Beethoven Heroine: A Female Allegory of Music and Authorship in Egmont

Author(s): Matthew Head

Source: 19th-Century Music , Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 097-132
Published by: University of California Press
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 MATTHEW
HEAD
Beethoven
Heroine

Beethoven Heroine: A Female Allegory

of Music and Authorship in Egmont
MATTHEW HEAD

In 1810 Beethoven acquired Schiller’s play Die
Jungfrau von Orleans (Joan of Arc), and though
he never set the drama of France’s transvestite
military heroine to music, she left a strong
impression. “Without my banner I dare not
go,” he wrote to Bettina Brentano in 1811, analo-
gizing his musical sketchbook to the national
banner carried into battle by Joan of Arc. In the
same letter, Beethoven refers to the frustration
of his marriage plans through another reference
to Schiller’s play: “‘Pity my fate,’ I cry with
Johanna.”1
This article explores why and how this self-
identification with a female heroine made sense
culturally in Beethoven’s day. Such explora-
tion begins by noting that heroism in the late
1
The Letters of Beethoven, ed. and trans. Emily Anderson,
3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961), I, 313 (no. 296, 10 Feb.
1811), cited in Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 210,
346, nn. 21–22. Solomon identifies the quotations from
act V, sc. 14 and act V, sc. 2 respectively.
German Enlightenment was frequently subject
to female embodiment and involved motifs of
transvestism and androgyny.2 Female embodi-
ment and androgyny, however, were not them-
selves “the point” of the heroic so much as the
means through which the heroic was linked to
a range of other ideas. Some of these come as
no surprise to students of the period and of
Beethoven specifically. At the level of the state,
heroines served as figureheads of nation and
patriotism, particularly during the Napoleonic
wars.3 An example appears in Beethoven’s un-
finished incidental music (WoO 96, 1815) to
2
Julie D. Prandi, Spirited Women Heroes: Major Female
Characters in the Dramas of Goethe, Schiller and Kleist
(New York: Peter Lang, 1983); W. Daniel Wilson, “Ama-
zon, Agitator, Allegory: Political and Gender Cross
(-Dress)ing in Goethe’s Egmont,” in Outing Goethe and
His Age, ed. Alice A. Kuzniar (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1996), pp. 125–46.
3
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory
of the Female Form (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson,
1985), pp. 23–25, 31, 36.

19th-Century Music, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 97–132. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2006 by the Regents of 97
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reprintInfo.asp. DOI: ncm.2006.30.2.097.

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 19 TH Leonore Prohaska, a play by Friedrich Dunker
CENTURY
MUSIC celebrating the life, and death in battle, of Marie
Christiane Eleonore Prohaska. At the level of
the family, heroines glamorized conjugal fidel-
ity through the figure of the heroically faithful
or constant wife. Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814) is
the best known of a number of operatic and
dramatic works on this theme.4
The theme was also supported in the con-
temporary press by “real life” examples of such
constancy. Toward the end of the Napoleonic
wars in Germany, Jacobi reported the appar-
ently true story of Caroline Weiß (née Eichner),
who rescued her typhoid-stricken husband from
his military camp. Under the banner heading
“Female Heroism” (Weiblicher Heroismus),
Jacobi reported how Caroline dodged shells and
gunfire as she brought her invalid husband on a
cart to a nearby village, extinguished a roof fire,
secured her husband lodgings despite initial
rejection, and nursed him back to health after
others deemed his case hopeless. But Jacobi
stresses not Caroline’s agency in the abstract
but her fidelity to her husband: her story exem-
plifies the “heroic constancy of a wife”
(heldmüthige Treue [einer] Gattin).5
These versions of the female heroic had a
disciplinary component. They inscribed con-
ventional female roles at precisely the point
where heroines went beyond the private and
domestic spheres and acted with apparent au-
tonomy. The relationship between female hero-
ism and female emancipation was contradic-
tory. On the one hand, the heroic was a sign of
exceptional and exemplary individual achieve-
ment that transgressed the bounds of norma-
4
For example, Ferdinando Paer, Leonora, ossia L’amor
conjugale (1804) and Giovanni Mayr, L’amor conjugale
(1805). On these works, see John A. Rice, Empress Marie
Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792–1807 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 253–56.
5 7
Jacobi, “Weiblicher Heroismus,” Schlesische Provinzial-
blätter 59 (1814), 165–70. See also L. Noël, Die deutschen
Heldinnen in den Kriegsjahren 1807–1815 (Berlin: Julius
Köppen, 1912); and Moritz Stern, Aus der Zeit der deutsch-
en Befreiungskriege 1813–1815, 2 vols. (Berlin: Hausfreund,
1918–38), II, 11–12. Stern reports the case of Luise
Grasemus, a German-Jewish woman who enlisted in 1813
reportedly in order to make contact with her military hus-
band. Distinguishing herself in battle, Grasemus received
a Prussian state pension until her death around 1852.
98
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tive femininity and female domesticity.6 On
the other hand, the heroic served a desire to
fold such transgression back into the then
heteropatriarchal institution of marriage. Fe-
male heroism is of interest to feminist scholar-
ship without necessarily fulfilling feminist de-
sire. The heroic was often a form of female
containment even when it appeared to celebrate
women of exceptional achievement or charac-
ter. Just as earlier periods attached the heroic
sign to women’s “defense” of their chastity,
the late Enlightenment marshaled heroic im-
ages of women’s defense of their husbands, their
marriages, and their fatherland.7
Late Enlightenment constructions of female
heroism were not limited, however, to displays
of conjugal fidelity. Heroines were also em-
ployed as allegories of art and authorship. As
paradoxical as it may seem today, heroines
served as emblems of the male artist as a self-
transcending, boundary-crossing individual. A
later example of this trope, from a very familiar
source, will help to set the stage. Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People (1830) (plate 1) con-
cerns the July Revolution of 1830 against the
absolutism of the French King Charles X.
Delacroix uses the female form as an allegory
of patriotism, heroism, and France itself. But
more than this, Liberty is also a symbol of the
artist and art. Delacroix offered the painting in
lieu of direct involvement in the uprising, writ-
ing to his brother Charles that “I have under-
taken a modern subject, A Barricade . . . and if I
have not fought for the country, at least I will
paint for her.”8
6
In her often brilliant but error-strewn monograph Anatomy
of Heroism (New York: Legas, 2000), Anna Makolkin pro-
poses that “extraordinariness” is the universal meaning of
the heroic as a sign. My use of the semiotic term “sign”
for heroism is inspired by Makolkin. However, I do not
endorse her unevidenced reconstructions of “pre-history”
and her dated anthropology.
See Wendy Beth Heller, Chastity, Heroism, and Allure:
Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice (Ph.D.
diss., Brandeis University, 1995); Gail David, Female Hero-
ism in the Pastoral (New York: Garland, 1991); and Lee R.
Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional
Form (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1984).
8
Letter of 12 October 1830, cited in Jobert Barthélémy,
Delacroix (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1998), p. 130.
 MATTHEW
HEAD
Beethoven
Heroine

Plate 1: Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830).

Reproduced by permission of the Arts and History Picture Library.

