she also took her undergraduate degree. She gained her doctorate from
Harvard University in 2006, and subsequently held a Fellowship by Examination at
Magdalen College, Oxford (2005–8) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the
University of Cambridge (2008–9). Her research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century German musical culture, considering issues of musical performance and listening,
musical expression, and histories of the body and the emotions. Her monograph Histories
of Heinrich Schütz appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2011. Her work was
awarded the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association in 2013 and the
William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society in 2016.

Norman Wirzba is Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke

Divinity School and a Senior Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He pursues
research and teaching interests at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and
agrarian and environmental studies. He has published The Paradise of God: Renewing
Religion in an Ecological Age, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and
Delight, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity, From Nature to Creation: A
Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (with Fred Bahnson) Making
Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation, and Food and Faith: A Theology
of Eating. He is currently directing a multi-year project on rethinking academic disciplines
in light of the Anthropocene.
 Introduction
Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey

What can the world of music bring to a theological reading of modernity? It was
with that question in view that a group of theologians, musicologists, and music
theorists met in 2015 under the auspices of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the
Arts at Duke University, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. We had little
idea in advance of what the meeting would yield, but we soon realized that the
benefits were going to be considerable. We were being pressed beyond our own
comfort zones to think about familiar issues in fresh and highly fruitful ways, and
we discovered multiple synergies we could never have predicted. A project began
to take shape, and in due course was given the name ‘Theology, Music, and
Modernity’ (TMM). We gathered for three major meetings over four years, and
shared each other’s work for comment, encouragement, and criticism. We cor­res­
pond­ed regularly and met in smaller groups when needed. The essays which fol­
low are the result of those rich and fecund conversations.
We were not, of course, starting from scratch. The interplay between Christian
theology and music has become increasingly lively and energetic in recent years,
issuing forth in a growing stream of conferences, monographs, articles, and
essays. It has taken a variety of forms. For example, there have been a number of
attempts to adopt a theological perspective oriented toward the Scriptures, con­
fessions, and traditions of the Church, and ask how this wisdom might ‘play out’
(or has already been played out) in the making and reception of music.1 Some of
this writing is focused on particular musicians and their output, or specific
mu­sic­al periods,2 others on more general issues (e.g. the theology of song, music
in worship).3 Others, while still operating within a Christian orientation, have

1 For example, Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1999);
Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Books, 2007).
2 For example, Andrew Shenton, Messiaen the Theologian (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Markus
Rathey, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016). Chiara Bertoglio, Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of
the Sixteenth Century (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017).
3 For example, Michael O’Connor, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, in Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology
and Music, ed. by Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), pp.
434–53; Gordon Graham, ‘The Worship of God and the Quest of the Spirit: “Contemporary” versus

Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey, Introduction In: Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles
for Freedom. Edited by: Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846550.003.0001
2 Begbie, Chua, and Rathey

moved in the other direction, from music back to theology: how might the
resources of music fruitfully enrich theological inquiry, help theologians do their
job more effectively, perhaps even free them from some of their worst bad habits?4
Still others in the field find themselves motivated by cultural and apologetic con­
cerns. For example, many claim to hear ‘rumours of transcendence’ in the world
of music, and often in music far beyond the Church or any overtly Christian set­
ting. This, it is said, provides a striking opportunity for creative dialogue with a
culture often resistant to the overt articulation of the Christian faith.5 Likewise,
some have sought to show that music with no explicit theological resonances can
nonetheless give voice to searching questions, deeply-felt existential drives and
passions that call out for theological responses.6
TMM overlaps with all of these (and other) approaches. But the project has
quite specific foci and interests in view. As we signalled at the start, the central
question being posed is: how can the study of music contribute to the theological
reading of modernity? It is a question that has received remarkably little attention
to date. Among the leading scholarly studies of the theological trajectories of
modernity—many of which we draw upon in this volume—music is largely
overlooked. As one might expect, the influence of the natural sciences receives
enormous attention, along with perspectives from philosophy, economics, politics,
and sociology. Of the arts, fictional literature and poetry may make brief illustra­
tive appearances, visual art may be given a passing glance, perhaps even film. But
music—especially music without lyrics or specific textual references—is con­
spicu­ous by its absence. Central to the essays in this book is the conviction that
the making and hearing of music, and the discourses surrounding music, can
bear their own kind of witness to the theological dynamics that have character­
ized and shaped modernity, and especially with respect to modernity’s ambivalent
relation to the God of the Christian faith. Music, that is to say, can provide a dis­
tinctive ‘theological performance’ of some of modernity’s most characteristic
impulses and orientations.
This should not strike us as a particularly strange idea. Music has, after all,
been ubiquitous in modern social life, and of considerable importance in framing
and articulating ethnic, political, and economic identities. It has been intimately

“Traditional” Church Music’, in God’s Song and Music’s Meanings: Theology, Liturgy, and Musicology in
Dialogue, ed. by Ben Quash, James Hawkey, and Vernon White (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 81–93.

4 For example, Alastair Borthwick, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti, ‘Musical Time and
Eschatology’, in Resonant Witness, pp. 271–94; Chelle Stearns, Handling Dissonance (Eugene, OR:
Pickwick Publications, 2019); Clive Marsh, Cinema and Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology
(Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2004); Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5 See, for example, David Brown and Gavin Hopps, The Extravagance of Music (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Férdia Stone-Davis, Music and Transcendence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
6 Clive Marsh and Vaughan Roberts, Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our Souls (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012); Tom Beaudoin (ed.), Secular Music and Sacred Theology
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014).
 Introduction 3

intertwined with many of modernity’s most significant ideological upheavals

and dilemmas, and its practitioners have at various times been pivotal agents of
cultural change. The modern age has generated a vast corpus of scholarly writing
on music, much of it engaging with some of life’s most momentous challenges.
Moreover, given the pervasiveness of Christianity in shaping the language and
culture of the modern West, theological issues of one sort or another have been
heavily implicated in these musical-cultural interactions, even when not identi­
fied and acknowledged as such.
We have just spoken of music’s ‘own kind of witness’. This implies that music is
possessed of a certain irreducibility. This may seem remarkably obvious, but in an
age when reductionisms of all sorts are rife, it is worth underlining. Scott
Burnham summarizes the point well:

precisely because music is musical, it can speak to us of things that are not
strictly musical. This is how we hear music speak: not by reducing it to some
other set of circumstances—music is simply not reducible to any other circum­
stances, whether cultural, historical, biographical, or sexual, and any attempt to
make it so has only a cartoonish reality—but by allowing it the opacity of its own
voice, and then engaging that voice in ways that reflect both its presence and our
own, much as we allow others a voice when we converse with them.7

When those whose business it is to allow music ‘the opacity of its own voice’ find
themselves meeting with theologians, there are inevitably going to be pointed and
awkward questions which they ask of each other, and this will in turn often
expose weaknesses and fragilities on both sides. In the long run, however, this is
bound to be beneficial—as we have repeatedly found in our conversations. For
the theologian: by engaging with the music and musical discourses of modernity,
some of the most intractable theological dilemmas and pathologies of our time
are laid bare, pathologies that have all too often disfigured modern theological
writing. What is more, in some cases the world of music can provide means by
which those very pathologies can be circumvented, perhaps even met and healed.
For those involved in the creation and understanding of music: by its very nature,
theology will press us to penetrate down to the fundamental assumptions and
presuppositions that shape a cultural phenomenon such as music, along with its
theoretical disciplines. Facing these can only profit musicians, musicologists, and
music theorists in the long term. And again, the benefits can go further: some of
the most troublesome aporias and dilemmas surrounding music begin to look far
less intractable when viewed theologically. All of this we hope will be clear from
the essays in this collection.

7 Scott Burnham, How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), p. 215.
4 Begbie, Chua, and Rathey

I. Modernity and Freedom

Inevitably, we have had to work with at least a minimal understanding of the

much contested word ‘modernity’. For our purposes, the term is taken as referring
primarily to a cluster of norms and mindsets inextricably bound up with social
and cultural practices, that include, for example, particularly strong and prom­in­
ent concepts of autonomy and human freedom; the notion of humans as ‘disem­
bedded’ from, and standing over against, their physical environment; linear
understandings of time and associated notions of progress; the privileging of a
distinctive form of reasoning allied to bureaucratization, technological mastery, and
industrialization; and an inclination to favour post-religious, even anti-theological
‘metanarratives’.8 Many of these are especially associated with the eighteenth-
century intellectual current known as the Enlightenment, but they are by no
means limited to that particular movement. Needless to say, modernity can be
(and often is) understood in a related, secondary sense as naming a chronological
phase or period—as in ‘the modern era’. There has been much dispute about
where the border between pre-modern and modern should be taken as lying, and
even more about where the so-called ‘post-modern’ or ‘late modern’ might begin.
Here it is enough to say that the decisive changes of outlook evident with the
advent of the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, carried
­forward in the sixteenth-century Reformation, can usefully be interpreted as
marking a shift from pre-modern to modern.
In what follows, we will deploy the term ‘modernity’ in both these senses,
depending on the context. In any case, among the most far-reaching of the devel­
opments associated with modernity is a distinctive imagination of freedom, and
this is the major reason for choosing freedom as a coordinating theme for this
book. Few passions characterize modernity more potently than humanity’s
as­pir­ation to freedom—and freedom of a very particular kind. As David Bentley
Hart puts it,

the one grand cultural and historical narrative we as modern persons tend to
share, and that most sharply distinguishes us from a premodern vision of
­society, is the story of liberation, the story of the ascent of the individual out of
the shadows of hierarchy and subsidiary identity into the light of full recognition,
dignity, and autonomy.9

8 As such, modernity should be clearly distinguished from what music historians speak of as ‘mod­
ernism’, a stylistic term used of music that first took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, associated especially with innovative figures such as Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).
9 David Bentley Hart, ‘Christianity, Modernity, and Freedom’, in Tradition and Modernity: Christian
and Muslim Perspectives, ed. by David Marshall (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
2012), pp. 67–78 (p. 67).
 Introduction 5

In addition to its centrality to modernity, there are two related reasons why this
concentration on freedom is especially appropriate for our purposes. First, as
many studies have shown, the ways in which freedom is conceived in modernity
have been inextricably linked to modernity’s negotiation of the Christian God. In
intellectual history, divine and human freedom have persistently implicated each
other, and perhaps never more so than in the last five hundred years. Debates
continue to swirl around the question of the theological origins of the modern
imagination of freedom, but few would deny that a theological genealogy is cru­
cial to its rise. Second, music—both in theory and practice—has been deeply
intertwined with the growth and elaboration of modern conceptions of freedom,
as will become abundantly clear in the essays that follow.
Although we have just spoken of a ‘modern imagination of freedom’, it comes
in numerous versions. Common to most, however, is a stress on freedom from, on
being liberated from some form of constraint (tradition, the material world, our
physical nature, other humans, or whatever), and with this often goes the assump­
tion that freedom reaches its highest expression in the unfettered choice of the
individual. As we will discover, music has often been enlisted to ‘sound out’ this
kind of vision, and perhaps, in some cases, to shape and advance it. What needs
to be borne in mind here is how much it diverges from most classical and medi­
eval conceptions. In earlier, pre-modern traditions, freedom makes little sense
without a telos or end in view (freedom for): freedom names the power that
en­ables an entity to realize its true being, which in turn presupposes some kind of
transcendent good or end to which that entity is properly directed. In this out­
look, ‘We are free . . . not because we can choose but only when we choose well.’10
The capacity to choose lies not at the centre of what it is to be free, but serves
a much higher and richer end: the actualization of one’s true end and purpose, a
purpose inseparable from our relation to others—and, supremely, to God. As a
number of our essayists make clear, this alternative vision resonates deeply with
the Scriptural texts of the Christian faith, in contrast to the individualist and
negative notions of liberty that have come to dominate so many modern discus­
sions. Furthermore, as we shall see, music can offer its own kind of witness to
these richer theological perspectives; musicians and writers on music have by no
means always been captive to modernity’s more problematic traits.
To keep the discussion manageable, historically, we have chosen to concentrate
on the years 1740–1850, and this for a number reasons. First, to state the obvious,
this was a period when freedom—especially religious and political freedom—
became a burning matter of concern in virtually every stratum of European society,
as well as a focus of intense philosophical labour (Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
being perhaps the most towering figure in this respect). Second, during these
years we witness considerable upheavals in the world of theology, involving an

10 Bentley Hart, ‘Christianity, Modernity, and Freedom’, p. 68.

6 Begbie, Chua, and Rathey

often severe questioning of the central tenets of the Christian faith, not only in
the Church, but also in newly developing scholarly circles (the founding of the
University of Berlin in 1810 proved to be one of the most important events of the
nineteenth century for virtually every field of enquiry). And many of these
theological upheavals were bound up with influential emerging philosophies of
freedom. Third, the period also sees no less momentous developments in the
world of music. It covers the passage from what historians have come to call the
Baroque, through the Classical, and eventually to the Romantic style. These
innovations and transformations in European music did not occur in a vacuum,
but—as we have already noted—were interwoven with (among other things) the
profound negotiations of freedom that marked the social and cultural life of the
time. They were also steeped in moral and metaphysical assumptions that by their
very nature were theologically freighted. Finally, we have chosen 1740 rather than
1750 because, from a musical-historical perspective, the year 1740 roughly marks
the transition from the Baroque to the pre-Classical era. While older historiogra­
phies have often chosen 1750 as a cut-off date (coinciding with the death of
J.S. Bach in that year), more recent work has located the shift rather around 1740,
with the music of composers such as C.P.E. Bach, Carl Heinrich Graun, Johann
Joachim Quantz, and Franz Benda.