Alexandre Dumas relates that during Dela-
croix’s lifetime the musket bearer to the
viewer’s left was considered a self-portrait, a
reading that persists to this day, and under-
standably so, for there is a significant resem-
blance. Toward the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the musketeer in a top hat was identified
as Etienne Arago, a republican active in the
July Revolution. This identification is now
taken as definitive, and the earlier conceit of
Delacroix’s self-interpolation in the canvas
deemed a matter of “mistaken identity.”9 How-
9
Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Criti-
cal Catalogue, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), I,
148.
ever, the “mistake” on the part of Delacroix’s
contemporaries—one that Delacroix did not feel
moved to correct—is significant in its own
terms as part of the reception of the painting
and illustrates the transference of battlefield
heroism to the discourses of art and the artist.
The idea of Delacroix as musket bearer in
Liberty’s wake analogizes the canvas and the
battlefield, the paintbrush and the musket, the
artist and the soldier, but it does so under the
higher symbol of the female heroine in whose
exalted wake the masculine figure trails. Lib-
erty can be read, conventionally, as Delacroix’s
muse, but her centrality and agency suggest
another reading: that she is the artist’s double,
his higher self.

99

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 19 TH Beethoven’s transsexualizing identification
CENTURY
MUSIC with Joan of Arc, a woman who was herself a
transvestite, is invoked here not simply to de-
stabilize his unassailably masculine image as
“the man who freed music” from service to
state, church, commerce, and musical conven-
tion.10 His epistolary transsexuality formed part
of a widespread discourse on the nature of com-
posers and of music. Cross-dressed and mili-
tary heroines functioned as representations of
artists in the late Enlightenment because such
heroines appeared to transcend earthly or mun-
dane categories. Their transcendence of one of
the must fundamental categories of identity,
sex, and their multiple transgressions of
gendered norms, could serve as epitomes of
“freedom” and “transcendence” in the aesthetic
sphere.11
The warrior maiden herself was a venerable
literary type. Cross-dressed female soldiers are
so common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen-
tury literature that one recent critic calls them
“an imaginative preoccupation of the early mod-
ern era, appearing not only in popular street
ballads but in . . . epic, romance, biography,
comedy, tragedy, opera, and ballad opera [as
well].”12 The cultural meaning of warrior maid-
ens proves to be much contested in recent lit-
erature and substantially colored by scholars’
theoretical agendas as well as by the time and
place that form the focus of their research.
Dianne Dugaw reads the military heroines of
early-modern popular balladry as a critique of
heroism itself, the discourse of which enforced
gender stereotypes and sex roles. She sees hero-
ines as combining “both sides of the tradition-
ally bifurcated ideal of Western heroism: fe-
10
I refer here to Robert Haven Schauffler, Beethoven: The
Man Who Freed Music (New York: Tudor, 1946) and the
critical tropes of Beethoven the “emancipator” (p. 364)
contained therein.
11
Since completion of this article, a significant discussion
of Beethoven and androgyny has appeared in Stephen
Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism
in the Late Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2004), chap. 7 “Androgynous Utopias.”
However, Rumph’s focus is on the poetic and music-sty-
listic mixture of masculine and feminine topics in the
Ninth Symphony and Wellingtons Sieg, whereas I explore
images of female heroism in dramatic works.
12
Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry,
1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
p. 1.
100
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male Love and male Glory, Venus and Mars.”13
Emma Donoghue, reviewing Dugaw, Randolph
Trumbach, and Julie Wheelwright, criticizes
the lack of attention to lesbianism in the sto-
ries of warrior maidens. “Exclusive heterosexu-
ality,” she asserts, “could only be maintained
by rigid costume codes,” a point borne out by
the frequent incidents of female same-sex flir-
tation and courtship that appear in memoirs of
female cross-dressed soldiers.14 But Donoghue’s
insistence on a lesbian element to female cross-
dressing before the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury is itself subject to caution by Judith
Halberstram. In Female Masculinity, Halber-
stram warns it is all too easy to read female
masculinities of the past as evidence of female
same-sex identity and desire.15
Amid these disputes about the meaning of
female cross-dressing, the use of transvestite
heroines as allegories of the male artist and
authorship as transcendent appears to go unno-
ticed. I am not aware of any earlier discussion
of this aspect of the meaning of female hero-
ism. This lack of critical literature is not the
only reason why my argument may at first
appear far-fetched. Music composed by women
was often treated with hostility in the early
nineteenth century, so the use of the female
heroine to represent transcendent male author-
ship appears illogical. In the context of bour-
geois women’s social roles and their “femi-
nine” character, female heroism—particularly
when it involved the assumption of a male
military role in the public sphere—amounted
to a conceptual scandal. But the discourse of
the great male author as heroine possessed its
own internal logic. Precisely because women
were subject to severe constraints on their pub-
lic actions, heroines who “broke through” those
13
Ibid., p. 2.
14
Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Les-
bian Culture 1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993), pp.
90 and 91, with reference to Dugaw, Warrior Women,
Randulph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol.
1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlighten-
ment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
and Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids:
Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Lib-
erty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989).
15
Judith Halberstram, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1998), with reference to Donoghue,
Passions Between Women, p. 90.
constraints emblematized freedom from pre-
scribed roles and identities. What better image
to represent an author’s movement from ser-
vant to “free” artist than a woman acting with
heroic self-determination? Beethoven’s identi-
fication with Joan of Arc was more than an
isolated epistolary whim.
Beethoven: Hero or Heroine?
The allegorical meaning of the heroine as tran-
scendent author/composer contributes to our
understanding of Beethoven in his cultural con-
text because it shifts attention to the late
Enlightenment’s discourse of heroism—a dis-
course that differed from the heroic as it figures
in Beethoven studies. One of the fundamental
differences between the contemporary and post-
humous discourses of the heroic around
Beethoven concerns the latter’s attempts to fig-
ure the heroic as a distinctively Beethovenian
province. Simply put, since Beethoven’s death,
scholarship and criticism have tended to figure
the heroic as an intrinsic, and near exclusive,
aspect of Beethoven, as man and composer. But
discourses of the heroic were everywhere in
Beethoven’s world, and the treatment of Ger-
man poets and composers as heroes was com-
mon prior to Beethoven’s “heroic decade.”16
Hannelore Schlaffer traces the discourse of the
artist as hero to the 1780s and finds this trope
in a range of texts connected with Goethe, from
J. H. W. Tischbein’s Goethe portrait, Goethe in
der Campagna (1786–88), to Goethe’s own
16
Joseph Kerman, Alan Tyson, Maynard Solomon, and Wil-
liam Kinderman associate the epithet “heroic” with the
new path that Czerny told us Beethoven spoke of around
1803. See Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 90–92; Alan Tyson,
“Beethoven’s Heroic Phase,” Musical Times 110 (1969),
139–41; Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (London: Cassell,
1978), p. 124; and William Kinderman, Beethoven (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),
p. 11. Solomon differs from Kerman and Tyson in the
extent to which he lends a quasi-libidinal character to
what he terms Beethoven’s “heroic impulse” (p. 203). The
term “impulse” implies a drive in the psychoanalytic sense,
which is born out by Solomon’s assertion that the heroic
builds up and is then released in the course of Beethoven’s
career. Specifically, Solomon writes that Beethoven’s “he-
roic impulse” entered “a state of quiescence following each
of its major manifestations” (p. 203). Freud’s comments on
the waxing and waning of the libido surely influenced
such formulations.
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Torquato Tasso (published 1790), a drama that MATTHEW
HEAD
represents Tasso as a poet who strives not for Beethoven
the praise of his contemporaries but for immor- Heroine
tality.17 Schiller’s drama Die Jungfrau von Or-
leans (1800–01) sets the poet next to mortal
kings at the pinnacle of humanity, while the
poet’s place in Olympus is affirmed in the ear-
lier poem Die Theilung der Erde (1795).18 By
analogy to the heroes of classical antiquity,
who assumed their place among the immortal
gods of Olympus, poets and composers were
honored with marble busts. Crown Prince
Ludwig of Bavaria (subsequently Ludwig I), for
example, constructed a pantheon to famous
German-speaking men, including German art-
ists. Although named Walhalla, Ludwig’s marble
temple was modeled on the Parthenon. Though
the structure was not completed until 1846,
Ludwig had collected his first busts of famous
Germans by 1807.19 Future research could use-
fully explore the extent to which Beethoven
was inspired by contemporary discourses to con-
struct himself and his music as heroic.
Scholarship on Beethoven is sometimes less
about the heroic than of the heroic; it pos-
sesses a ceremonial character. The fact that
heroes are produced within and for culture; the
fact that heroes are honored not simply for
their achievements but by the meaning given
to their achievements; the fact that heroes are
created through a ritual of recognition within
which they are largely passive—these facts are
off limits when we “discover” heroism as
unique to Beethoven’s life and music.20
17
Hannelore Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, 1770–1830
(Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1984), pp. 125–31.
18
Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, p. 125; and Walter
Schafarschik, Friedrich Schiller, Literaturwissen (Stuttgart:
Philipp Reclam, 1999), pp. 125–34.
19
“Schon als Kronprinz kam Ludwig I. 1807 auf die Idee,
für alle großen Deutschen einen Ehrentempel zu errichten,
und die ersten Büsten wurden schon in den Jahren 1807
bis 1812 erstellt.” http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walhalla.
See Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, pp. 125–31. Review-
ing images of the artist from the late Enlightenment,
Schlaffer distinguishes the Volk-Dichter, who sings to and
of the people, from the solitary genius, the poet as hero (p.
126).
20
Elizabeth E. Bauer, Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam:
Die Entstehung eines musikalischen Mythos (Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler, 1992); Hans H. Eggebrecht, Zur Geschichte der
Beethoven Rezeption: Beethoven 1970 (Mainz: Verlag der
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literature, 1972).
101
 19 TH In tracing the differences between the heroic
CENTURY
MUSIC of modern Beethoven studies and the heroic of
the late Enlightenment, my argument returns
to issues of gender that were raised by Scott
Burnham and Sanna Pederson as long as a de-
cade ago. In reviving the debate between
Burnham and Pederson, I do not offer a correc-
tive, but simply supplement their work with a
more historicist and empirical level of analy-
sis. Burnham’s characterization of the heroic in
Beethoven studies as a trope of “overcoming”
is persuasive and is corroborated by earlier re-
ception studies. 21 There is an element of
Burnham’s argument, however, that I find less
convincing. This concerns the relationship be-
tween the posthumous trope of Beethoven’s
music as an enactment of heroic “overcoming”
and notions of the heroic in Beethoven’s own
cultural context. In my reading, Burnham elides
these posthumous and contemporary dis-
courses. The trope of “overcoming” as the es-
sence of the heroic is reported as foundational
to what Burnham calls the “Goethezeit” (age
of Goethe). Specifically, “overcoming” is
granted a central place in discourses of male
identity and male subject formation. This area
of Burnham’s Beethoven Hero is very lightly
annotated. The designation “Goethezeit” is bor-
rowed from Nicholas Boyle’s Goethe biogra-
phy, despite Burnham’s acknowledgment that
Boyle ironizes the term.22 I find the term un-
helpful in this context because it incorporates
the very discourse of the male artist as hero of
history that it seeks to examine.
Beethoven Hero involves a paradox of si-
multaneous inscription and deconstruction of
the heroic. Burnham at once lays bare the insti-
21
Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995). “Overcoming” is Sanna Pederson’s
gloss on Burnham’s conception of the heroic. See her
“Beethoven and Masculinity” in Beethoven and His World,
ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 313–31 (at p. 324).
Burnham himself speaks of struggle and triumph (see
Beethoven Hero, p. xiv). Compare Eggebrecht, Beethoven-
Rezeption and Robin Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aes-
thetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s
Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
22
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 187, n. 1, with reference to
Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1: The
Poetry of Desire, 1749–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), p. 7.
102
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tutional and critical production of Beethoven’s
music as an aesthetically and ethically exalted
paradigm of Western music and at the same
time deems such heroics intrinsic to the mu-
sic. Thus in his introduction Burnham writes:
“I ultimately argue that it is Beethoven who
sounds [the Goethezeit’s] deepest and yet most
vivid keynote, joining, in the élan terrible of
his heroic style, the Goethean dynamic of con-
templation and deed with the Hegelian dialec-
tical trajectory of the self and its conscious-
ness.”23 The comments in which Beethoven
usurps Goethe as the chief representative of a
(constructed) historical era are ceremonial: they
create the hero in the guise of celebrating him.
Burnham’s introduction lends Beethoven’s mu-
sic intrinsic meaning of such philosophical
gravity and historical-cultural eloquence that
a deconstruction of the process by which Beet-
hoven was produced as a hero is compromised
by the reinscription of that same trope.
Beethoven’s own representations of heroism,