II. Freedom, Scripture, and New Creation

Theologically, the TMM project has been marked by a number of distinctive

orien­ta­tions—in the belief that more is learned by deliberately limiting and focus­
ing a conversation like this than by attempting to be comprehensive. (This does
not of course preclude other fruitful theological approaches.) The reader will find
frequent recourse to the Christian scriptures. Curiously, many theological read­
ings of modernity pay scant attention to the normative texts of Christianity. There
seems to be a reluctance to consider not only the cultural impact of developments
in biblical interpretation that mark the modern age, but also the benefits of
attending afresh to particular texts without being wholly bound to the apparatus
of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment hermeneutics. In this collection, the
reader will find a number of attempts to show what a ‘Scriptural imagination’
might contribute to a fresh reading of modernity (in the company of musicians),
one that includes, but goes beyond, historical commentary and analysis, and in so
doing opens up fresh and perhaps more culturally hopeful possibilities for the future.
In particular, the theological orientation of TMM is toward the concept of
‘New Creation’, a major current in the writings of St Paul, but implicit in virtually
every book of the New Testament, and deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible.11 Not

11 Key texts include Is. 65:17; Gal. 6:11–18; 2 Cor. 5:11–21; Rom. 8:18–25. For discussion, see, for
example, Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (New York: HarperCollins, 2007);
T. Ryan Jackson, New Creation in Paul’s Letters: A Study of the Historical and Social Setting of a Pauline
 Introduction 7

every contributor to this collection explicitly cites the theme, but it informs the
overall shape and orientation of much of what follows. The New Creation, in bib­
lical terms, speaks of God’s action to heal and re-make the created order. It c­ entres
on the person of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom God’s future is believed to have
­broken into the present. The bodily raising of the crucified Jesus from the dead is
the supreme act of the New Creation, a transformation of created matter in the
midst of history, enacting a promise of the ultimate re-creation of all things. What
has happened in Christ, according to this outlook, has made possible a new life
for humans in the present, a radical renewal of human nature that anticipates its
final and complete renewal beyond death. Through the agency of God’s Spirit,
this new life, inherently relational and corporate, can begin now: a New Creation
in the midst of the old.
The New Creation theme is especially apt for our purposes. It is remarkably
comprehensive and synthetic—gathering together a wide range of key motifs in
biblical and classical Christian faith. It is geared towards the future, thus pressing
one to think about ends—not least, the ends (and end) of human freedom. It is an
inherently communal concept, countering the tendency to let our thinking about
freedom circulate around the unimpeded agency of the individual. It has obvious
resonances with artistic creativity. Not least, it goes very naturally with a host of
musical procedures—the transformation of themes, resolution of dissonance, and
so forth.

III. ‘Secularization’?

One further matter needs to be highlighted. We are dealing with a period that has
often been associated with the phenomenon of ‘secularization’. This has received
enormous attention in scholarly engagements with modernity, and the debate
about its nature, its theological origins, and significance are hotly contested—as
are the numerous terms associated with it (‘disenchantment’, ‘secularity’, and so
on). Most are agreed that the social processes of differentiation, individualization,
and privatization have radically shaped the form and outlooks of modern so­ci­
eties, encouraging, among other things, a waning influence of religion in shaping
public affairs (as evinced, for example, in the notion of the ‘secular state’). On the
musical front, modernity has been marked by a widespread emancipation of
music from religious patronage, and in recent times, a reluctance on the part of
‘mainstream’ composers to deal with overtly religious subject-matter. Today,
matters of religion and theology are rarely engaged with in any depth by
­mu­sic­ol­ogists and music theorists, except perhaps when historical contextualization
is required. Referring to our contemporary climate, Charles Taylor has written of

Concept (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Mark D. Owens, As It Was in the Beginning: An Intertextual
Analysis of New Creation in Galatians, 2 Corinthians, and Ephesians (Eugene, OR: Pickwick
Publications, 2015).
8 Begbie, Chua, and Rathey

the emergence of what he calls the ‘the immanent frame’, when ‘we come to
understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order’,12
with no need to refer to any kind of transcendent power or presence. It is not hard
to find extreme versions of this, closed form of ‘secularity’ that are hostile to reli­
gion of any kind.
On the other hand, there are some secularization narratives that are hard to
sustain, and this needs to be borne in mind in what follows. The notion that the
advances of industrial modernization inevitably issue in the progressive decline
(and eventual disappearance) of religion is now widely regarded as untenable.
Unfortunately, narratives of this kind have led many to overlook significant mani­
festations of religion in unexpected places. They have also wrongly implied that
we are dealing with some steady trajectory towards stark unbelief rather than
with something much more complex: a pluralization and re-formation of reli­
gious commitments. Certainly, in the period we are examining, the kind of stark
naturalism of the sort that denies the presence, activity, or even existence of any
extra-worldly reality, is relatively rare. (The French Enlightenment and the
­anti-clerical French Revolution are often wrongly taken as standing for the
Enlightenment as a whole.) Indeed, there is ample evidence of widespread and
astonishing religious vitality as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries take
their course, even if such vitality was highly diverse, and by no means always rec­
ognizably Christian. What is more, there is also considerable evidence of the arts
playing crucial roles in generating and furthering this ferment: this can range
from offering periodic compensation for a felt loss of divine transcendence,
through to providing a surrogate religion, complete with an over-arching meta­
physics. Music—as we will be reminded especially in Part II—could readily be
enlisted to play a quasi-religious role. It was often invoked for its seemingly
immense theological potency in a world bewitched by the ascendance of scien­
tific, instrumental reason. What kind of weight we give to these accounts of music
depends very much on the kind of theology we bring to the table. But that music
did function in this way is undeniable, and much can be learned from this about
the roles music might be playing, or could play in our own day.

IV. Arrangement

The book is arranged into four parts, each taking a particular musical work or
corpus of music as its major reference point. In Part I, the theme of ‘revolutionary
freedom’ is taken up and explored, with particular reference to Beethoven’s Eroica
symphony. Part II takes its cue from the journey of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion out
of its original church setting in 1727 to the concert hall of Berlin’s Singakademie

12 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 543.
 Introduction 9

in 1829, examining the way in which fundamentally different concepts of free­

dom were implicated. Attention turns in Part III to the theme of justice, in par­
ticular to the social and political freedom embodied in the life and music of
Richard Allen (1760–1831), founder of the African American Methodist Church,
the first independent black denomination in the United States. And in the final
group of essays, Part IV, with reference to Haydn’s Creation, the focus is on music’s
relation to language, specifically on the extent to which music can mediate a dis­
tinctive kind of freedom, one which an over-reliance on certain kinds of language
can easily eclipse.

*
Our debts of gratitude are immense. TMM has been generously funded by the
McDonald Agape Foundation, whose vision for the project has been unstinting
from start to finish. The Foundation’s Vice Chairman and President, Peter
McDonald, has attended all of our main meetings and been consistently support­
ive. Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music was kind enough to host several of the gather­
ings as well as provide generous financial support. We are especially grateful to its
Director, Martin Jean, for his probing questions and gracious hospitality, as well
as to Kristen Forman for her superlative administration. At Duke, the Associate
Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts, Daniel Train, has provided
wise advice on numerous fronts, along with considerable administrative as­sist­
ance, and Hillary Train has handled numerous practical matters with her custom­
ary grace and diplomacy. TMM is part of a larger project, ‘Theology, Modernity,
and the Arts’, whose Steering Group has offered valuable advice at every stage. In
particular, the work of poet Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, has proved
crucial for inspiring the overall shape of the enterprise. We would also like to
thank Tom Perridge of Oxford University Press for his support at every stage of
the publishing process. Finally, Alice Soulieux-Evans and Louise McCray have
taken on the lion’s share of the editing and formatting: without their endless
patience and determination this book would never have seen the light of day.

Jeremy Begbie
Daniel K. L. Chua
Markus Rathey

Bibliography

Beaudoin, Tom (ed.), Secular Music and Sacred Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical
Press, 2014).
Begbie, Jeremy, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
10 Begbie, Chua, and Rathey

Begbie, Jeremy, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007).
Bentley Hart, David, ‘Christianity, Modernity, and Freedom’, in Tradition and
Modernity: Christian and Muslim Perspectives, ed. by David Marshall (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), pp. 67–78.
Bertoglio, Chiara, Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the
Sixteenth Century (Berlin; Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017).
Blackwell, Albert L., The Sacred in Music (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1999).
Borthwick, Alastair, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti, ‘Musical Time and Eschatology’,
in Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology and Music, ed. by Jeremy S. Begbie and
Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 271–94.
Brown, David and Gavin Hopps, The Extravagance of Music (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
Burnham, Scott, How Music Matters: Poetic Content Revisited (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
Graham, Gordon, ‘The Worship of God and the Quest of the Spirit: “Contemporary”
versus “Traditional” Church Music’, in God’s Song and Music’s Meanings: Theology,
Liturgy, and Musicology in Dialogue, ed. by Ben Quash, James Hawkey, and Vernon
White (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 81–93.
Hays, Richard B., The Moral Vision of the New Testament (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007).
Jackson, T. Ryan, New Creation in Paul’s Letters: A Study of the Historical and Social
Setting of a Pauline (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
Marsh, Clive, Cinema and Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology (Milton Keynes:
Paternoster Press, 2004).
Marsh, Clive, and Vaughan Roberts, Personal Jesus: How Popular Music Shapes Our
Souls (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012).
O’Connor, Michael, ‘The Singing of Jesus’, in Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology and
Music, ed. by Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2011), pp. 434–53.
Owens, Mark D., As It Was in the Beginning: An Intertextual Analysis of New Creation in
Galatians, 2 Corinthians, and Ephesians (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015).
Rathey, Markus, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Shenton, Andrew, Messiaen the Theologian (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
Stearns, Chelle, Handling Dissonance (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019).
Stone-Davis, Férdia, Music and Transcendence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
 PART I
REVOLU T IONA RY F R E E D OM

Few composers are associated with human freedom as closely as Ludwig van
Beethoven (1770–1827). His third Eroica Symphony, in particular, has been
widely linked to a distinctively modern notion of freedom (inspired especially by
the French Revolution): the freedom of the ‘heroic’ individual subject driven by
an indomitable will. It is hard to deny the enormous influence of such a notion in
almost every sphere of culture, even though it appears in many forms. It has had a
significant part in shaping modern Christianity, but in much recent writing has
come under heavy theological fire, especially on biblical grounds. In his opening
essay, Daniel Chua gives an account of ‘revolutionary’ freedom as a potent con-
fluence of agency and style, one that was given philosophical impetus by the work
of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and enacted in the epic struggles of Beethoven’s
third symphony. Chua views this autonomous, non-relational freedom as, in
effect, a secularized theology, and contrasts it sharply with the freedom of the
‘new creation’ of the New Testament (even though he detects a ‘twist’ in the Eroica
that gestures towards a far more gracious, love-oriented notion of freedom). John
Hare sees Kant in a rather more sympathetic light, and explores Beethoven in
relation to the philosopher’s theologically grounded account of the sublime, a
concept rather more complex than is often thought, and integrally bound up with
Kant’s understanding of freedom. Hare contends that in Beethoven’s ‘A Major
Piano Sonata’ of 1796, as well as in the first movement of the Eroica, we can dis-
cern musical dynamics that are highly consonant with what Hare calls Kant’s
‘optimistic’ sublime. Chris Tilling presents an account of freedom in the thought
of Paul the Apostle that contrasts with the ‘revolutionary’ tradition described by
Chua. For Paul, authentic human freedom centres not on the capacities of the
singular human will, but on what has been made possible through God’s climactic
work in the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. To be free is not so much
to assert as to receive; more fully: to participate by the Spirit in Christ’s own risen
life, the one in whom the ‘dark mesh of evil powers’ that enslave us have been
12 Revolutionary Freedom

decisively defeated. Such participation means inhabiting a new realm—a ‘new

creation’. This is inherently relational and communal: it entails belonging to
Spirit-formed communities characterized by an other-directed love rooted,
ul­tim­ate­ly, in the triunity of God. Tilling goes on to reflect on the implications of
this vision for a theological-musical engagement with modernity. Taking her cues
from the other three essayists, Imogen Adkins exposes the zero-sum thinking
(‘the more of God, the less of us’) that she believes pervades much discussion of
freedom in modernity, and especially when the ‘revolutionary’ model is in view.
She argues that the aural phenomenon of simultaneously sounding tones offers a
powerful means of re-imagining freedom, opening up the relational character of
freedom of the sort outlined by Tilling. In particular, she proposes that, under-
stood from this perspective, music can enhance our understanding of Christ’s
expression of divine freedom as a ‘kenotic’ emptying of self for the sake of
the other.
It is clear that the main protagonists in this account of revolutionary freedom—
Beethoven and Kant—left an ambivalent legacy. On the one hand, they (and their
works) can be regarded as enacting a revolutionary fervour, commending a kind
of freedom uprooted from Christian theological soil; on the other hand, they can
be regarded as defenders of the faith, attempting to modernize theological con-
cepts. (The Eroica itself betrays such an ambivalence, with Napoleon’s name on
the dedication page of the autograph score scratched out by Beethoven.) These
essays are embedded in the interplay of this complex situation. They may not
resolve all the tensions, but they do offer a musico-theological diagnosis of
modern freedom, and the possibility of re-imagining freedom’s most basic shape.
 1
Revolutionary Freedom
An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven
Daniel K. L. Chua

This chapter defines the freedom of the French Revolution through its aesthetics
because this ugliest of freedoms was also one of the most beautiful. The pande-
monium it caused was directed by the most disciplined principles of form. To
define revolutionary freedom through its images and sounds is therefore to
understand the fabrication of the aesthetic as an authentic mode of being that still
defines what human freedom means today.

I. Im-Posing

The French Revolution (1789) replaced an absolute monarch with what

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) called ‘Absolute Freedom’. It was the most abstract of
freedoms, a general will that wreaked havoc in obedience to a principle as indif-
ferent as ‘chopping the head of a cabbage’.1 Its cutting-edge virtues were terrifying,
meting out death equally and liberally under its sovereign rule. Despite its
effect, such sovereignty, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) noted, could not be
represented.2 Or rather, it was beyond representation; absolute freedom was
sublime in the magnitude of its historical task and ineffable as a universal force.
Its identity could not be pinned down by the pockets of gratuitous violence that
dotted the landscape of France because there was no human perspective to view
the revolutionary spectacle on the vast stage of history. And yet it had to be
staged. Like the absolute body of Louis XIV, absolute freedom needed a body to
enter the social imaginary.3 Its abstract, metaphysical ideals had to be dressed up

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977),
p. 360 (§590).
2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. by
G.D.H. Cole (London: Dent, 1993), p. 266.
3 See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (London and Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004).

Daniel K. L. Chua, Revolutionary Freedom: An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven In: Theology, Music, and
Modernity: Struggles for Freedom. Edited by: Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K. L. Chua, and Markus Rathey, Oxford University
Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846550.003.0002
14 Daniel K. L. Chua

and turned into a theatrical act, with gestures as ceremonial as the Catholicism it
denounced and as grandiose of the grand operas of the ancien régime. And so it was
that absolute freedom became a style, or, more precisely, a fashion icon that gave a
glimpse of its transcendence through the chaos that followed its wake. The unrep-
resentable became a pose to be adopted by its disciples, a revolutionary act that
was as aesthetic as it was political, and as beautiful as it was terrifying.4
But it would be a mistake to regard it as merely a pose or only a style, as if the
Revolution dressed up liberty with a beauty spot, for the late eighteenth century
was the age of style itself. The neoclassicism that shaped the period was not sim-
ply a matter of appropriating the classical models of the past as a façade, but
staged its style as the very substance of experience.5 It was what Foucault would
call a ‘technology of the self ’, enabling individuals to reconfigure themselves as
objects of knowledge.6 Style was identity. The pose had agency. And freedom—
the identity of the revolutionary agent—was the perfect pose and the ultimate
style. In this sense, the pose was less a fashion statement than a secularized
­the­ology—an imitation of Christ—except that it was no longer Christ, but the
­revolutionary hero who, in modelling freedom, became the image for humanity.
Just as the Christian had to ‘put on Christ’, the revolutionary hero had to put on
­freedom as ‘a new creation’. Akin to a type of spiritual armour, freedom was a
permanent identity that hardened as the exoskeleton of the new man, so that his
style was more than just skin deep: it was structural. The external pose spoke of
an inner power for a spiritual battle against the forces of the world.7
What did this revolutionary pose look like? Ironically, the model for such a
heightened sense of historical progress was more ancient that the ancien régime:
the Roman Republic was the neoclassical style designed to capture the spirit of
modern freedom. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was the master of depicting
these revolutionary poses. He animated on canvas the virile, impenetrable bodies
of heroes, striking perfectly structured poses of liberty: these men were lean,
mean statuesque machines. Take Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–5), for
ex­ample (Figure 1.1).

4 See Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French
Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
5 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et experiences du temps (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004);
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004). The period witnessed a new sense of time, a struggle between the
experience and expectations of progress; the stylization of the past was not so much nostalgia, as an
attempt to make present a new identity that could enact this new sense of history.
6 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988). Initially these technologies of self-intervention were religious practices,
but in the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath, these practices were modernized and
secularized in aesthetic terms, as this chapter will make clear. On music as a ‘technology of the self ’,
see Tia De Nora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7 See Rom. 13:14, Gal. 3:27, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 15

Figure 1.1 Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801–5).

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum © Photo Austrian Archives/Scala, Florence.

Frozen almost in mid-air, Bonaparte rears his stallion at speed, as if flying with
the wind across the treacherous terrain; he poses with a balletic grace that
speaks of total mastery. His troops, in contrast, appear more pedestrian, as if
down-trodden by the hooves of the hero’s horse in the foreground, their boots
seemingly clogged up by the ground on which they trudge, and their bodies swal-
lowed up by the rocks that loom around them. They are the moving backdrop of
circumstance for the Napoleonic ‘still’ to transcend as a heroic monument.
Or take the three brothers in the Oath of the Horatii (1784); they swear their
allegiance unto death not so much with words as with their taut angular bodies
16 Daniel K. L. Chua

Figure 1.2 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784).

Paris, Louvre © Photo Scala, Florence.

standing erect, displaying an architectural indifference that contrasts with the

collapsed curves of women swooning in the corner as if their reaction represented
a by-gone aesthetic of sentimentality (Figure 1.2).
Revolutionary freedom defines itself as the unmoved against the moved; it is
about action as opposed to re-action, masculine resolve as opposed feminine
­feeling. It is a freedom that divides through discipline, defining itself by excluding
the weak and unprincipled. This binary contrast is sharply delineated in David’s
portrayal of The Death of Socrates (1787). Freedom is an internal scaffold within
the philosopher’s body; it tightens his torso with a stoical force that sits the
­philosopher up at right-angles to the swirling commotion around him. The heroic
will is staged without movement. The blind e-motion of his disciples, who can
barely watch the act of self-execution, contrast with the motionless gaze of their
master as he takes the cup of death for a higher cause. Socrates points out this
cause with his left hand (Figure 1.3), gesturing to some unrepresentable will ‘up
there’ that organizes an invisible will within his body.
All these poses are predicated on a contradiction. Revolutionary freedom
flaunts its power through a kind of heroic posturing that, for all its death-defying
antics, is an act of monumental rigor mortis; the pose is a ‘still’, designed to cap-
ture the immortal moment in which the hero changes the course of the world. In
seizing history, he seizes up as a perfect form that immortalizes his act in the
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 17

Figure 1.3 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787).

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala,
Florence.

fashions of time. And it is precisely in this formal immobility that freedom is on

the move; it is just that it cannot be seen because its movement is on the inside,
and generated from an absolute source. The pose is the manifestation of an invisible
agency driven from within. Exerting an energy that pushes the heroic body out-
wards into a skin-tight structure, freedom holds the hero in suspended animation
against the external flux that swirls around him. ‘The stoical body of the
Revolution’, writes Dorinda Outram, ‘is about the definition of the autonomous
self through an . . . impermeable, controlled body’. Liberty moves as an immovable
will, an unflinching wall of self-determination that bends the future to conform
to its timeless deed. The hero’s immobility is therefore the measure of progress.
Revolution is telos as tableau, an act of such decisive force that it can only be cap-
tured in slow motion—or, rather, in ‘no motion’. But the price of liberty is already
figured in the rigor mortis of the pose; revolutionary freedom is defined by death.
It is this contradiction between life and death, or time and eternity, that reveals
the theological roots of this radicalized self. The new humanity of the Revolution
is a theological displacement.8 Or as Carl Schmitt might put it, a ‘political
­the­ology’, where the representation of power is a secularization of theological
concepts.9 The biblical adage ‘the old has gone, the new has come’ is remastered

8 On the theology of displacement, see Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God,
Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
9 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. by
George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
18 Daniel K. L. Chua

by the French Revolution by replacing the person of Christ with a universal

abstraction that demands an allegiance unto death. Man’s new identity is founded
in a non-relational principle that requires a ‘dying to self ’, purging the ‘desires of
the flesh’ in order to live for freedom. The heroic self, sanctified through suffering,
is therefore raised from the dead by the spirit of liberty so that, like Socrates, the
higher freedom ‘up there’ is now ‘in here’. In David’s portrayals of liberty, the
hero’s pose declares: ‘I have been crucified in history; it is no longer I who live, but
freedom that lives in me’. To ‘lose one’s life’ is therefore to find it in an eschatology
where the hero, in dying to self, transcends time, returning as his own Parousia in
the form of absolute freedom.10
In Schmittian terms, the theology of the Revolution collapses the I-thou rela-
tionship of ‘being in Christ’, into a single-self organism in which the principle of
freedom and the identity of the self are one and the same; this singularity is by
definition an exception—a ‘sovereign exception’—who, like Napoleon crossing
the Alps, wields his will in a perpetual state of emergency across a treacherous
terrain.11 Freedom is therefore the opposite of licence; it is total rigour. The
in­tern­al­iza­tion of freedom is designed to train the will to will, fending off any-
thing contingent or arbitrary that might divert the decisive, universal act. As with
the Oath of the Horatii, once freedom is obeyed from within, this revolutionary
self can simultaneously make the law and enact the law and so suspends every law
external to its rule; indeed, the hero, as the emblem of autonomy, gives the law
(nomos) to himself (auto) in order to be self-sufficient. He authorizes himself. The
law of freedom, then, is the legislative basis for the new humanity. It is ‘the mod-
ern absolute’ that must overcome the world at all costs even if the law of freedom
is ultimately the law of death.12
If revolutionary freedom is a secularized theology, then it is only theological as
a negative image of the original. For St Paul, freedom in Christ is not a law (in the
sense of a ‘dead letter’ or external regulation), let alone a law given to oneself.
Indeed, to be under law is to be under slavery,13 which makes modern autonomy
a form of self-mastery that ultimately enslaves the self.14 The letter of the law,
claims the Apostle, spells death. As the narratives in David’s paintings confirm,

10 See Rom. 13:14, Gal. 2:20, and 3:26–7, 2 Cor. 5:17, Matt. 10:39, Mark 8:34–5.
11 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben’s notion of ‘the state of exception’ arises
from the work of the political theorist, Carl Schmitt, for whom the state of emergency (the exception)
was not so much an extreme example of sovereign rule as its fundamental category.
12 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom’, in God and Freedom:
Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, ed. by Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995),
pp. 57–81 (p. 57). Also see Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers: Volume 2, Philosophy and the Human
Sciences (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 318.
13 See Gal. 5:1.
14 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno would famously call this process the Dialectic of
Enlightenment where the pursuit of freedom leads to oppression. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979).
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 19

revolutionary freedom is a deadly sacrifice rather than a ‘living sacrifice’,15 an act

of rigor mortis in which the self dies by con-forming to an unchanging law that
moulds its identity rather than by being trans-formed in an ever-changing rela-
tionship of freedom in the person of Christ. This transformative relation is a dif-
ferent form of law, written by God on the human heart; it is a kind of ‘lawless law’
that breaks the very boundaries it secures, in that its righteous requirements are
already fulfilled in Christ, releasing a new life of freedom and obedience founded
on love and not fear.16 St Paul, in writing to the very Romans that the French
Revolution were re-styling as their heroes, was making a counter-cultural move
that undermined the moral basis of the Roman Republic. To put on Christ is to
indwell a freedom so radicalized by love that the division of the law—its
­judgements—are annulled by a freedom of reconciliation and inclusion where all
bar­riers between class, gender, and ethnicity are abolished without erasing their
distinction: the name of this freedom is grace (charis).17 It is a gift (charisma)—
not law—with so many differentiated manifestations that no one in the ‘body-
politic’ of the Church is the same.18 In contrast, freedom in its secularized form
does the exact opposite. By shaping everyone to conform to same abstract prin­
ciple, freedom divides and conquers, differentiating male and female, friend and
foe, as it exercises a will that can no longer entertain the possibility of love or the
contingency of grace in case they derail the self from achieving its greater his­tor­
ic­al task. Revolutionary freedom is the voluntarist theology of a sovereign non-
relational God, stripped of the messiness of love, re-incarnated in modern man
and housed in the streamlined style of the Roman Republic. The heroic pose of
the Revolution was not so much ‘fashion’ as a noun than as a verb, fashioning
humanity into the shape of freedom in order for humanity to re-fashion the
external forces of nature for its own purposes. The self is no longer part of the
ecology of the created order, but transcends nature and acts upon it to bring about
progress. Style made visible the invisible force whose radicalism became the ‘root
concept of freedom that has characterised the whole modern age’.19 The rise of the
aesthetic in this revolutionary period was inseparable from the rise of freedom,
and its style needs to be analysed if we are to grasp its meaning.20
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was to give this secular theology its philosophical
legitimacy, albeit inadvertently.21 For the philosopher, freedom was a meta­phys­ic­al

15 Rom. 12:1.
16 On the idea of ‘lawless law’, see David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in
Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2017), p. 319.
17 Gal. 3:28. 18 Rom. 12:1–21.
19 Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), p. 32.
20 See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
21 Although Kant saw the possibility of moral progress in the French Revolution, he was not an
advocate of revolutions, and, as with so many of his German contemporaries, was appalled by its ter-
rifying outcome.
20 Daniel K. L. Chua

principle that one had to wear until it became the very fabric of the will. In a
­re-vision of its French counterpart, this Teutonic freedom was also unrepresentable,
residing in a noumenal realm that was beyond experience. And although Kant
maintained a strict separation of freedom from the empirical world, he inadvert-
ently laid the foundation for its aestheticization in his philosophy of the beautiful
and sublime; taking its cue from Kant’s third critique (1790), the next generation
of German philosophers would re-stylize freedom as the very art of being human.
Although for Kant, the will was a moral force that still harboured Christian
duties, in its aestheticized state, the will lost its Kantian obligations and its free-
dom became purely a force. It became a pose of power.
Beethoven (1770–1827) was to suffer the same fate; the moral will of his music
became a pure will deracinated from its Christian roots. This transfiguration is
not simply due to the contingency of his reception history; there is something
latent within the music, just as there is something latent in Kant’s conception of
freedom, that caused the moral fabric to unravel. Whatever Christian framework
the music assumed was overcome by a heroism in which Christ is replaced by an
aesthetic force as stoical and implacable as one of David’s revolutionary figures.
Indeed, this heroism became Beethoven’s defining style.

II. Hair-Styling

Jacques-Louis David was responsible for Beethoven’s haircut—but not that wiry
halo of genius that famously bristles forth from the composer’s gigantic head;
rather, David was responsible for the closely cropped fringe in Willibrord Joseph
Mähler’s dashing Portrait of Beethoven with Lyre completed c.1804 (Figure 1.4). In
the semiotics of hairstyles, this austere cut, fashioned after the stoic emperors of
the Roman Republic, was a distinguishing mark of the revolutionary hero. Known
as the hairdo ‘à la Titus’, it was (re-)invented by David for a revival of Voltaire’s
play, Brutus, in the 1790s, inaugurating a new fashion that was adopted by none
other than Napoleon himself.22 In 1801, Carl Czerny noted that Beethoven had
adopted the ‘cut à la Titus’.23 The composer, like so many fashionable men, sported
the look to imitate the heroic pose of statues in Roman antiquity, but the effect,
according to Czerny, merely made him look somewhat ‘shaggy’.
Mähler’s rendition of the composer was certainly more flattering. Beethoven
may not have connected his handsome trim to David’s hair designs, but he must
have noticed the same fringe sitting atop a small figurine that he kept with him
until his death of Lucius Junius Brutus—the eponymous hero of Voltaire’s play.

22 Jessica Larson, ‘Usurping Masculinity: The Gender Dynamics of the Coiffure à la Titus in
Revolutionary France’, unpubl. PhD dissertation (University of Michigan, 2013).
23 Carl Czerny, ‘Recollections from My Life’, Musical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1956), pp. 302–17 (p. 306).
See also John Clubbe, ‘The Mask of Beethoven: Brutus, Revolution, and the Egyptian Mysteries’, The
Beethoven Journal 25, no. 1 (2010), pp. 4–18.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 21

Figure 1.4 Willibrord Joseph Mähler, Portrait of Beethoven with Lyre (c.1804).
Vienna, Wien Museum © Wien Museum.

As the founder of the Roman Republic, Brutus was a potent source of inspiration
for the French Revolution, and seemingly a source of virtue for Beethoven; not
only did Brutus sacrifice himself in defending the Republic, but he famously
­oversaw the execution of his two sons for their treacherous alliance with the mon-
archy. Indeed, in 1789, while the Revolution was raging outside, David exhibited
The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons as if it were a historical alle-
gory of the spirit of liberty storming the streets of Paris (Figure 1.5). Lit up on one
side of the canvas is (once again) a distraught group of women overcome by emo-
tion; in the shadows, sitting like a statue, is Brutus, stony-faced and motionless.
He looks ahead with a blank stoical stare, his arms arranged stiffly in a gesture of
Roman salutation while clutching the edict that sentenced his sons to death: he is
the picture of a pure will devoid of feelings, as if his emotions had long been dead
under the weight of duty that now animates his decisions. It is this volitional stare
and angular gesture that Beethoven mirrors in Mähler’s portrait.
Of course, Mähler’s portrait is no political painting. The edict has been replaced
by a lyre. The sacrifice, as Beethoven put it himself, is ‘for art’.24 In the aftermath
of the Terror, the German Romantics, sublimated the freedom that the French

24 Czerny, ‘Recollections from My Life’, p. 306.

22 Daniel K. L. Chua

Figure 1.5 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his
Sons (1789).
Paris, Louvre © Photo Josse/Scala, Florence.