along with the discourses of the heroic in the
late Enlightenment, certainly include an idea
of “overcoming,” specifically of self-transcen-
dence. But it is too reductive to deal with the
Enlightenment’s heroic through this term alone,
and factually inaccurate to deem “overcom-
ing” an exclusively male province. Beethoven’s
representations of heroism are frequently sub-
ject to female embodiment and are character-
ized by an androgynous mixture of masculine
and feminine signs. I endorse Pederson’s femi-
nist analysis of the posthumous discourse of
Beethoven Hero as an opportunistic celebra-
tion of Beethoven’s music and character as ex-
clusively and normatively masculine: “The
German tradition that valorizes Beethoven’s
narrative of overcoming has,” she concludes,
“a tradition of viewing woman as an unchang-
ing, eternal essence, as the polar opposite of the
dynamically striving and achieving man.” Here
Pederson refers primarily to nineteenth-century
German philosophy; she notes that novelistic
representations of the sexes are “more com-
plex” and acknowledges that “whether [or not]
one can speak of a female Bildungsroman is
23
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. xviii.
currently a subject of vigorous debate.”24 These
complexities, I suggest, are present within
Beethoven’s own representations of the heroic
in which sex and gender are subject to mixture
and exchange.25 Beethoven’s discourses of the
heroic are creatively flexible in precisely the
realm of sex and gender that ossified in the
composer’s posthumous reception.
Beethoven’s representations of male hero-
ism do not uphold obviously “masculine” char-
acteristics of the hero. For example, the Over-
ture to Beethoven’s incidental music (1807) for
Heinrich von Collin’s drama Coriolan dwells
on the pathos of the hero’s death. A technique
of thematic disintegration at the end of the
piece (also used in the funeral march of the
Eroica Symphony) analogizes the musical and
physical body and reveals the vulnerability and
fragility of the hero.26 The injured, expiring body
of the hero is the occasion for sentiment. More
broadly, en route to its pathetic close, the Over-
ture transforms its opposition of convention-
ally “masculine” and “feminine” themes into
the basis of what Lawrence Kramer describes
as “not a Coriolanus narrative but a Coriolanean
subject-position, the fatality, but also perhaps
the redemption, of which lies in its deep identi-
fication with ‘woman’s tenderness’.”27 This
emphasis on death, emotion, and the violated
body recalls the complex gendering of male
heroism in the visual arts of the contemporary
French Republic, particularly David’s paintings
The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1795–
99) and The Death of Bara (1794).28
24
Pederson, “Beethoven and Masculinity,” in Beethoven
and His World, pp. 326, 325.
25
For a study of this exchange in Beethoven’s Kreutzer
Sonata, see Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual
Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), passim, one
of the texts through which Pederson frames her argument.
The sections on the Kreutzer are collected as “Tolstoy’s
Beethoven, Beethoven’s Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata,” in
Kramer, Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Re-
sponse: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
26
The technique of thematic disintegration is noted in
Solomon, Beethoven, pp. 203–04.
27
Lawrence Kramer, “The Strange Case of Beethoven’s
Coriolan: Romantic Aesthetics, Modern Subjectivity, and
the Cult of Shakespeare,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995),
256–80 at 272, 274, rpt. in Kramer, Critical Musicology
and the Responsibility of Response.
28
Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the
Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
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With the recent article “Beethoven” in the MATTHEW
HEAD
revised New Grove in mind, Beethoven’s life Beethoven
and music still attract low-grade metaphors of Heroine
military masculinity that are dissonant with
the heroic as Beethoven himself constructed it.
The authors see Beethoven engaged in his “early
Vienna period” with “a deliberate campaign to
annex all current musical genres.”29 Barry Coo-
per, in his biography of 2000, joins in with this
appropriation of Beethoven for a politics of force
in speaking of the composer’s “Conquest of
Vienna.”30 As Michael Broyles notes, discus-
sions of Beethoven’s compositional process
based on the sketchbooks view this process
“almost in military terms, with scholars speak-
ing of compositional strategy, of deployment,
of defensive postures, of conflict and resolu-
tion—the entire concept of the compositional
process being seen in terms of Beethoven’s
struggle to conquer and mold notes into some
sort of acceptable pattern.”31 Such vocabulary
recalls Romain Rolland’s Beethoven the Cre-
ator of 1929, which describes Beethoven as “the
Ego of the period of combat” and continues:
“For anyone who can survey these campaigns
of the soul from which stand out the victories
of the Eroica and the ‘Appassionata,’ the most
striking thing is not the vastness of the armies,
the floods of tone, the masses flung into the
assault, but the spirit in command, the impe-
rial reason.”32
1994). Potts argues that before 1789 David presented im-
ages of “heroic austerity” in Oath of the Horatii, Death of
Socrates, and Brutus, involving draped male figures painted
in a “manly roman style” (p. 224). She argues for a more
complex gendering of the heroic male body in David after
1789, one that comes (in The Intervention of the Sabine
Women [1795–99] and The Death of Bara [1794]) to rest on
the “damaged body,” the “pathos of a vulnerable yet in-
domitable subject facing annihilation” (p. 234). After 1789
David, inspired by Winckelmann, turned to nude Greek
males, who are “more sensuously graceful and beautiful”
and incite erotic desire (p. 234).
29
Joseph Kerman, Alan Tyson, and Scott Burnham,
“Beethoven, Ludwig van,” New Grove Dictionary of Mu-
sic and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (2nd edn. New York:
Grove, 2001), vol. 3, 73–140, at p. 98, col. 1.
30
Barry Cooper, Beethoven, The Master Musicians (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 4.
31
Michael Broyles, Beethoven: The Emergence and Evolu-
tion of the Heroic Style (New York: Excelsior, 1987), p.
145.
32
Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, trans. Ernest
Newman (New York: Dover, 1929/R 1964), pp. 3–4.
103
 19 TH Constructions of heroism by Beethoven, his
CENTURY
MUSIC contemporaries, and his collaborators focused
as much on women as on men and involved
ambiguous gendering. That ambiguity is already
glimpsed in Lewis Lockwood’s topos of the he-
roics of resignation personified by the impris-
oned Florestan in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.33
Lockwood’s account of the varieties of heroism
in Beethoven’s music is a major step forward in
our understanding of heroic discourse in
Beethoven’s world and opens up the issues ex-
plored in this article. Gender issues, I suggest,
help to elaborate the meaning of the specific
variety identified by Lockwood. In Fidelio, the
topos of heroic resignation is part of a reversal
of sex roles. In an exchange between the sexes,
the lead female (Leonore, cross-dressed as
Fidelio) takes up the cause of masculine heroic
action (albeit, ultimately, within the frame-
work of being an excellent wife) while her hus-
band, Florestan, is an absent presence in the
first act and spends almost the entire opera in a
dungeon. If the conventionally masculine role
of liberator passes to Leonore, Florestan him-