Revolution failed to deliver and preserved it within the creative imagination of

the artist. Poiesis was the new liberté. Art would maintain the freedom of the
Revolution by hibernating its ideals for the future in the form of its own auton-
omy. The heroic pose had become art itself, with its political eschatology sus-
pended in a kind of ‘purposiveness without purpose’, to borrow Kant’s definition
of the beautiful.25 What had styled the new humanity returns transformed as art
in the image of the new man. Thus Beethoven, in Mähler’s portrait, is the revolu-
tionary hero of music; he is Orpheus in the body of Napoleon. Freedom is no
longer real but ideal, less a matter of politics than aesthetics.
What is happening in this painting? Mähler was introduced to Beethoven in
1803 while he was busy composing the Eroica Symphony. It is therefore apt that
Beethoven is portrayed as if he were the Eroica—a hero. But it is not merely the

25 ‘Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck’ is most memorably translated in English by J.H. Bernard as ‘pur-
posiveness without purpose’; the translation captures the play of words in the German, although its
meaning may not be as clear as that in Paul Guyer’s and Eric Matthew’s recent translation of Kant’s
third critique, where the phrase is rendered ‘purposiveness . . . without an end’; see, for example,
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 105, 111, 112.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 23

look, but the apparatus around the pose that defines the freedom that Beethoven
embodies. Mähler writes:

It was a portrait, which I soon painted after coming to Vienna in which

Beethoven is represented, at nearly full length, sitting; the left hand rests upon a
lyre, the right is extended, as if, in a moment of inspiration, he was beating time;
in the background is a temple of Apollo.26

The portrait represents the heroic Beethoven as Orpheus, the son of Apollo. Half
god and half man, the composer sits in Arcadia as an Orphic transmitter, picking
up the signals of Apollo’s broadcast in his right hand and amplifying them
through the lyre resting under his left hand. This is the mythic technology of
musical transmission. Music is the unseen force of inspiration (literally: muse–ic),
broadcast through the genius—the priestly artist—and disseminated everywhere.27
The music is universal, absolute, and eternal because Beethoven’s freedom is
legitimized by a higher order of hearing that emanates from a noumenal realm
(Apollo’s temple) in order to indwell the phenomenal world (the Orphic lyre).
This noumenal law is echoed in nature by a pair of freedom trees behind the com-
poser’s right hand that not only beats time but is seemingly poised to seize it in a
revolutionary act. As with David’s painting of Socrates, Beethoven is internalizing
an aesthetic freedom ‘up there’ as a creative force ‘in here’ that renders him immo-
bile, as if caught in suspended animation. Indeed, as a corollary to this dynamic
stasis, music’s power is depicted without sound. No one is playing the lyre. Music,
like Beethoven, is a ‘still,’ posing as the universal. Its non-action is the posture of
revolutionary emancipation.
If there is no music ‘sounding’ in the painting, then what kind of music is
Beethoven’s right hand conducting? Were Mähler’s portrait of Beethoven a film,
this music would operate as a non-diegetic soundtrack. No one in the painting
gets to hear the music; even if we could step into the canvas with Beethoven, we
would hear nothing because the composer is animated by an inaudible music that
is both inside him and outside the painting. Mähler’s allegorical representation
illustrates how Beethoven redefined the meaning of instrumental music. Music
was no longer required to represent a specific object or emotion to make sense of
itself in the taxonomy of eighteenth-century aesthetics; it was now the non-
diegetic soundtrack of humanity—a meta-music that overturned the tables of
classifications as an invisible force. Its non-representational movement was a play
of power, an abstraction of inspirational energies that constituted the structure of

26 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, 3 vols (Berlin, 1866–79); revised
edition by Elliot Forbes as Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970), vol. 2, p. 337.
27 Friedrich Schlegel on artists as priests.
24 Daniel K. L. Chua

human freedom. In other words, Beethoven made audible the movement of the
will. The inner-dynamic that stretched the heroic torso into that taut and tensile
pose could finally be articulated. Thus many nineteenth-century commentators
sensed an ‘inner life’ driving the impulses of Beethoven’s music with an ineluctable
‘psychological logic’.28 By conjuring up vast symphonic structures powered by an
internal force that could resolve diverse and often chaotic mixtures of materials
in a single trajectory, Beethoven transformed musical movement into the
‘soundtrack of subjectivity’; this was a self ‘reduced to its dynamic essence’, realiz-
ing its will as an expressive force, unfolding its destiny from within, and imposing
its shape against the world.29 The general will that was unrepresentable for
Rousseau and the noumenal freedom that Kant made inaccessible to knowledge
was revealed by Beethoven in music as music. In so doing, Beethoven transformed
the political theology of the Revolution into an aesthetic theology.30 If style was
already a form of agency in the neoclassical imaginary of the French Revolution,
then Beethoven’s music, by making audible the power behind the style, was tanta-
mount to ‘a theophany in the Age of Self ’. He made freedom live in us.31

III. Re-Kanting

Beethoven scholarship has often connected the philosophy of freedom in Kant’s

three critiques with the composer’s beliefs. However, biographically, there is no
direct connection. In fact, Beethoven was mostly interested in the pre-critical
Kant of physico-theology that would have been more in tune with the landscape
of the Pastoral Symphony than the heroism of the Eroica Symphony. What
Mähler’s painting demonstrates, however, is that Beethoven and Kant were accus-
tomed to a similar ‘style’ of freedom: it was ‘in the (h)air’. After all, Mähler’s por-
trait merely makes use of stock ideas to represent freedom; Beethoven and Kant
also breathed in these ideas to define their aesthetic and philosophical positions.
They articulated heroic values refracted through revolutionary France but

28 See Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E.T.A. Hoffmann to
Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 51–85.
29 Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought, pp. 17, 79. For a fuller account of
music’s inner force, see Daniel K. L. Chua, Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), pp. 14–19. Some parts of this chapter are adapted from the book.
30 Indeed, Beethoven’s theophany of the will eventually became a theology of the will, in a dia­lect­
ic­al reversal where human freedom, modelled on a purely voluntarist god, returns to a divine form,
but this time made in the image of modern autonomy. In the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the Will is
a force that reveals itself as sheer indifference and destruction. This primal unity is a god whose free-
dom spells fate for those destined to be absorbed and annihilated within its being. Beethoven’s music,
claims Schopenhauer, is a direct representation of this Will. Death is the basis of heroic freedom, as
the funeral march that follows of the heroic deed of the first movement of the Eroica testifies, because
it is conditioned by fate. The stiff, immobile gesture of Beethoven in Mähler’s portrait already implies
the rigor mortis demanded by freedom.
31 Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 150.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 25

dis-located from the Revolution as universal values. As Hegel notes: ‘the freedom
of the Will per se…[as an] inherently eternal Right . . . by which man becomes
man’ was made concrete in the French Revolution; ‘the same principle’, he con­
tinues, ‘obtained speculative recognition in Germany in Kantian philosophy’.32
One could add: ‘the same principle obtained aesthetic recognition in Germany in
Beethoven’s music’.
However, the Enlightenment for both Kant and Beethoven was not the French
Enlightenment with all its anti-clerical and anti-monarchist rage. Indeed, such a
position was not tenable within the Teutonic principalities where the models for
the Enlightenment were paradoxically ‘enlightened despots’ who were monarchs
doubling as religious authorities.33 And, in the light of the Terror, freedom had to
be reframed to exclude the mindless (and headless) violence it spawned if it were
to have any legitimacy under imperial rule. The theological ramifications of the
French Revolution was, therefore, a double displacement in which the secularized
theology of the Revolution was refracted through a religious Enlightenment in the
forms of philosophy and art (and their fusion—aesthetics). As reason and poiesis
without praxis, these forms may have been less violent than their political coun-
terpart, but they were no less radical in changing the course of intellectual history
and the formation of the modern self. In one sense, the double displacement
could be seen as an attempt to re-place the dis-placement, reformulating revolu-
tionary freedom in a framework that was open to religion. But it was also more
insidious than its godless counterpart—or, at least, more ambiguous—in that, like

32 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (Dover: New York, 1956), p. 443.
33 Although the French Enlightenment, with its epoch-making revolution, has coloured the gen-
eral picture of the Enlightenment, it was arguably something of an anomaly in its radical secularism.
In most of Europe the Enlightenment contained strongly religious elements; even the anti-clerical
French example is contested by historians such as J.S. Barnett who describes it as more of a secular
pose than reality. As J.G.A. Pocock observes: ‘Enlightenment was a product of religious debate and not
merely a rebellion against it’. Beethoven’s religious beliefs should be seen in this light. The composer
lived his entire life in a Catholic culture enlightened by the reforms of Emperor Joseph II who pro-
moted both religious freedom and diversity. Despite the political changes in Beethoven’s lifetime, the
Josephinism of the Catholic Church remained a constant in Bonn and Vienna. Religion also had an
aesthetic dimension in German thought and the discourse on freedom; the early romantic philo­
sophers reacted to the French Revolution by attempting to create a ‘new mythology’ for a modern
Christian society, with artists constituting a new race of clerics. In this sense, the mythic element was
already built into the idea of aesthetic autonomy, based on a displacement of godlike attributes which
Friedrich Schlegel called a ‘divine egoism’. Although the impetus for the new myth-making came from
radical Christian thought, it ultimately turned against its religious roots. As George S. Williamson
writes, the romantic discourse on myth was ‘deployed in ever starker opposition to Christian moder-
nity’ as the nineteenth century progressed. See George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in
Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–120 (p. 4); J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment:
Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003); Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Ideen’, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst
Behler (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–2009), vol. 2, p. 262.
26 Daniel K. L. Chua

the parable of the wheat and tares,34 the theological effect was difficult to
­disentangle, resulting in a divided legacy. Kant may have kept the body of religion
intact but, by sublimating the French Revolution as German philosophy, he had,
in the words of Heinrich Heine, decapitated God with his guillotine of pure
reason.35
There are two aspects of modern freedom that, in miming the ‘new creation’ in
secularized form, resulted in an impoverished theological framework. First,
whereas St Paul’s notion of freedom is an eschatology that embraces all of
creation,36 Kant’s definition of freedom is dis-embedded from nature in its pur-
suit of the future, as if the world were fundamentally at variance with the self. For
Kant, liberty required a will that was impervious to the forces of the empirical
world resulting in a freedom that was beyond the realm of experience. Like
David’s Brutus, the sentient self is secondary and can be sacrificed in order to
obey a supersensible law which holds the hero morally upright. This formal law
transformed an individual from a mere object in the sensible world to a subject
driven by a timeless principle independent of that world. Thus freedom became
synonymous with autonomy. As Kant explained, autonomy is ‘the will’s property
of being a law to itself ’,37 for a self-given law both frees the subject from being
determined by the external world and undetermined by its own arbitrary deci-
sions. Reason, therefore, functions as both the legislator and executor of the
moral law within us. It both recognizes the necessity and internalizes the author-
ity of the law. But if God, who guarantees the law is removed, then the conse-
quence of such a freedom, is a will, instrumentalized by reason, premised on a
world that is not so much created for humanity as a world to be overcome and
reformulated in the name of freedom.
Second, with inner-discipline as the basis of its autonomy, modern freedom
tends to be non-relational by definition. It may echo the Christian virtues of self-
control, but the drumbeat of liberty is so loud that it drowns out the fundamental
relational virtues of ‘faith, hope and love’. Law and respect motivates a heroic free-
dom, demanding obedience and duty first, not love and grace. Indeed, freedom,
in becoming the ‘modern absolute’, has turned what was a means for relationships
into a solipsistic end. Freedom under love, for example, is a means of liberating a
humanity condemned by the ‘curse of the law’ for a new kingdom of grace

34 Matt. 13:24–30.
35 Heinrich Heine, ‘Introduction to Kahldorf: Concerning the Nobility in Letters to Count M. von
Moltke’, in Heinrich Heine: The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. by Jost Hermand and
Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 245–57 (p. 45). Heine called
Kant the German Robespierre; he also compares Fichte to Napoleon, Schelling to the New Restoration,
and Hegel to the Duke of Orléans. Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment,
trans. by John Snodgrass (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 107–9, Heine claims
that ‘German philosophy is nothing but the dream of the French Revolution.’ On the Christian legacy
of Kant, see John Hare’s Chapter 2 in this volume.
36 Rom. 8:19–22.
37 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals, in Gesammelte Schriften, 13 vols
(Berlin: Akademieausgabe, 1902–10), vol. 4, pp. 446–7.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 27

c­ haracterized by hope and faith through the Spirit of Christ.38 It is fundamentally

the freedom—the means—to love the Other. Freedom under freedom, on the
other hand, is ultimately organized power. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, Kantian free-
dom leads to ‘the Will as the Will to Will’.39 In down-playing divine assistance,
Kant formulated an agency that is fundamentally rooted in the self and divides to
rule. Hence, Kant had to assume a religious framework with moral imperatives to
regulate the content of freedom’s power, even though his definition of freedom
potentially undermines that very framework, as the subsequent development of
German philosophy would demonstrate from Fichte to Nietzsche, with music
playing the leading role in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will.
Kant’s definition of freedom set the tone in German Idealism during the
twenty-five years between his Critique of Pure Reason and the completion of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.40 The idea of ‘absolute music’ came into being in
all but name in this period under the banner of this newfound liberty. When
Ludwig Tieck described instrumental music as prescribing ‘its own laws to
itself ’,41 or when Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795–1866) claimed that musical form ‘is
nothing other than self-determination’,42 they were asserting a Kantian autonomy
for music. What Kant calls the self-activity of freedom (Selbsttätigkeit) is realized
as the self-activity of a musical process. Beethoven’s contribution was to the­mat­
ize this process so that his music was not merely the medium of autonomy but its
heroic narrative. As Oliver O’Donovan states: during the course of the
Enlightenment, ‘the structure of creation . . . no longer served to shape love and
action, but the will became the exclusive giver of practical meaning. It no longer
seemed to matter in what a will found satisfaction if it was consistently deter-
mined within itself. . . . The climax of this development, reached at the very end of
the eighteenth century, was the opening sentence of Kant’s Grundlegung,
which . . . threw out a challenge only to be compared with the very similar opening
motifs of his younger contemporary, Beethoven.’43 In Beethoven’s hands, music
announced the self-determined movement of the will, embracing the form as law.

38 Gal. 3:13.
39 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso,
1999), p. 48.
40 Michael Rosen notes in his 2010 Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford University that although
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and the Schlegel brothers differ on many points,
they fundamentally agreed on Kant’s moral conception of freedom as self-determination.
41 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, ‘Symphonien’, Phantasien über die Kunst für
Freunde der Kunst (Hamburg, 1799), in Werke und Briefe von Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (Berlin:
Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1938), p. 254.
42 Adolf Bernhard Marx, ‘Form in Music’, in Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings
on Theory and Method, ed. and trans. by Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 55–90 (p. 60).
43 Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World and Time: Ethics and Theology 1: An Introduction (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2013), p. 116. The opening of Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten boldly states: ‘It
is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed beyond it, that could be considered
good without limitation except a good will’; Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. by Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 49. On the opening motifs of the heroic
symphonies as an assertion of autonomy, see Chua, Beethoven and Freedom, pp. 57–66.
28 Daniel K. L. Chua

The opening motifs of his heroic symphonies hammered home the assertion of
the will to determine its own destiny, as if to grapple fate by the throat. Hence
Marx could claim that Beethoven brought to fulfillment the first ‘real, autonomous,
free-standing’ artwork.44
For Marx, the work that defines this freedom is the Eroica Symphony.45
Beethoven famously scratched out the name of Napoleon on the dedication page,
but as Wagner proclaims, the Eroica is not about a particular hero; ‘it is the act of
heroism itself ’ with Beethoven accomplishing the territorial gains that Napoleon
achieved in the battlefield in the arena of music.46 The symphony performs its
own title; it is the heroic deed in the history of music that transforms Beethoven
into music’s hero, placing his name in the blank space on the title page that
Napoleon had once occupied. Thus the Eroica not only names a new period in
Beethoven’s creative output (the heroic period), but defines the liberation of
music itself. In the words of Marx, it inaugurated a new ‘Kunstepoche’—an era
of autonomy.47 1803, the year of its composition, is therefore the real beginning of
the nineteenth century, claims Wilhelm von Lenz: ‘On your knees old world!’ he
proclaims, ‘Before you stands the idea of the great Beethoven symphony. . . . Here
is the end of one empire and the beginning of another. Here is the boundary of a
century’.48 Such claims establish the work as an epochal pose—an intersection of
time and eternality where the music, in seizing the historical moment, establishes
the immortality of the work as a monument.49 It assumes the revolutionary pose.
Such a momentous claim goes back even further than these early commentar-
ies because Beethoven already makes this assertion in the music itself. To borrow
the title of another work by Beethoven, the Eroica is a ‘Glorious Moment’. But,
unlike Der glorreiche Augenblick, a piece that claims the moment for Europe’s
­victory over Napoleon, the Eroica claims an eternal glory for itself. In effect, the
symphony is an act of heroic self-canonization; it gestures to its own autonomy,
putting on freedom (will) as its own law of autonomy (form). Its greatness is

44 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen, ed. by Gustav Behncke, 2 vols
(Berlin: Verlag von Otto Janke, 1875), vol. 1, p. 265; translation from Musical Form in the Age of
Beethoven, p. 177.
45 Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, vol. 1, p. 261; Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, pp. 174–5.
Similar readings of the Eroica by Marx’s contemporaries can be found in the writings of Wolfgang
Griepenkerl, Wilhelm von Lenz, and Richard Wagner. See Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, Das
Musikfest oder die Beethovener (Braunschweig: Eduard Leibrock, 1841), p. 110; Wilhelm von Lenz,
Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie, 6 vols (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1855–60), vol. 3, p. 291; Richard
Wagner, ‘Ein Glücklicher Abend’ (1840), in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig; Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1911–16), vol. 1, pp. 136–49 (p. 147). Of course, the Eroica itself, by assuming a heroic pose,
gestures to its own canonization; this is evident in its programmatic reception; see Burnham,
Beethoven Hero, pp. 3–28.
46 Wagner, ‘Ein Glücklicher Abend’,vol. 1, p. 147.
47 Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven, vol. 1, p. 261.
48 Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie, vol. 3, p. 291. Also see Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and
the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 235.
49 Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunststudie, vol. 3, p. 291.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 29

therefore not a retrospective conferment, but is already inscribed in both the

­programme and its form as a bid for immortality.50 By making heroism the
message, Beethoven ensures that the Eroica is born great.51
How, exactly, does the Eroica pose? In two ways.
First, as structure: the Eroica is form incarnate. It puts on freedom as an armour
that solidifies the musical flow into statue. The symphony is revolutionary force as
form, assuming the pose of the hero, who in seizing history, seizes up as a dynamic
structure in suspended animation. The Eroica’s mastery of time, then, results in a
moment of eternal glory. Theodor W. Adorno captures this idea succinctly when
he describes the experience of a Beethoven symphony as an ‘Augenblick’ in which
time is so ‘pent up’ it flashes by in a blink of an eye (Augen-blick). A Beethoven
movement, ‘when properly performed,’ he says, ‘seem[s] to last not . . . fifteen
minutes, but only a moment [Augenblick]’.52 Time becomes space. In heroic terms,
the Augenblick is the technical means through which the music manufactures its
transcendence as an eternal pose.53 The Eroica achieves this pose through an act
of renunciation that reveals the principle of form as freedom itself. Gone are the
powdered wigs, frilly cuffs, and beauty spots that decorated those flabby and
effeminate bodies of a decadent age prone to too much sentiment and emotion. In
this new ‘Kunstepoche’, Beethoven strips away the ornamental to reveal the
un­adorned elements of tonal form: the triad—‘tonalité à la Titus’. It begins with
two E-flat major triads (see example 1, Figure 1.6); they call the symphony into
being, pounding out their elemental force as chordal hammerstrokes (bs. 1–2),
and then proceed to unfold linearly as a motif—the fanfare of the hero (bs. 3-6).
What the Eroica announces at its very beginning is form at its most stoic; this is
tonality as sheer principle, pure structuring in denial of the superfluous and the
ephemeral. These elemental forces are equivalent to the muscular interior of the
heroic body—bare, impenetrable, taut, energized, impervious to the outside, and
devoid of lyrical feeling. In this act of self-denial, the opening theme is so basic
that it is almost theme-less. The motif does not so much form itself into a melodic
phrase as perpetuate itself in a constant state of form-ation. Indeed, it is precisely
the theme-less animation of motivic particles that projects the movement as a
single invisible force, driving the music forward and pulling the elements together

50 See Chua, Absolute Music, pp. 235–44. As Burnham notes, many of the programmes bestowed
on the Eroica follow the ‘Homeric formula for kléos [glory]’. See Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 20.
51 See Chua, Beethoven and Freedom, pp. 67–88.
52 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 119. On music and the relationship between
space and time, see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Some Relationship between Music and Painting’, trans.
by Susan Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (1995), pp. 66–79.
53 ‘Beethoven’s art achieves its metaphysical substantiality’, writes Adorno, ‘because he uses
­technique to manufacture transcendence’. The ‘representation of metaphysical transcendence’, he
­con­tinues, is not an ‘image’ but ‘a real enactment’, ingrained in the structural activity of a music that
can make its material vanish into a ‘w/hole’; see Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, p. 78.
30 Daniel K. L. Chua

Figure 1.6 Example 1: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55, first
movement, bs. 1–8.

into a skin-tight totality. The projection of a force endowed with purpose mimes
the movement of the will. This symphonic voluntarism shapes the movement
with such ineluctable logic that it pulls the two hammerstrokes at the start and
last two chords in the final cadence into an instant. In an act of structural hearing,
what should last fifteen minutes suddenly strikes a pose that takes no time to
grasp itself as form. An ‘Augenblick’.
Second, the pose is a narrative: the Eroica narrates its form, as if the music were
directing its own heroic epic as some kind of non-diegetic voice. Scott Burnham
calls this dual process a ‘telling presence’ in which the music enacts and recounts
its meaning.54 Thus the theme-less form of the symphony is given a theme; its
abstraction is given a programme; or rather, in the Eroica, Beethoven programmes
the absolute to reinforce its claims to autonomy. And the tale it tells is of a hero
whom one might find in one of David’s revolutionary paintings, striking a pose in
the knowledge of death. In case this fate was unclear in the symphony, the head-
ing of the first London publication of the score from 1809 is entitled: ‘Sinfonia
Eroica composta per celebrare la morte d’un’ Eroe’ [Heroic Symphony to celebrate
the death of a hero]—not that this programmatic spoiler was needed since the
funeral march of the second movement is enough to give the story away.55 Death
is the theme of the first movement’s autonomy.
The opening triad in its vertical and horizontal form—the hammerstroke and
the hero’s fanfare—are the protagonists of the drama. Since the initial chords are
also the final chords of the movement, the hero’s triadic motif springs forth from
the first hammerstroke to affirm the last, turning the Ursprung into an Ursatz.
But the beginning and the end are not the same; the opening chords are not part
of the thematic structure—they are outside the exposition, excluded in the repeat.
They are separated by silences that isolate them as something outside the system,
and yet, as the work progresses, these very chords seem to take control of the
movement as rhythmic blows. What ensues after the initial hammerstrokes is a

54 Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 147.

55 The third and fourth movement, in this respect, can be seen as the ‘celebration of the death of the
hero’ after funeral, which in the ancient world took the form of funereal games.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 31

dialectical battle between this rhythmic gesture (the origin) and the motivic
development (the hero’s formation). The theme can only come into being as it
moves against its origins; it struggles against its own birth in order that it might
internalize it as part of its structure, so that by the final bars, the first two chords
would have moved from the outside to the inside: self-creation, ex nihilo. The self-
sufficient manhood of the epic hero, notes Christine Di Stefano, ‘is bound up with
the repudiation of the (m)other . . . as a kind of defensive reaction formation
against memories of dependence and the early symbiotic relation’.56 Thus in
between these outer hammerstrokes, the hero discovers his autonomy as he trans-
forms the somatic pangs of birth into the structural pillars of self-generation. The
violence of this process is unprecedented in the history of music. In the ex­pos­
ition, as the heroic motif develops, the hammerstrokes return as increasingly dis-
sonant and syncopated gestures that go against the metrical symmetry, striking
the second beat with such force that they bunch up as violent syncopated asser-
tions (bs. 122–31). The heroic will of the music exists through its ability to push
against these barriers with a relentless motion that eventually resolves the strug-
gle by synchronizing the conflicting accents on the downbeat of the larger metric
structure (or hypermeasure).57 Time is mastered by a harmonic inevitability that
crushes the rhythmic crisis; the fanfare of the hero stands against the ­metrical
chaos in a musical equivalent to the movement of freedom as an im­mov­
able stance.
But this inevitability is suddenly thrown into disarray at the centre of the form
(bs. 238–84: see example 2, Figure 1.7). In the development section, the hammer-
strokes take over the music with an unremitting dissonance that fails to resolve
the structure on both rhythmic and harmonic levels, leaving a deafening silence
(b. 280). Although the silence lasts for merely a split second, for many nineteenth-
century commentators, this pivotal event is what defines the Eroica as an epochal
boundary. Friedrich Griepenkerl declared, ‘Thirty-six bars of nineteenth century’
as the hammer-blows build up to the cataclysmic blank (bs. 248–83).58 This
moment is a decision that the music has been driving towards from the very
beginning with the clash between the horizontal and vertical elements. By bar 248,
the intensity of the dissonance demands a resolution that is not merely mu­sic­al but
seemingly volitional: this event is a resolve, an act of the will, a self-determined
decision that is simultaneously necessary and free. It is precisely what one would
expect from a hero whose act of freedom is tied to fate. Structurally, this momen-
tous blank falls on such a strong hypermetric downbeat that Grosvenor Cooper

56 Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political

Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 97.
57 See, for example, David Epstein, Beyond Orpheus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979),
pp. 128–36.
58 Griepenkerl, Das Musikfest oder die Beethovener, p. 110.
32 Daniel K. L. Chua

Figure 1.7 Example 2: Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Eroica, Op. 55,
first movement, bs. 275–83.

and Leonard Meyer proclaim it to be the ‘loudest silence in musical literature’.59

It is palpably absent. The expected resolution arrives as a negation, as an ear-
shattering nothing. At the very heart of the form, in the moment of crisis and
decision, Beethoven delivers a representation of the unrepresentable as high
drama (b. 280). The crisis is unnamed—or unnamable, since the deed is an act of
heroic self-sacrifice that is beyond immediate comprehension. As Beethoven him-
self noted in his sketches for the death of Clärchen in Egmont: ‘death could be
expressed by a rest’.60 In this empty beat, the hero has been reduced to nothing.
After all, what comes after these blows is the problematic appearance of a new

59 Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 139. The metrical complexities that build up to this moment are also dis-
cussed in Harald Krebs, Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 76; Justin London, ‘Loud Rests and Other Strange Metric
Phenomena, or Meter as Heard’, Music Theory Online 0, no. 2 (1993); John Paul Ito, Focal Impulse
Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
60 See Gustav Nottebohm, Zweite Beethoveniana (Leipzig: Verlag von C.F. Peters, 1887), p. 277.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 33

theme in E minor that has perplexed countless analysts (b. 284ff). This theme is
such a contradiction to the non-theme of the hero and so distant from the tonal
anchor that it can only be heard as a negation of the hero. Indeed, for Lenz, the
new theme signals his death.61
What appears in this void, is the apophatic pose of the hero—it is the moment
of action where there is no action, a music held in suspended animation that
seizes the historical momentum as an instant. In this deafening silence is the
heroic deed as heroic death, where freedom and fate, self-determination and his­
tor­ic­al necessity, kenosis and fulfilment perfectly align to turn the mortal and
particular into the immortal and the universal. As the epochal downbeat of the
symphony, this is also the music’s declaration of independence. The phenomenon
of music has become a noumenon—a transcendental silence that asserts its force
from an eternal perspective: like the music from Apollo’s temple in Mähler’s por-
trait of Beethoven, this unheard sound will direct the rest of the symphony, as the
particular hero summons the universal into being, living on in sprit through his
sacrifice.62 Griepenkerl’s ‘Thirty-six bars of nineteenth century’ is only the begin-
ning of an absolute reign in which music will realize its autonomy as an inaudible
principle forging the progress of its history.