self exhibits the—by convention—feminine vir-
tues of endurance, resignation, and patience.
There is more at stake than a simple reversal
of roles, however. The double gendering of
Florestan as at once passively enduring his in-
carceration and, prior to the start of the opera’s
plot, an active opponent of political tyranny, is
itself complicated by his Christ-like qualities
(his higher cause, his arrest, his imprisonment
as a kind of entombment). We first see and hear
Florestan at the opening of act II in his recitative
(“Gott! Welch Dunkel hier”) and aria (“In des
Lebens Frühlingstagen”). Here he declares his
Christian belief and refers to Christ’s example
and God’s will as the foundations of his accep-
tance of his ordeal and his fate. The recitative
runs as follows: “O God! How dark it is! How
terrible this silence! Here in this void no living
thing comes near. O cruel ordeal! But God’s
will is just. I’ll not complain; for He has de-
creed the measure of my suffering.” The first
part of this two-tempo aria expresses some-
33
Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven, Florestan, and the Variet-
ies of Heroism,” in Beethoven and His World, pp. 27–47
(at p. 43).
104
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thing approaching the antithesis of Burnham’s
heroic overcoming: the “sweet solace” (süsser
Trost) that sustains the imprisoned hero.
Florestan attributes this comforting sentiment
to a sense of doing his duty (Pflicht), pre-
sumably to God. What Lockwood calls Flores-
tan’s “heroism of endurance” involves a belief
system (not unique to Christianity) that trades
physical strength for spiritual fortitude.
Florestan’s imprisonment is not only the con-
dition of possibility for his display of heroic
endurance but a metaphor for the interiorization
of the heroic itself: its containment within the
spiritual-emotional life of the individual.
The slow first section of Florestan’s aria “In
des Lebens Frühlingstagen” marshals musical
signs of exaltation (associated specifically with
Florestan’s sense of fulfilling his duty) within
the prevailing and framing topos of sweet, Chris-
tianized solace—the hero’s “süsser Trost.” The
latter is constructed through the Adagio tempo,
triple meter, diatonicism, legato articulation,
and a predominantly conjunct melody inter-
spersed with appoggiaturas. The scoring for a
reduced, quiet band of strings and woodwinds
is inwardly strengthened with the sustained,
binding notes of French horns. Florestan’s ref-
erence to having done his duty (“meine Pflicht
hab’ ich gethan!”) forms a climax, a moment of
internal exaltation, within this overarching
topos of sweet solace. Crucially, however,
Beethoven does not allow the more animated
music literally to break through or “overcome”
the topos of passive endurance. In approaching
the cadence at the end of the first part of the
aria, Florestan’s voice reaches up modestly to a
high G
appoggiatura (m. 29). This gesture of
sensibility, highlighting the word “Pflicht,”
does not at all threaten to break the frame, and
Florestan’s voice falls back resignedly into an
understated authentic cadence.
Beethoven, responsive to the libretto, resists
any temptation to inscribe heroic striving when
Florestan’s aria approaches the boundary be-
tween its Adagio and Poco allegro sections. As
a two-tempo aria, “In des Lebens Frühlings-
tagen” was well placed to offer a musical ver-
sion of a hero’s striving for freedom. Florestan
might have moved, for example, from the sweet
solace of his faith to a more vigorous anticipa-
tion of escape and of subsequent reengagement
with his political cause of resisting despotism.
But in keeping with the text, there is no com-
positional enactment of “overcoming.” The
Adagio closes gently and is followed immedi-
ately by an animated Poco allegro in which
Leonore appears to Florestan as an apparition.
Thus the “freedom” displayed in the second
section of the aria is the freedom of the imagi-
nation, fired by love, within a static acceptance
of imprisonment. The fact that Florestan’s vi-
sion of Leonore is also a prophecy—for in the
next scene Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, begins
her search for her husband’s underground cell—
further distances Florestan from rationality and
action. His imprisonment involves a loss of
masculinity; it brings him under the control of
such signs as darkness, death, passivity,
“mother earth,” water, faith, spirit, and visions,
all signs variously and unstably coded in the
late Enlightenment as Other and as feminine.34
The topos of sweet solace exists at a point of
furthest remove from the discourse of “the dy-
namically striving and achieving man” (to re-
call Pederson’s words). This discourse could be
theatrically enacted through an attempt at es-
cape, but Florestan does not pursue his libera-
tion. He embodies the “eternal essence” that
the aged Goethe personified in the figure of
“the feminine,” just as, through a similar ex-
change, Fidelio takes up the mantle of heroic
self-endangerment and actively rescues her
spouse. These motifs of transvestism do not
exist simply to disrupt the sex/gender system.
Instead they serve as signs of both Florestan’s
and Leonore/Fidelio’s transcendence of the
mundane. The transvestite motifs grant the he-
roic couple access to a “higher” transcendental
realm of Christian and Enlightenment ideals.
The practice of cross-dressing, broadly con-
ceived not just as the exchange of clothing be-
tween men and women but also as the ex-
change of dramatic role and character, is linked
here to moral and political idealism and not
(primarily or exclusively) to downward trav-
esty and farce. Cross-dressing is marshaled in
34
See Gretchen A. Wheelock, “Schwarze Gredel and the
Engendered Minor Mode in Mozart’s Operas,” in Musicol-
ogy and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Schol-
arship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993), pp. 201–24.
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defense not just of marriage but of the MATTHEW
HEAD
Enlightenment’s rhetorics of humanity and free- Beethoven
dom. Heroine
Christianity wrought havoc with the mas-
culine gendering of the classical heroic by cel-
ebrating what were by “pagan” standards the
passive, effeminate virtues of forgiveness and
cheek-turning over physical action, opposition,
and struggle. Despite the evidence of the Cru-
sades, battlefield gore and slaughter were not
easily reconciled with official Christian ethics.
If love and peace were parts of the Christian
message, then significant elements of the clas-
sical heroic were sinful. This problem was
spelled out in an English text of the mid-eigh-
teenth century.35 Employing a common autho-
rial conceit, the “editor” claims to have discov-
ered a collection of letters from the mid-seven-
teenth century in which warlike heroism is
deemed the proper province of God alone in the
context of his wrath at sin and disobedience.
Christians must therefore “abstain from War
and Fighting.” They must follow the example
of Christ in whom heroism took the form of
“fortitude,” “patience,” and “forbearance.”
Christian heroism “conquers by continual For-
bearance, and subdues the Malice of its En-
emies by the divine Power and Force of invin-
cible Love.”36 This notion of Christian forbear-
ance is similar to the trope of resignation that
Lockwood identifies in Fidelio, and which ap-
pears again in Egmont when the eponymous
hero is imprisoned and then executed. That is,
men became heroes by enduring the enforced
passivity of unjust incarceration and even sac-
rifice. This physical passivity extinguished
“masculine force” and set heroism on a more