IV. Undoing

In 1802, prior to starting work on the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven composed

Christus am Ölberge, Op. 85, an oratorio in which an anguished Jesus is portrayed
in the Garden of Gethsemane as a hero who decides to sacrifice his life to save the
world in obedience to the Father’s will. It was written at a moment of crisis when
the composer became tragically aware of his own deafness and made the decision
to ‘die to self ’ and ‘live for art’. The Oratorio could be viewed as a theological
counterpart to the Eroica Symphony; indeed, Peter Schleuning even suggests that
the new theme that follows the ear-shattering moment of ‘nothing’ in the first
movement references the old German Easter Hymn Christ ist erstanden and
Luther’s chorale (base on the same plainchant) Christ lag in Todesbanden, conflat-
ing the revolutionary hero with the passion of Christ, if not Beethoven’s own mar-
tyrdom for art.63 Such a conflation would resonate with the Catholicism of the

61 Lenz, Beethoven: Eine Kunst-Studie, p. 293. See Scott Burnham, ‘On the Programmatic Reception
of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony’, Beethoven Forum 1, ed. by C. Reynolds, L. Lockwood and J. Webster
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 1–24 (pp. 9–10). For most nineteenth-century com-
mentators, some kind of death takes place in the development. See for example, Marx, Ludwig van
Beethoven, vol. 1, p. 196; Aléxandre Oulibischeff, Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Leipzig,
1857), pp. 177–8.
62 For an analysis of the narrative after this momentous sacrifice, see Chua, Absolute Music,
pp. 157–61.
63 Martin Geck and Peter Schleuning, ‘Geschrieben auf Bonsparte’: Beehovens ‘Eroica’: Revolution,
Reaktion, Rezeption (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1989), p. 119. Obviously, being based on plainchant, the
hymns originated in the Catholic tradition.
34 Daniel K. L. Chua

Austrian Enlightenment in which religion, politics, and art were interwoven.

While Schleuning’s reference to Protestant hymnody is somewhat tenuous, the
hymn-like aura of the new theme marks a death and resurrection that could carry
Christological overtones. The Eroica, as with Kant’s philosophy, may tacitly
depend on a theological framework for its moorings. The question is whether the
heroism modelled on the Roman Republic articulates a freedom that could align
with the freedom that St Paul announces: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us
free’.64 St Paul, of course, did not need to style himself on the Roman Republic; he
was already a Roman citizen within the Roman Empire, and he often employed
military analogies in his letters to describe the Christian life. He even envisaged
himself participating in a victory parade, celebrating the success of a Roman mili-
tary campaign. In 2 Corinthians 2:14–17, Paul describes how God leads him in a
‘triumphal procession’, with valiant soldiers parading not only the spoils of war
but their captors who will either be enslaved or publicly executed as glorious sac-
rifices to the Roman deities. This image could be an epic painting by David. Or at
least it would had not the Apostle shockingly reversed the status of freedom in
this procession. In this analogy, St Paul—and perhaps, by implication, Christ
himself—is not leading the celebration with God by his side; rather he is being led
as a prisoner of war, a conquered slave, a victim to be to be slaughtered. And yet,
in this dire situation of utter hopelessness and total humiliation, he has the freedom
to give thanks to God who leads him as a captive in the triumphal procession.65
This is not the victorious pose of a stoic hero. There is no triumph for the Apostle.
There is no heroism. This startling image—unrepresentable as a portrait of liberty—
paints a freedom so radical in its contradiction that it upends the stoic virtues of
the Roman Empire: weakness, shame, and fragility shape the earthen vessel
through which the knowledge of God will triumph. The last concept in the mind
of an Apostle who is on permanent display as a humiliated slave on death row is
heroic autonomy.
If musical autonomy is a heroic pose, then it is opposed to the freedom in
Christ expounded by St Paul. It sides with the victor rather than the victim. Both
freedoms involve death; but St Paul is free because he is already dead to every-
thing except his love for God and because of God’s love for him; this love is ‘better
than life’ (God’s love for him) and ‘stronger than death’ (his love for God).
Freedom predicated on such love is beyond life and death. Death, after all, is
already dead; through Christ, death has ‘lost its sting’ and so cannot define free-
dom. Heroic autonomy, on the other hand, is defined by death. It is predicated on
fear and cannot love because everything is a potential threat to its independence
and may undermine its obedience to a higher law that demands his life. The hero
lives his life as a perpetual Augenblick-at-the-ready, waiting for his sudden

64 Gal. 5:1. 65 See also Acts 16:16–40 for a similar act of thanksgiving. Also see 1 Cor. 4:9.
 An Image of Musical Autonomy in Beethoven 35

moment of glory amidst the unpredictable forces of fortune. Ultimately, the

heroic paradigm is tragic since the hero’s moral code demands an ‘ascetic
­self-overcoming’ that is willing to sacrifice his life for the higher cause of the
whole. His moral alliance with death ties his being to fate.66 But freedom under
fate is no freedom at all; the necessity of freedom is a form of self-imprisonment—
a self-given law. And as with David’s paintings where women are sidelined as
emotional baggage, such heroic virtue, as Milbank observes, is ‘the essence of
manhood in action, virtus, the male force which sustains the bounds of self, or
the bounds of the city’.67 By fortifying himself in this way, the male action hero
functions as an indifferent, impervious force against a violent order.68 His
­legitimacy is always based on threat, requiring a prior evil to react against in
order to celebrate a virtue that merely replicates the violence it resists. Thus the
heroic will wills itself as a disciplinary force, projecting an autonomy that
reproduces the very force that Kant would classify as ‘radical evil’. Milbank puts
the matter more starkly: ‘Evil is self-governing autonomy—evil is the Kantian
good, the modern good’. ‘It is this very promotion of abstract free autonomy’, he
concludes, ‘that itself enshrines what is evil, and radically deficient’.69
Milbank’s uncharitable statement is designed to shock. Such provocations
would scarcely be entertained by Kant as the logical outcome of freedom. Milbank
probably went too far, and yet it is precisely this Kantian ‘evil’ that Adorno hears
in Beethoven. The Augenblick may embody the sound of freedom, but, from the
perspective of Auschwitz, Adorno was well aware of freedom’s underbelly, even at
its most transcendent: ‘[M]oral self-determination’, writes Adorno, ‘is ascribed to
human beings as an absolute advantage . . . while being covertly used to legitimize
dominance—dominance over nature. . . . [H]umanity threatens incessantly to
revert to the inhumane. . . . And to this the somber aspects of Beethoven are pre-
cisely related’.70 If you ‘listen to the humane Beethoven from the outside’, he
writes, ‘from a sufficiently great distance’, then you will hear ‘the terror aroused by

66 On the moral basis of heroic societies, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral
Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, third edition, 2007), p. 124.
67 John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford; Blackwell,
1997), p. 220.
68 See Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), pp. 39–40, 78–82.
69 John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 18, 25.
Perhaps Kant already indicated the instability of his own position in his late Essay on Radical Evil.
Instead of the usual attribution of evil to ignorance among the Aufklärer, Kant locates its source in the
very will that is the agent of autonomy. In effect, modern freedom results in a power crisis, a funda-
mental inability of the Will to will its goals from within. For Kant, ‘radical evil concerns freedom in its
process of totalization’, comments Paul Ricoeur. ‘The demand for a complete object of the will is ba­sic­
ally antinomic’ for, ultimately, the will to freedom turns against itself. See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of
Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 417–18. On
Radical Evi,l see Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral
Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
70 Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, p. 80.
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had married a seafaring youth, and borne him one fair child. Her
husband was returning from a distant voyage; had entered the sea of
Solway; his native hills—his own home—rose to his view, and he saw
the light streaming from the little chamber window, where his wife
and his sweet child sat awaiting his return. But it was not written
that they were to meet again in life. She heard the sweep of a
whirlwind, and she heard a shriek, and going to her chamber-door,
she saw the ship sinking, and her husband struggling in the agitated
water. It is needless to lengthen a sorrowful story: she now threw
herself weeping over his grave, and poured out the following wail:—
“He was the fairest among men, yet the sea swept him away: he
was the kindest hearted, yet he was not to remain. What were all
other men compared to him,—his long curling hair, and his sweet
hazel eyes, and his kind and gladsome tongue? He loved me long,
and he won me from many rivals; for who could see his face, and not
love him? who could listen to his speech, and refuse him aught?
When he danced, maids stood round, and thought his feet made
richer music than the instruments. When he sang, the maids and
matrons blessed him; and high-born dames loved the song of my
frank and gentle sailor. But there is no mercy in the ocean for the
sons of men; and there is nought but sorrow for their daughters. Men
go gray-headed to the grave, who, had they trusted the unstable
deeps, would have perished in their prime, and left fatherless babes,
and sorrowing widows. Alas, alas! in lonely night, on this eerie spot,
on thy low and early grave, I pour forth my heart! Who now shall
speak peace to my mind, and open the latch of my little lonely home
with thy kind and anxious hand? Who now shall dandle my sweet
babe on his knee, or love to go with me to kirk and to preaching,—to
talk over our old tales of love and courtship,—of the secret tryst and
the bridal joy!”
And, concluding her melancholy chant, she looked sorrowfully and
steadfastly at the grave, and recommenced anew her wailing and her
tears.
The widow’s grief endured so long that the moon began to make
her approach manifest by shooting up a long and a broad stream of
thin, lucid, and trembling light over the eastern ridge of the
Cumberland hills. She rose from her knees, shed back her moist and
disordered locks, showing a face pale but lovely, while the watery
light of two large dark eyes, of liquid and roving blue, was cast
mournfully on the way homewards, down which she now turned her
steps to be gone. Of what passed in the pastor’s mind at this
moment, tradition, which sometimes mocks, and at other times
deifies, the feelings of men, gives a very unsatisfactory account. He
saw the hour of appointment with his shadowy messenger from the
other world arrive and pass without his appearance; and he was
perhaps persuaded that the pure, and pious, and overflowing grief of
the fair young widow had prevented the intrusion of a form so
ungracious and unholy. As she advanced from the burial-ground, the
pastor of her parish stood mute and sorrowful before her. She passed
him as one not wishing to be noticed, and glided along the path with
a slow step and a downcast eye.
She had reached the side of a little lonely stream, which glided half
seen, half hid, underneath its banks of broom and honeysuckle,
sprinkled at that hour with wild daisies, and spotted with primroses
—when the voice of Ezra reached her ears. She made a full stop, like
one who hears something astounding, and turned round on the
servant of the altar a face radiant with tears, to which her tale of woe,
and the wild and lonely place, added an interest and a beauty.
“Young woman,” he began, “it is unseemly in thee to bewail thy
loss at this lonely hour, and in this dreary spot: the youth was given
to thee, and ye became vain. I remarked the pride of thy looks, and
the gaudiness of thine apparel, even in the house of holiness; he is
taken from thee, perhaps, to punish thy pride. There is less meekness
in thy sorrow than there was reason in thy joy; but be ye not
discomforted.”
Here the weeping lady turned the sidelong glance of her swimming
eyes on Ezra, shed back the locks which usurped a white brow and
snowy temples, and folding her hands over a bosom, the throbbings
of which made the cambric that concealed it undulate like water,
stood still, and drank in his words of comfort and condolence.
Tradition always conducts Ezra and the mariner’s widow to this
seldom frequented place. A hundred and a hundred times have I
mused over the scene in sunlight and moonlight; a hundred and a
hundred times have I hearkened to the wild and variable accounts of
the peasantry, and sought to make bank, and bush, and stream, and
tree assist in unravelling the mystery which must still hang over the
singular and tragic catastrophe. Standing in this romantic place, a
pious man, not over-stricken in years, conversing with a rosy young
widow, a vain and a fair creature, a bank of blossomed flowers beside
them, and the new risen moon scattering her slant and ineffectual
beams on the thick budded branches above them,—such is the
picture which tradition invariably draws, while imagination
endeavours to take up the tender thread of the story, and
imagination must have this licence still. Truth contents herself with
the summary of a few and unsatisfactory particulars. The dawn of
morning came, says Truth, and Ezra had not returned to his manse.
Something evil hath happened, said Imagination, scattering as she
spoke a thousand tales of a thousand hues, many of which still find
credence among the pious people of Galloway.
Josiah, the old and faithful servant of Ezra, arrived in search of his
master at the lonely burial-ground, about the dawn of the morning.
He had become alarmed at his long absence, and his alarm was not
abated by the unholy voices which at midnight sailed round the
manse and kirk, singing, as he imagined, a wild and infernal hymn of
joy and thanksgiving. He traced his steps down the footpath by the
rivulet side till he came to the little primrose bank, and found it
trodden upon and pressed as if two persons had been seated among
the flowers. Here all further traces ceased, and Josiah stood
pondering on the power of evil spirits, and the danger of holding
tryst with Beelzebub or any of the lesser spirits of darkness.
He was soon joined by an old shepherd, who told a tale which
pious men refuse to believe, though they always listen to it. The
bright moonlight had made him imagine it was morning, and he
arose and walked forth to look at his lambs on the distant hill—the
moon had been up for nearly an hour. His way lay near the little
lonely primrose bank, and as he walked along he heard the
whispering of tongues: he deemed it some idle piece of lovemaking,
and he approached to see who they might be. He saw what ought not
to be seen, even the reverend Ezra seated on the bank, and
conversing with a buxom young dame and a strange one. They were
talking wondrous kindly. He observed them for a little space; the
young dame was in widow’s weeds; the mariner’s widow wore the
only weeds, praise be blest, in the parish, but she was a raven to a
swan compared to the quean who conversed with the minister. She
was indeed passing fair, and the longer he looked on her she became
the lovelier—ower lovely for mere flesh and blood. His dog shrunk
back and whimpered, and an owl that chased a bird in the grove
uttered a scream of terror as it beheld her, and forsook its prey. At
length she turned the light of her eyes on himself; Will-o’-the-wisp
was but a proverb to them; they had a glance he should never get the
better of, and he hardly thought his legs carried him home, he flew
with such supernatural speed.
“But, indeed,” added the cautious peasant, “I have some doubts
that the whole was a fiction of the auld enemy, to make me think ill
of the douce man and the godly; and if he be spared to come home,
so I shall tell him. But if Ezra, pious man, is heard of nae mair, I shall
be free to believe that what I heard I heard, and what I saw I saw.
And Josiah, man, I may as weel give you the benefit of my own
opinion. I’ll amaist aver on my Bible, that the minister, a daring man
and a courageous,—ower courageous, I doubt,—has been dared out
to the lonely place by some he, or, maybe, she-fiend—the latter maist
likely; and there he has been overcome by might or temptation, and
now Satan may come atween the stilts of the gospel plough, for the
right hand of Ezra will hold it no longer; or I shouldna wonder,”
added the shepherd, “but that the old dour persecutor Bonshaw has
carried him away on his fiend-steed Geordie Johnstone; conscience!
nought mair likely; and I’ll warrant even now they are ducking him
in the dub of perdition, or picking his banes ahint the hallan o’ hell.”
The whole of this rustic prediction was not fulfilled. In a little deep
wild dell, at the distance of a gunshot, they found Ezra Peden lying
on the ground, uttering words which will be pardoned, since they
were the words of a delirious tongue. He was carried home amid the
sympathy and sorrow of his parishioners; he answered no question,
nor seemed to observe a single face, though the face of many a friend
stood round him. He only raved out words of tenderness and
affection, addressed to some imaginary person at his side; and
concluded by starting up, and raising such an outcry of horror and
amazement, as if the object of his regard had become a demon: seven
strong men could hardly hold him. He died on the third day, after
making a brief disclosure, which may be readily divined from this
hasty and imperfect narrative.
 YOUNG RONALD OF MORAR:
A TRADITIONARY TALE OF THE WESTERN
HIGHLANDS.