exalted ethical plane. The mixture of materials
suggesting, on the one hand, resignation (and
its analogues: reflection, acceptance, passivity,
lament) and, on the other hand, struggle (wres-
tling energy, force, forward drive, physical
35
“H. B.,” A Letter concerning the Glory and Excellency of
the peaceable state of the Kingdom of the Messiah; wherein
the nature of warlike heroism, and that of Christian forti-
tude, are distinguished (London: n.p., 1755). The editor’s
preface is signed: “J. B.” In the British Library online cata-
logue, “J. B.” is identified as Joseph Besse. It is possible
that Besse, or a relative, was the author of the Letter and
not just of its “editorial” preface.
36
Ibid., pp. i, iv.
105
 19 TH strength) in Beethoven’s music from all periods
CENTURY
MUSIC of his career warrants further investigation in
this light.37
The relationship between Christian heroism
and gender was richly complex. A late-nine-
teenth-century text, for example, sets out to
deconstruct the superficial dichotomy between
classical warlike heroism as masculine and
Christian fortitude as effeminate or feminine.
John Coleman Adams argued in 1891 that all
forms of the heroic are in essence androgynous
because they involve a mixture of masculine
and feminine characteristics:
The charge is frequently brought against Christian-
ity that it bestows a special patronage upon the
passive virtues, reversing the honors men have usu-
ally paid to those of the heroic type, and claiming for
meekness the praise which once went to courage,
and for self-sacrifice what used to be bestowed on
personal force. Christian ethics, it is said, do not
encourage the active and aggressive qualities. . . .
[However] the strength which bears down opposi-
tion, which upsets and resists and encroaches and
carries by storm, must be supplemented by the
strength which can control self, endure, submit, con-
cede, and bid the turning of the tide. In the very field
in which the martial and the patriotic virtues shine
most brilliantly, underlying personal prowess, bold
generalship, defiance of danger, is a strength knit up
of implicit obedience, the abnegation of self, the
submission of the subordinate to the superior will.
The glory of the conqueror’s crown shines with the
mild luster of the passive virtues.38
This heroization of submission resonates with
biographical narratives of Beethoven that stress
his resignation in the face of personal suffering
and his acceptance of harsh fates (deafness,
unrequited love). In his autobiography Aus
meinem Leben (1861), Ludwig Rellstab evoked
this Christian-heroic tropology in recounting a
37
Such an investigation might draw on Richard Kramer’s
discussion of the song Resignation (WoO 149, 1817) in
“Lisch aus, mein Licht: Song, Fugue, and the Symptoms of
a Late Style,” Beethoven Forum, vol. 7, ed. Mark Evan
Bonds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp.
67–88. In the conclusion to this richly suggestive chapter,
Kramer links resignation to late-style topics of “question-
ing and seeking” and “the exhaustion of Art itself” (at p.
81).
38
John Coleman Adams, Christian Types of Heroism (Bos-
ton: Universalist, 1891), pp. 7, 9–10.
106
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meeting with Beethoven in 1825. Beethoven
had been subjected in life to “cruel renuncia-
tory tests,” Rellstab reported. Through them
Beethoven emerged as a “sacred presence”; in
Rellstab’s imagination, the biographical trope
of Christian heroism opened a doorway to an
ideology of art as religion.39 The rhetorical con-
ceits of the composer’s own Heiligenstadt Tes-
tament suggest that the Christian heroization
of mortal suffering was available to Beethoven
not just as a way of expressing pain but as a
mode of self-representation.
Though far-removed from Beethoven’s
Viennese context, these comments shed light
on why the composer and his contemporaries
so frequently subjected the heroic to an an-
drogynous female embodiment. “Woman,” with
her reported weakness of body, distanced the
heroic from a crude, “pagan” display of physi-
cal force: she brought a morally elevating touch
even to the battlefield. As for androgyny, this
involved the complex mixture of “passive” and
“active” virtues identified above. The stage is
now set for an exploration of Beethoven’s own
representations of heroism.
Heroism and the Late Enlightenment
Beethoven only once used the word “hero” in a
title: not for the Symphony No. 3 (1804), which
is a “Sinfonia Eroica” (Heroic Symphony) ini-
tially titled “Bonaparte,” but for the slow third
movement of the Piano Sonata, op. 26, “Marcia
funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe” (Funeral March
on the Death of a Hero).40 The hero is not
specified, suggesting that this is a generic fu-
neral march, not an occasional piece. The ge-
neric register of this honoring of the hero itself
gives the lie to the specificity, the uniqueness,
attending the heroic epithet as applied to
Beethoven himself. Audiences are invited to
make their own specific attribution, to supply
their own hero. As far as gender is concerned,
“Eroe” is the masculine form of the noun, while
the context of the Piano Sonata sets the piece
39
Cited from Beethoven: Impressions of Contemporaries,
ed. [O. G. Sonneck] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927),
p. 181.
40
On the title of Symphony No. 3, see Solomon, Beethoven,
p. 133.
equivocally in the private sphere and implies a
female performer (though of course men played
the piano at home too). The piece gently sexes
the fallen hero as male, the performer/mourner
as female, though any number of personal in-
scriptions by the performer and audience are
possible.
The mobility of sex and gender in the Enlight-
enment’s heroic is evident in the subsequent
history of this movement. In 1815 Beethoven
orchestrated the march as part of his incidental
music for Leonore Prohaska. As Hans-Günther
Klein explains, the drama “tells the true story of
a young woman from Potsdam who disguised
herself as a man, took the name of Renz and
enlisted with the Volunteer Rifles in the Wars of
Liberation [against Napoleonic France], receiv-
ing a fatal wound in a skirmish in 1813.”41 In its
orchestrated form, the funeral march projects
one of the central allegorical images of the Revo-
lutionary Era: woman as a figurehead of nation
and a template of masculine heroism. The fe-
male allegory of nation and national unity was
long established—Britannia dates back to the
Roman conquest of Britain—but such images
proliferated in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the period that inaugu-
rated Marianne as the image of the French Re-
public.42 The fact that this music was also played
at Beethoven’s own funeral hints at an associa-
tion of the composer/artist with female hero-
ism.43
Beethoven’s music for Leonore Prohaska dis-
rupts male monopolies on heroic military ac-
tion. This is not the same, however, as a feminist
intervention into patriarchy; the disruptions of
sexual norms in Leonore Prohaska are of inter-
est to, but not fully compatible with, modern
feminist politics of women’s equality to men.
41
Hans-Günther Klein, “Beethoven’s Music for the Stage
and Various Other Works,” in Complete Beethoven Edi-
tion (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1997), vol. 3 (Or-
chestral Works, Music for the Stage), pp. 32–33.
42
Britannia appeared as early as A.D. 119 on a Roman coin
as an image of English capture by Rome; she was revived
in the seventeenth century for English coinage. See Warner,
Monuments and Maidens, pp. 45–46. On Marianne, see
pp. xx, 27, 267–68, 270.
43
On the music of Beethoven’s funeral, see Christopher H.
Gibbs, “Performances of Grief: Vienna’s Responses to the