Angus Macdonald, a son of Clanranald, having quarrelled with his

neighbour and namesake, the Laird of Morar, he made an irruption
into that district, at the head of a select portion of his followers. One
of his men was celebrated for his dexterity as a marksman; and on
their march he gave a proof of this, by striking the head off the
canna, or moss cotton, with an arrow. This plant is common on
mossy ground in the Highlands; it is as white as the driven snow, and
not half the size of the lily.
Having got possession of the cattle, Angus was driving away the
spreith to his own country; but Dugald of Morar pursued him with a
few servants who happened to be at hand; and, being esteemed a
man of great bravery, Angus had no wish to encounter him. He
ordered the marksman to shoot him with an arrow; but the poor
fellow, being unwilling to injure Dugald, aimed high, and overshot
him. Angus observed this, and expressed his surprise that a man who
could hit the canna yesterday, could not hit Dugald’s broad forehead
that day; and drawing his sword, swore that he would cleave the
marksman’s head should he miss him again. John then reluctantly
drew his bow, and Dugald fell to rise no more.
Angus got into his hands the only son of the dreaded Morar, then
very young; and the treatment which the unfortunate boy received
was calculated to injure his health and shorten his life. A poor girl,
who attended the calves, had pity on him, and at last contrived to
carry him away, wrapped up in a large fleece of wool. Having escaped
from her pursuers, she made her way to the house of Cameron of
Lochiel. Here she and the boy were most hospitably received; and,
according to the custom of the country in those days, they passed a
year and a day without being asked any question. At the end of that
period, Lochiel made inquiry regarding the boy, and the girl candidly
told him her story. He thus discovered that the boy was the son of his
own wife’s sister; but he concealed the whole from his lady, of whose
secrecy he was not very confident. But he treated young Ronald with
great kindness. Lochiel had a son much of the same age; the two boys
frequently quarrelled, and the lady was angry to see her own son
worsted. She at last swore that “the girl and her vagabond must quit
the house next morning.” The generous Lochiel set out with the boy
to Inverness, where he boarded him under a false name, and placed
the woman in the service of a friend in the neighbourhood, that she
might have an eye to his condition.
Ronald received such education as befitted his birth; and when he
grew up to manhood, he paid a visit to Lochiel, his kind benefactor,
in Lochaber, who was so much satisfied with him, that he
determined on giving him his powerful assistance in recovering his
paternal estate, which was then in the possession of Angus.
Lochiel ordered a hundred men to attend himself and Ronald on
this occasion; and they arrived in Morar on a Sunday, when the
usurper and all his people were in church at mass. He congratulated
the young man on the opportunity he now had of avenging his
father’s blood, and destroying all his enemies at once, by burning
them in the church. Ronald humanely objected, that though many of
those persons then in the church were guilty of his father’s death, yet
there were others innocent of that crime; and he declared that if his
estate could not be recovered otherwise, he would rather want it, and
trust to Providence and his own valour. Lochiel did not at all relish
such sentiments, and left Ronald to his fate.
Ronald took refuge in a cavern, and the daughter of Angus, his
only child, frequently passed that way, in looking after her father’s
fold. He sometimes got into conversation with her; and, though but a
child, she became attached to him. He prevailed upon her to get his
shirts washed for him. Her father having accidentally discovered the
linen bleaching, observed the initial letters of Ronald’s name; and
making inquiry into the circumstances, soon suspected that he was at
hand. He attempted to persuade his daughter to decoy Ronald into
his power; but she told the young man all that her father proposed to
her; and he, finding that Angus was still thirsting for his blood,
immediately left the country, and took the girl along with him. With
much difficulty he conveyed her in safety to Inverness, from whence
he procured a passage to France, where he placed her in a convent.
He entered the French army, and was much distinguished for his
bravery; he was thus enabled to support himself, and to defray the
expense of her education. When the young woman was of age, they
were married, and returned to Scotland. Ronald having obtained
strong recommendations to the king, he found means of being
reconciled to Angus, who was then old, and had become very
penitent. He made great professions of friendship and attachment to
Ronald; but his daughter was always doubtful of his sincerity, and it
would appear that she had justly appreciated his disposition. One
night, Ronald having feigned intoxication and retired to rest, the old
barbarian calculated that he would sleep very soundly, and slunk into
his apartment, armed with a dirk, to stab his son-in-law; but the
young man watched the treacherous hypocrite, and put him to death.
Ronald obtained possession of his paternal estate, and, after a long
and prosperous life, became the founder of a very respectable family.
—Lit. Gazette.
 THE BROKEN RING.

By one of the Authors of the “Odd Volume.”

“Hout, lassie,” said the wily Dame Seton to her daughter, “dinna
blear your een wi’ greeting. What would honest Maister Binks say, if
he were to come in the now, and see you looking baith dull and dour?
Dight your een, my bairn, and snood back your hair—I’se warrant
you’ll mak a bonnier bride than ony o’ your sisters.”
“I carena whether I look bonny or no, since Willie winna see me,”
said Mary, while her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, mother, ye have been
ower hasty in this matter; I canna help thinking he will come hame
yet, and make me his wife. It’s borne in on my mind that Willie is no
dead.”
“Put awa such thoughts out o’ your head, lassie,” answered her
mother; “naebody doubts but yoursel that the ship that he sailed in
was whumelled ower in the saut sea—what gars you threep he’s
leeving that gate?”
“Ye ken, mother,” answered Mary, “that when Willie gaed awa on
that wearifu’ voyage, ‘to mak the crown a pound,’ as the auld sang
says, he left a kist o’ his best claes for me to tak care o’; for he said he
would keep a’ his braws for a day that’s no like to come, and that’s
our bridal. Now, ye ken it’s said, that as lang as the moths keep aff
folk’s claes, the owner o’ them is no dead,—so I e’en took a look o’ his
bit things the day, and there’s no a broken thread among them.”
“Ye had little to do to be howking among a dead man’s claes,” said
her mother; “it was a bonny like job for a bride.”
“But I’m no a bride,” answered Mary, sobbing. “How can ye hae
the heart to speak o’t, mother, and the year no out since I broke a
ring wi’ my ain Willie!—Weel hae I keepit my half o’t; and if Willie is
in this world, he’ll hae the other as surely.”
“I trust poor Willie is in a better place,” said the mother, trying to
sigh; “and since it has been ordered sae, ye maun just settle your
mind to take honest Maister Binks; he’s rich, Mary, my dear bairn,
and he’ll let ye want for naething.”
“Riches canna buy true love,” said Mary.
“But they can buy things that will last a hantle longer,” responded
the wily mother; “so, Mary, ye maun tak him, if you would hae me
die in peace. Ye ken I can leave ye but little. The house and bit garden
maun gang to your brother, and his wife will mak him keep a close
hand;—she’ll soon let you see the cauld shouther. Poor relations are
unco little thought o’; so, lassie, as ye would deserve my benison,
dinna keep simmering it and wintering it any longer, but take a gude
offer when it’s made ye.”
“I’ll no hae him till the year is out,” cried Mary. “Wha kens but the
ship may cast up yet?”
“I fancy we’ll hae to gie you your ain gate in this matter,” replied
the dame, “mair especially as it wants but three weeks to the year,
and we’ll need that to hae ye cried in the kirk, and to get a’ your
braws ready.”
“Oh, mother, mother, I wish ye would let me die!” was Mary’s
answer, as she flung herself down on her little bed.
Delighted at having extorted Mary’s consent to the marriage,
Dame Seton quickly conveyed the happy intelligence to her son-in-
law elect, a wealthy burgess of Dunbar; and having invited Annot
Cameron, Mary’s cousin, to visit them, and assist her in cheering the
sorrowful bride, the preparations for the marriage proceeded in due
form.
On the day before that appointed for the wedding, as the cousins
sat together, arranging the simple ornaments of the bridal dress,
poor Mary’s feelings could no longer be restrained, and her tears fell
fast.
“Dear sake, Mary, gie ower greeting,” said Annot; “the bonny white
satin ribbon is wringing wet.”
“Sing her a canty sang to keep up her heart,” said Dame Seton.
 “I canna bide a canty sang the day, for there’s ane rinnin’ in my
head that my poor Willie made ae night as we sat beneath the rowan-
tree outby there, and when we thought we were to gang hand in hand
through this wearifu’ world,” and Mary began to sing in a low voice.
At this moment the door of the dwelling opened, and a tall, dark-
complexioned woman entered, and saying, “My benison on a’ here,”
she seated herself close to the fire, and lighting her pipe, began to
smoke, to the great annoyance of Dame Seton.
“Gudewife,” said she gruffly, “ye’re spoiling the lassie’s gown, and
raising such a reek, so here’s an awmous to ye, and you’ll just gang
your ways, we’re unco thrang the day.”
“Nae doubt,” rejoined the spaewife, “a bridal time is a thrang time,
but it should be a heartsome ane too.”
“And hae ye the ill-manners to say it’s otherwise?” retorted Dame
Seton. “Gang awa wi’ ye, without anither bidding; ye’re making the
lassie’s braws as black as coom.”
“Will ye hae yer fortune spaed, my bonny May?” said the woman,
as she seized Mary’s hand.
“Na, na,” answered Mary, “I ken it but ower weel already.”
“You’ll be married soon, my bonny lassie,” said the sibyl.
“Hech, sirs, that’s piper’s news, I trow,” retorted the dame, with
great contempt; “can ye no tell us something better worth the
hearing?”
“Maybe I can,” answered the spaewife. “What would you think if I
were to tell you that your daughter keeps the half o’ the gold ring she
broke wi’ the winsome sailor lad near her heart by night and by day?”
“Get out o’ my house, ye tinkler!” cried Dame Seton, in wrath; “we
want to hear nae such clavers.”
“Ye wanted news,” retorted the fortune-teller; “and I trow I’ll gie ye
mair than you’ll like to hear. Hark ye, my bonnie lassie, ye’ll be
married soon, but no to Jamie Binks,—here’s an anchor in the palm
of your hand, as plain as a pikestaff.”
“Awa wi’ ye, ye leein’ Egyptian that ye are,” cried Dame Seton, “or
I’ll set the dog on you, and I’ll promise ye he’ll no leave ae dud on
your back to mend another.”
 “I wadna rede ye to middle wi’ me, Dame Seton,” said the fortune-
teller. “And now, having said my say, and wishing ye a blithe bridal,
I’ll just be stepping awa;” and ere another word was spoken, the
gipsy had crossed the threshold.
“I’ll no marry Jamie Binks,” cried Mary, wringing her hands; “send
to him, mother, and tell him sae.”
“The sorrow take the lassie,” said Dame Seton; “would you make
yoursel and your friends a warld wonder, and a’ for the clavers o’ a
leein’ Egyptian,—black be her fa’, that I should ban.”
“Oh, mother, mother!” cried Mary, “how can I gie ae man my
hand, when another has my heart?”
“Troth, lassie,” replied her mother, “a living joe is better than a
dead ane ony day. But whether Willie be dead or living, ye shall be
Jamie Binks’ wife the morn. Sae tak nae thought o’ that ill-deedy
body’s words, but gang ben the house and dry your een, and Annot
will put the last steek in your bonny white gown.”
With a heavy heart Mary saw the day arrive which was to seal her
fate; and while Dame Seton is bustling about, getting everything in
order for the ceremony, which was to be performed in the house, we
shall take the liberty of directing the attention of our readers to the
outside passengers of a stagecoach, advancing from the south, and
rapidly approaching Dunbar. Close behind the coachman was seated
a middle-aged, substantial-looking farmer, with a round, fat, good-
humoured face, and at his side was placed a handsome young sailor,
whose frank and jovial manner, and stirring tale of shipwreck and
captivity, had pleasantly beguiled the way.
“And what’s taking you to Dunbar the day, Mr Johnstone?” asked
the coachman.
“Just a wedding, John,” answered the farmer. “My cousin, Jamie
Binks, is to be married the night.”
“He has been a wee ower lang about it,” said the coachman.
“I’m thinking,” replied the farmer, “it’s no the puir lassie’s fault
that the wedding hasna been put off langer; they say that bonny
Mary has little gude will to her new joe.”
“What Mary is that you are speaking about?” asked the sailor.
 “Oh, just bonny Mary Seton that’s to be married the night,”
answered the farmer.
“Whew!” cried the sailor, giving a long whistle.
“I doubt,” said the farmer, “she’ll be but a waefu’ bride, for the
sough gangs that she hasna forgotten an auld joe; but ye see he was
away, and no likely to come back, and Jamie Binks is weel to pass in
the world, and the mother, they say, just made her life bitter till the
puir lassie was driven to say she would take him. It is no right in the
mother, but folks say she is a dour wife, and had aye an ee to the
siller.”
“Right!” exclaimed the young sailor, “she deserves the cat-o’-nine
tails!”
“Whisht, whisht, laddie,” said the farmer. “Preserve us! where is he
gaun?” he continued, as the youth sprung from the coach and struck
across the fields.
“He’ll be taking the short cut to the town,” answered the
coachman, giving his horses the whip.
The coach whirled rapidly on, and the farmer was soon set down at
Dame Seton’s dwelling, where the whole of the bridal party was
assembled, waiting the arrival of the minister.
“I wish the minister would come,” said Dame Seton.
“We must open the window,” answered Annot, “for Mary is like to
swarf awa.”
This was accordingly done, and as Mary sat close by the window,
and gasping for breath, an unseen hand threw a small package into
her lap.
“Dear sirs, Mary,” said Dame Seton, “open up the bit parcel, bairn;
it will be a present frae your Uncle Sandie; it’s a queer way o’ gieing
it, but he ne’er does things like ony ither body.” The bridal guests
gathered round Mary as she slowly undid fold after fold. “Hech!”
observed Dame Seton, “it maun be something very precious to be in
such sma’ bouk.” The words were scarcely uttered when the half of a
gold ring lay in Mary’s hand.
“Where has this come frae?” exclaimed Mary, wringing her hands.
“Has the dead risen to upbraid me?”
 “No, Mary, but the living has come to claim you,” cried the young
sailor, as he vaulted through the open window, and caught her in his
arms.
“Oh, Willie, Willie, where hae ye been a’ this weary time?”
exclaimed Mary, while the tears fell on her pale cheek.
“That’s a tale for another day,” answered the sailor; “I can think of
nothing but joy while I haud you to my breast, which you will never
leave mair.”
“There will be twa words to that bargain, my joe,” retorted Dame
Seton. “Let go my bairn, and gang awa wi’ ye; she’s trysted to be this
honest man’s wife, and his wife she shall be.”
“Na, na, mistress,” said the bridegroom, “I hae nae broo o’
wedding another man’s joe: since Willie Fleming has her heart, he
may e’en tak her hand for me.”
“Gude save us,” cried the farmer, shaking the young sailor by the
hand, “little did I ken wha I was speaking to on the top of the coach. I
say, guidwife,” he continued, “ye maun just let Willie tak her; nae
gude e’er yet come o’ crossing true love.”
“’Deed, that’s a truth,” was answered by several bonny
bridesmaids. Dame Seton, being deserted by her allies, and finding
the stream running so strongly against her, at length gave an
unwilling consent to the marriage of the lovers, which was celebrated
amidst general rejoicings; and at the request of his bride, Willie, on
his wedding-day, attired himself in the clothes which the moths had
so considerately spared for the happy occasion.
 A PASSAGE OF MY LIFE.