Death of Beethoven,” in Beethoven and His World, pp.
227–85.
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As the commemoration of a named heroine, MATTHEW
HEAD
Prohaska’s funeral march belongs among those Beethoven
feminine allegories of nation in which Marina Heroine
Warner sees the ironic negation of women’s
public role.44 The disruptive effect of the public
celebration of Prohaska as a military heroine is
limited by the overarching category of military
masculinity that is temporarily stabilized in the
figure of the fallen woman solider. A melodrama
for Prohaska, however, destabilizes this link
between heroism and masculinity. Prohaska’s
dying monologue (prior to the funeral march) is
a call for love and loyalty, implicitly to the
Fatherland:
Oh you for whom [my flowers] were entwined,
Two flowers were yours, [one] for love and [one
for] loyalty:
Now I can dedicate only funeral flowers to you,
But on my tombstone
Lilies and roses grow anew.45
Beethoven set this speech to the accompani-
ment of the glass harmonica, an instrument
whose ethereal tones were associated with femi-
ninity and the female body.46 In Enlightenment
terms this feminization of the heroic reflects a
civilizing impulse to refine heroism, to purge it
of its blood and gore, at least in public repre-
sentation if not battlefield practice.47 An at-
44
“Liberty is not represented as a woman, from the colos-
sus in New York to the ubiquitous Marianne, figure of the
French Republic, because women were or are free. In the
nineteenth century, when so many of these images were
made and widely disseminated, the opposite was conspicu-
ously the case. . . . Often the recognition of a difference
between the symbolic order, inhabited by ideal, allegorical
figures, and the actual order, of judges, statesmen, sol-
diers, philosophers, inventors, depends on the unlikeli-
hood of women practising the concepts they represent”
(Warner, Monuments and Maidens, pp. xix–xx).
45
Translation, slightly altered, from Lionel Salter, texts
and translations for Complete Beethoven Edition, vol. 3,
Orchestral Works, Music for the Stage, p. 165.
46
Heather Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the
Glass Harmonica,” Journal of the American Musicologi-
cal Society 53 (2000), 507–42.
47
However, writers tend to portray this as a distinctive
feature of the period of their own research. John M.
Steadman, Milton and the Paradoxes of Renaissance Hero-
ism (Batan Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987),
notes the repugnance of Renaissance Stoics and
Neoplatonists at the violence detailed in Homer’s epics
and the turn to sanitized allegorical readings of battle. A
similar notion of moral progress informs the attempts of
Christian theologians to figure love and forgiveness as the
107
 19 TH tempt to refine earlier notions of heroism—to
CENTURY
MUSIC improve the heroic—is an almost universal ele-
ment of the discourse of the heroic through the
centuries, and we can detect in the memo-
rialization of Prohaska a use of “woman” and
“the feminine” not just to sentimentalize but
morally to refine battlefield gore. As seen in
Fidelio, the category “woman” was so closely
tied to ideas of affectionate loyalty to men that
Leonore Prohaska also served, by analogy, as an
image of male loyalty to the Fatherland. The
heroine was a way of imagining patriotism.
The biography of Eleonore Prohaska reveals
that music played an important part in articu-
lating, even fostering, her transformations from
young woman to cross-dressed solider, to mar-
tyr, and finally to memorialized heroine. Mu-
sic, androgyny, and heroism were intimately
connected in her life, at least as that has come
down to us. Prohaska (1785–1813) was the
daughter of a military musician who taught her
to play the flute, an instrument rarely culti-
vated by women in this period. Placed in an
orphanage when her father was in active ser-
vice (1794–97) due to a reportedly “neglectful”
mother, Leonore subsequently worked as a cook
and kept house for her father and two sisters.48
As a further measure of her distance from bour-
geois femininity, she appeared on the public
stage in Berlin as a flutist alongside her father,
probably between 1810 and 1813. As if with an
eye to dramatic symbolism, Prohaska exchanged
her flute for a rifle in 1813 when she enlisted,
under the name August Renz, in the volunteer
corps of General Adolf Freiherr von Lützow.
She gave her age as eighteen to help explain her
lack of beard. Tall and slim with powerful limbs,
she cut a fine figure in uniform, but she was
still teased for her delicate voice. Her role in
camp was ambiguous. While a great success
with a rifle (“I hit the target 150 times!”), she
essence of heroism, Christ as the ultimate hero: see
Makolin, Anatomy of Heroism, p. 34. In a musical con-
text, Leon Plantinga notes late-twentieth-century skepti-
cism over heirloom heroes from the era of imperial con-
quest and exploration. See his Beethoven’s Concertos: His-
tory, Style, Performance (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 8.
48
For biographical information on Prohaska, see Freia
Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper: Die musizierende Frau
in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991),
pp. 380–92 (at p. 382). Hoffmann’s documentary study forms
the basis of my interpretations.
108
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nonetheless assumed the female tasks of cook-
ing and sewing. Her persona was androgynous,
not definitely masculine, and she was relieved
to share quarters with a fifteen-year-old boy,
“little Arnold.”49 This mixture of masculine
and feminine signs recalls Beethoven’s music
for Leonore Prohaska: the androgynous whole-
ness of its mixture of military and lyrical top-
ics, the somber funeral march following
Leonore’s sacred and feminine monologue with
glass harmonica, her strophic Romance follow-
ing the Soldiers’ Chorus, and the libretto’s ref-
erences to battle and flowers, love and war.
In a letter to her brother, the real-life Eleonore
presented herself as a template for masculine
courage: “Dear good brother, once you said that
I must not turn your heart into that of a woman,
but must try to rouse great courage in you. See,
then, my dear, I’m thinking of you now. . . . I go
to war decisively and full of courage.”50 This
self-representation is not unlike Delacroix’s rep-
resentation of Liberty. In both cases “woman”
functions as an emblem of the “manly virtue”
of military courage. Also like Delacroix’s Lib-
erty, Eleonore rallied her comrades and led them
into battle. Though no painted allegory, she
was nonetheless a symbolic focal point during
combat, providing the signal through her drum-
ming. This percussive role extended the gender
transgression of her flute playing prior to en-
listing and lends a distinctively musical thread
to her story. Eleonore died on 5 October 1813,
from wounds sustained in a battle on 16 Sep-
tember in the forest area of Göhrede, in present
day Lüchnow-Dannenberg. Shortly before her
fatal wounding, she took up the military signal
drum because the drummer, Friedrich Förster,
was unable to continue after a minor injury. In
this capacity, Förster stated, Eleonore rallied
the troops and led them into combat.51 His
description lent Eleonore a quasi-authorial role:
she orchestrated the battle with her drum beats.
Female masculinity, heroism, and music were
closely linked not only as representational con-
ceits but also in the biography of the heroines
of Beethoven’s era.
49
Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, pp. 385, 386.
50
Ibid., p. 386.
51
Ibid., pp. 387–88.
 MATTHEW
HEAD
Beethoven
Heroine