Maiden aunts are very tough. Their very infirmities seem to bring
about a new term of life. They are like old square towers—nobody
knows when they were built, and nobody knows when they will
tumble down. You may unroof them, unfloor them, knock in their
casements, and break down their doors, till the four old black walls
stand, and stand through storm and sunshine year after year, till the
eye, accustomed to contemplate the gradual decay of everything else,
sickens to look at this anomaly in nature. My aunt, dear good soul,
seemed resolved never to die,—at least to outlive her hopeful
nephew. I thought she was to prove as perdurable as a dried
mummy,—she was by this time equally yellow and exsiccated as any
of the daughters of Pharaoh.
I had run myself quite aground. But my extravagances, as well as
my distresses, I had the policy to conceal from my aged relative. She,
honest lady, occasionally had pressed me to accept of some slight
pittances of two or three £50’s at different times, which, after much
difficulty and entreaty, I made a merit of accepting, stoutly asserting
that I only received them to avoid hurting her feelings—that my own
income was amply sufficient for the limited wants of a scholar, or to
any one who could put in practice the rules of wholesome economy;
but this trifle certainly would enable me to purchase a few rather
expensive publications which I could not otherwise have hoped to do,
and which would prove of essential use in furthering the progress of
the two great works I had commenced while at college, and had been
busy with ever since, viz.: “A History of Antediluvian Literature, Arts,
and Sciences,” and, “A Dissertation on the Military Tactics of the
Assyrians,” which I intended should appear along with the last
volume of Valpy’s Greek Dictionary, or the first of Sir James
Mackintosh’s History of Great Britain.
 Fortune at last grew tired of persecuting me; she fairly turned her
wheel, and put me on the brightest spoke. My aunt’s factor called one
day, and let me know that he thought I should make my visits at
Broadcroft more frequent—take a little interest in looking over the
ditching and draining of the estate (short-sighted man, he little knew
how much I had ditched and drained it by anticipation!)—walk
through the woods and plantations, and bestow my opinion as to
thinning them (they were long ago, in my own mind, transferred to
the timber-yard)—apply myself a little to master the details of
business connected with agricultural affairs, such as markets, green
and white crops, manure, &c. &c.; and concluded by telling me that
his son was a remarkably clever lad, knew country matters
exceedingly well, and would be a most valuable acquisition as factor
or land grieve to any gentleman of extensive landed property. The
drift of this communication I perfectly understood. I listened with
the most profound attention, lamented my own ignorance of the
subjects wherein his clever son was so much at home, and wished
only that I had an estate, that I might entrust it to the care of so
intelligent a steward. After dispatching a bottle or two of claret, we
parted mutually pleased.
He had seen my aunt’s will, and, in the fulness of his heart, ran
over the legal jargon which constituted me the owner of Broadcroft,
Lilliesacre, Kittleford, Westerha’, Cozieholm, Harperston, and
Oxgang, with hale parts and pendicles, woods and fishings, mills and
mill-lands, muirs and mosses, rights of pasturage and commonty. I
never heard more delightful music all my days than the hour I spent
hearkening to this old rook cawing over the excellent lands that were
mine in prospective. My aunt’s letters, after this, I found assumed a
querulous tone, and became strongly impregnated with religious
commonplaces—a sure sign to me that she herself was now winding
up her earthly affairs—and generally concluded with some such
sentence as this: “I am in a comfortable frame of spirit, but my
fleshly tabernacle is sorely decayed—great need hath it of a sure prop
in the evening of its days.” These epistles I regularly answered,
seasoning them with scriptural texts as well as I could. Some, to be
sure, had no manner of connection or application whatsoever; but I
did not care for that if they were there. I stuck them thick and
threefold, for I knew my aunt was an indulgent critic, provided she
got plenty of matter. I took the precaution also of paying the postage,
for I learned, with something like satisfaction, that of late she had
become rather parsimonious in her habits. I also heard that she daily
took much comfort in the soul-searching and faith-fortifying
discourses of Mr Samuel Salmasius Sickerscreed, a migratory
preacher of some denomination or other, who had found it
convenient for some months to pitch his tent in the Broadcroft.
Several of my aunt’s letters told me, in no measured terms, her high
opinion of his edifying gifts. With these opinions, as a matter of
course, I warmly coincided. Sheet after sheet now poured in from
Broadcroft. I verily thought all the worthy divines, from the
Reformation downwards, had been put in requisition to batter me to
pieces with choice and ghostly counsel.
This infliction I bore up against with wonderful fortitude, and
repaid with my weightiest metal. To supply the extraordinary drafts
thus made on my stores of devout phraseology, I had to call in my
worthy friend Tom ——. He had been a regularly-bred theologian,
but finding the casque more fitting for his hot head than the
presbyter’s cowl, he now lived in elegant starvation as a dashing
cornet in the —— Dragoons, and a better fellow never breathed. His
assistance was of eminent service: when we exhausted our own
invention, we immediately transcribed the sermon of some forgotten
divine of last century, and sent it thundering off. These we
denominated shells. At this time Tom’s fortune and mine were
hanging on the same pin; we were both up to the chin in debt; we
had stretched our respective personal credits, as far as they would go,
for each other. We were involved in such a beautiful multitude and
labyrinth of mutual obligations, that we could neither count them
nor see our way out of them. In the holy siege of Broadcroft citadel
we therefore joined heart and hand.
In this manner things went on smoothly. My aunt was becoming
daily weaker, seldom left her own bedroom, and permitted no person
to see her save the Rev. S. S. Sickerscreed. Indeed, every letter I
received from my aunt intimated more plainly than its predecessor
that I might make up my mind for a great and sudden change, and
prepare myself for afflictions. As in duty bound, my answers
breathed of sorrow and resignation—lamented the mutability of this
world—its nothingness—the utter vanity of all earthly joys. I really
loved the good old lady; but I was hampered most villanously. I knew
not a spot where I could put the sole of my foot, without some legal
mine blowing me up a shivered rag into the azure firmament,—a fate
a thousand times more picturesque than pleasant. I may therefore be
excused for confessing that I looked upon my aunt’s release from this
world as the dawn of my own deliverance. Yet, even then, I felt
shame when I looked into the chambers of my heart, and found that
every feeling of grief I had there for my aunt’s illness was beautifully
edged with a gleam of satisfaction. The cypresses and yews, and
other mournful trees that threw their pensive shadows around me,
were positively resting above a burning volcano of joy. No; it was not
in human nature for a desperate man like me to exclude from his
contemplation the bills, bonds, moneys, and manors that had
accumulated for years under her thrifty and prudent management.
One morning, while musing in this indescribable state of feeling, a
little ragged boy, besmeared with dust and sweat, whom I recognised
as turnspit and running footman of the establishment at Broadcroft,
thrust a crumpled greasy-like billet in my hand.
“Come awa, laird, come awa, gin ye would like to see your auld
auntie afore she gangs aff a’thegither.”
I started up, threw down the “Sporting Magazine,” and
instinctively snatched up my hat.
“When did it happen, wee Jamie?”
“This morning, nae far’er gane—but come awa; everything’s gaun
tap-salteerie at Braidcraft—sae unexpected by us a’! Has your horse
been fed yet? Dinna put aff, but come awa. We’re a’ dementit ower
the way, and ye’re muckle wanted, and sair missed.”
With this wee Jamie darted away; I roared after him to obtain
further particulars, but wee Jamie shot off like an arrow, only
twisting his head over his shoulder, notwithstanding his trot, he
screamed—
“Gerss maunna grow under my heels, if I care for my lugs. But it’s
a’ by noo, and there’s nae gude in granin’.”
With which sapient remark the kitchen boy got out of hearing, and
soon out of sight.
I now hastily broke the black wax of the billet. The note was
subscribed by Mr S. S. Sickerscreed, and was written in his most
formal small-text hand. He had been a schoolmaster in his youth,
and could write legibly, which no gentleman who regards his caste
should do. The three big S S S were dearer to me than a collar of
knighthood. It required my immediate presence at Broadcroft to talk
over certain serious and impressive matters. So had Mr Samuel
Salmasius Sickerscreed penned his billet, and in the fulness of my
heart I gave the poor man credit for an excess of delicacy more than I
ever noticed had belonged to him before. Poor dear man, he, too, has
lost a valuable friend. Judging of the exquisiteness of my feelings by
the agony of his own, he has kindly delayed the fatal announcement
of my aunt’s demise, till my heart has been prepared to meet the
shock with becoming fortitude. How considerate—how very
compassionate he has been! Worthy man—would I could repay his
kindness with a benifice! Thus did I soliloquise over the dispatch
from Broadcroft; but notwithstanding the tumult which it and its
bearer raised in my bosom, I did not omit communicating to Tom the
unexpected change which a few hours had produced in our destinies,
and charging him at the same time to moderate his transports till I
returned with a confirmation of our hopes.
Then backing my stoutest hunter, and taking a crow’s flight across
the country, I spared not her heaving flanks, nor drew bridle, till I
reached the long, straight, dusky avenue that led to the tall, narrow
slip of a house yclept Broadcroft Place. Here I slackened my pace,
and left my wearied and panting brute to crawl as lazily as she liked
along the avenue. I, too, lengthened my visage to the requisite degree
necessary for the melancholy purpose on which I came. The very
trees had a lugubrious and sepulchral aspect. I took them in fancy to
be so many Sawlies waiting the time for heading the funeral
procession of my lamented aunt. They seemed to mourn for her in
sincere sorrow, and, in fact, walking under their shadows disposed
my mind very much to melancholy. Now a green leaf, now a withered
one, dropped on my beaver as I passed, and in the deep silence that
reigned around me, I could not, despite my constitutional
recklessness, be wholly insensible to the appeals these mute
emblems of man’s mortality made to reflection.
But a pleasanter train of feelings arose when I looked at the stately
trunks of the venerable oaks, their immense girth, and (with a glow
of patriotic virtue, quite common now-a-days) pictured forth to
myself how admirably they were suited to bear Britannia’s thunders
triumphantly across the wave. Yes, every tree of them shall be
devoted to the service of my country. Perish the narrow thought, that
for its own gratification would allow them to vegetate in unprofitable
uselessness, when they can be so beneficially employed for the state.
Every old, druidical-looking oak which my eye scanned was, of
course, devoted to the axe. I already saw the timber yards piled with
Broadcroft oak, and the distant sea my imagination soon whitened
with a fleet of noble barks wholly built of them. Thus did I speculate
till I reached the end of the avenue, where, to my surprise, I found a
travelling post-chaise and four drawn up before the door of the
mansion. This vehicle, an apparition of rare occurrence in so
secluded a part of the country, and at the residence of so retired a
lady as my departed aunt, was literally crushed with trunks, and
boxes, and bags, and packages of one kind or another, strapped
above, behind, and before it.
Being never unfertile in surmises, I immediately guessed that the
equipage I saw must, of necessity, belong to the clerk to the signet,
my aunt’s city lawyer, who had trundled himself into the country
with the whole muniments of my estate, for the mere purpose of
welcoming me, and regulating my deceased relative’s affairs. His
prompt appearance, I attributed, with my usual goodness of heart, to
the kindly foresight of Mr Samuel. I really did not know how I could
sufficiently recompense him for the warm, disinterested, and
valuable services he had rendered in this season of affliction. But my
aunt must have remembered him in her testament. She was ever
grateful. She cannot possibly have overlooked him. As the d—l would
have it, I then asked myself, now, if your aunt has forgotten Mr
Samuel Salmasius Sickerscreed altogether, how will you act? At first,
I said he must have £100 at least; then as I looked on my own
necessities, the uncertainty of rents, the exorbitance of taxes, this
sum speedily subsided into half the amount. And by the time I fairly
reached my aunt’s door, I found my mind reconciling itself to the
handsome duty of presenting Mr Sickerscreed with a snuff-box, value
£2, 10s., a mourning ring worth 30s., a new coat, and ten guineas; in
all, some twenty pieces of gold or thereby.
On alighting, I gave my horse to the servant to walk and cool. John
was old as his late mistress—a very good, foolish, gray-headed
domestic, marvellously fond of the family he served with, and
marvellously fond of conversation. He looked profoundly melancholy
when he took my reins.
“It’ll be a sair dispensation to you, Maister William,” quoth John,
“this morning’s news. Ye wud be wonderfully struck and put about
when ye heard it.”
“It is, indeed,” said I, throwing as much of mournfulness as
possible into the tones of my voice. “Heavy news indeed, and most
unexpected. Great cause have I to grieve. My poor dear aunt to be
thus lost to me for ever!”
“Nae doubt, nae doubt, Maister William, ye maun hae a heavy
heartfu’. We were a’ jalousing as muckle,—that’s me, Souple Rab, and
wee Jamie; however, it’ll no do to be coosten down a’thegither,—a
rainy night may bring a blithe morrow. Every thing is uncertain in
this world but death! But come on, Kate;” and John and my reeking
jade disappeared in the direction towards the stable; John, no doubt,
bursting with impatience till he could communicate to his select
cabinet, Souple Rab and wee Jamie, the awsome and doncie looks of
the young laird.
I was yet lingering on the threshold in a most comfortable frame of
mind, when the door was thrown open. Imagine my horror when the
first figure I saw was my aunt herself, not in the drapery of the grave,
but bedizzened with ribbons from head to heel, and leaning her
withered hand on the arm of the Reverend Mr Sickerscreed. I gasped
for breath—my tongue swelled and clung to the roof of my mouth—
my eyes literally started from their sockets as if they would leave
their bony casements altogether. Had I not caught hold of the porch,
down I should have dropped.
“Am I in my senses, aunt? Do I see you really alive? Is this no
unreal mockery—no cruel hallucination? Resolve me, for Heaven’s
sake, else I go mad.”
“Dear me, nephew,” said the old lady, “what agitates you so? I feel
so glad that you have paid me this visit ere I set off on my marriage
jaunt with the elect of my heart, your worthy connection, Mr
Sickerscreed.”
“Marriage!” thundered I, “marriage!—I came to mourn over your
bier, not to laugh at your bridal. O, the infernal cruelty, Mr What’s-