Plate 2: Anon., [Eleonore Prohaska wounded in battle], from Wilhelm Oertel von Horn,
Vier Deutsche Heldinnen aus der Zeit der Befreiungskriege (Wiesbaden: n.p., [1864]).
Reproduced by permission of the British Library (10706.aa.25 between 72 and 73).

The reason Beethoven’s music for Dunker’s
Leonore Prohaska remained unfinished lay
not in any obscurity of subject matter but, on
the contrary, the subject’s wide popularity.
Beethoven and Dunker were pipped at the post
on 23 February 1814 by what the AmZ reported
as a “musical Academy, with recitation and
exhibition of paintings” that celebrated the lib-
eration of Vienna from Napoleonic occupation.
In this academy, two items were dedicated to
Eleonore: a poem by Fr. Pichler, recited by Dem.
Adamberger, and a tableau vivant thought to
be conceived by Friedrich Tremel, a stage de-
signer and painter at the Hofburgtheatre, de-
picting “Leonore Prohaska, as royal, Prussian
solider August Renz, surrounded by comrades,
after receiving a wound.”52 A later nineteenth-
century engraving of the wounded Eleonore sur-
rounded by her comrades gives us some idea of
how the tableau might have looked (plate 2).
52
Ibid., p. 389.

109

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 19 TH EGMONT
CENTURY
MUSIC
Although Beethoven’s Leonore Prohaska re-
mained incomplete, the triangulation of female
masculinity, heroism, and music provides a new
understanding of one of his better-known works,
the incidental music to Goethe’s tragedy
Egmont. Beethoven’s incidental music (op. 84,
1809–10) for Goethe’s five-act drama Egmont
(1774–87) was commissioned by the director of
the Imperial Theatre in Vienna, Joseph Hartl
Edlen von Büchsenstein, in the wake of the
occupation of the city by Napoleonic troops in
May 1809.53 In this context, Egmont was topi-
cal because it deals with national resistance to
foreign occupation. Unlike Beethoven’s works
of the Congress period celebrating the defeat of
Napoléon, which are generally depreciated for
their “bombastic rhetoric and ‘patriotic’ ex-
cess,” the composer’s incidental music for
Egmont is almost always praised as a positive
example of his “heroic” style. (Adorno’s criti-
cisms of the heroics of the Egmont Overture
are an exception to which I will return.)
Maynard Solomon groups Egmont with Fidelio
and the Third and Fifth Symphonies as works
that sublimate “the ‘ideological/heroic’ man-
ner . . . into a subtle and profound form of
expression.”54 The basis of these distinctions
between “good” and “bad” versions of the he-
roic are rarely made explicit, but seem to in-
volve aesthetic distaste for music that makes
its ideological engagement explicit.55
Beethoven’s reading of the dramas of Schiller
and Goethe is often summoned by biographers
as evidence of the composer’s attachment to
male heroes and the political visions those he-
53
Beethoven Werke IX/7, Musik zu Egmont und andere
Schauspielmusiken, ed. Helmut Hell (Munich: G. Henle,
1998). The overture was published by Breitkopf and Härtel
in 1811, the remaining incidental music in 1812. Goethe’s
Egmont was published in 1788 and is available in Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke: Hamburger
Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1982), vol. 4 (Dramatische Dichtungen II), pp. 370–454. A
translation by Michael Hamburger is available in Goethe:
The Collected Works, 12 vols., vol. 7: Early Verse Drama
and Prose Plays, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and Frank Ryder
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 83–151.
54
Solomon, Beethoven, pp. 222, 222–30.
55
See Nicholas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Heroism,
the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14,” this journal 27
(2003), 3–24.
110
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roes are said to embody. Solomon aligns
Beethoven’s political thinking with the mes-
sages of a “German drama” that he understands
to be peopled by aristocratic male heroes who
“dissolve the tangled problems of the relations
between masters and men.”56 But these easy
appeals to “German drama” and its self-evi-
dent meanings are problematic both method-
ologically and factually.
In 1983 Julie Prandi noted the prominence of
what she called “the spirited woman hero” in
dramas of Kleist, Schiller, and Goethe written
between the late 1780s and 1810, for example,
the eponymous heroines of Kleist’s Pentheselia
and Das Kätchen von Heilbronn, Schiller’s
Maria Stuart and Jungfrau von Orleans, and
Goethe’s Iphigenie and Die näturliche Tochter.
These women “occup[y] center stage” and “try
to assert . . . political influence” and their own
will against other characters’ presumption of
their deference to male authority and/or the
domestic identity of mother and wife.57 Though
retaining components of femininity as then de-
fined, these women differ from the virtuous
and passive female characters of more conspicu-
ously bourgeois dramas concerned with family
conflicts like Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson, or
secondary female characters in dramas about
male heroes, like Marie in Goethe’s Götz von
Berlichingen. In Goethe’s Egmont, which
Solomon offers as an example of male heroism
gripping the Beethovenian imagination, the lead
female character, Klärchen, Egmont’s mistress,
purchases her power from, and even borrows
from the wardrobe of, the titular hero who, in
W. Daniel Wilson’s words, is “passive and in-
ert” for much of the play.58
Prandi sets the heroines of late-eighteenth-
century German drama in the context of the
period’s contestation over the nature of women
and their place in the world: the debate be-
tween figures like Mary Wollstonecraft and von
Hippel, who, on the one hand, sought a thor-
ough application of Enlightenment rhetorics of
equality to women, and Humboldt and Fichte,
who, on the other, employed the evidence of
56
Solomon, Beethoven, p. 39.
57
Prandi, Spirited Women Heroes, p. 2.
58
Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” p. 144.
biology and tradition to diagnose women as
passive and dependent by both nature and nur-
ture. In their battle against their own sex and
the expectations of other characters, the hero-
ines of the era’s German drama exemplify the
self-determination, the attempt to free them-
selves from tutelage (as internally and exter-
nally imposed constraints on one’s self) that
Kant set at the heart of Enlightenment. Kant
implicitly figured the use of reason as heroic
because it involves daring and courage; it is a
kind of action, it grants autonomy, and it is a
force that opposes and challenges irrational au-
thority.59
Female heroism is central to Goethe’s five-
act tragedy Egmont. This aspect of the drama is
overlooked in the musicological literature, un-
derstandably perhaps, as the female heroic is
not obvious from a summary of the plot. Based
on historical fact and set in Brussels in 1568,
the play is among other things a love story
between Egmont and Klärchen. Both are na-
tives of the Netherlands (encompassing Bel-
gium at that time), Egmont a nobleman and
local governor, Klärchen a Burgher’s daughter.
Against the backdrop of Spanish occupation,
Egmont is imprisoned and Klärchen takes her
own life with poison. In a final scene in
Egmont’s dungeon, Klärchen appears to him in
his sleep as the allegorical figure Liberty. In a
musical pantomime she reveals that through
his impending execution the Netherlands will
be freed. Even at the level of plot summary,
however, musicologists have tended to offer
excessively normalizing and male-biased précis.
William Kinderman omits all reference to
Klärchen, providing a summary of the play as if
it were about an active heroic Egmont: “In
59
Prandi does not read or even invoke Kant in this way,
but my reading is inspired by her account of heroines in
German drama. In Lewis White Beck’s translation, the
relevant passage from Kant reads: “Enlightenment is man’s
release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s
inability to make use of his understanding without direc-
tion from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its
cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution
and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere
aude! ‘Have courage to use your reason!’–-that is the motto
of enlightenment” (Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlighten-
ment?” in Kant On History, ed. and trans. Lewis White
Beck [New York: Macmillan, 1963], pp. 3–10, at p. 3).
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Goethe’s play, the Flemish Count Egmont faces MATTHEW
HEAD
execution by the Spaniards, against whom he Beethoven
has led an uprising. He accepts his fate proudly, Heroine
predicting liberation of his country.”60 A couple
of problems here: there is no reference to
Egmont leading an uprising, and it is not Egmont
but the figure of Liberty, endowed with
Klärchen’s features, who predicts the libera-
tion of his country.
In a complex exchange, Goethe purchases
heroism for Klärchen from the lead male char-
acters. Indeed, Egmont sidelines male heroism.
With the opening dialogue between Dutch
Burghers, Egmont’s heroic military feats have
already passed into fable; during the play he
does next to nothing. Since her childhood,
Klärchen has possessed a woodblock print of
one of Egmont’s famous battles—the first of
the means by which Egmont himself is trans-
formed from an active male hero into a static
signifier of heroism. When Klärchen posthu-
mously appears in the exalted guise of Liberty
to the imprisoned Egmont, the latter’s passiv-
ity is intensified. Asleep and about to be sacri-
ficed, Egmont is every bit the victim. His sym-
bolic crowning acts like the medium of the
woodblock print to render him a sign of hero-
ism, but not the embodiment of the thing it-
self. By honoring the hero, culture feminizes
him. He is rendered passive, an ideal; he is
initiated into precisely that allegorical realm
inhabited already by woman.61
Egmont’s own ideas on liberty are briefly
explored in his conversation with Alba at the
end of act IV. Egmont espouses a version of
sovereign rule in which the relationship be-
tween subjects and hereditary monarch is soft-
ened by quasi-familial bonds. According to this
political-social ideal, the people of the Nether-
lands will be the loving brothers of the heredi-
tary nobles and kings who rule over them.
Egmont objects to foreign tyranny because it is
60
Kinderman, Beethoven, p. 147.
61
Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” p. 136 and passim,
stresses Egmont’s passivity. My reading differs from
Wilson’s in the consideration of music and specifically
female heroism, issues that lead to a different interpreta-
tion of the dungeon scene.
111
 19 TH foreign and, as such, disrupts the familial model
CENTURY
MUSIC of sovereignty:
EGMONT: And it is just as natural that the citizen
should wish to be ruled by those who
were born and bred where he was, who
were imbued with the same ideas of
right and wrong, whom he can look
upon as brothers.
ALBA: And yet the aristocracy can hardly be
said to have shared equally with these
brothers.
EGMONT: This occurred centuries ago and is now
accepted without envy.62
In this exchange, Alba highlights the short-
comings of Egmont’s familial ideal: if society is
bound by fraternal bonds, how is social inequal-
ity to be understood and justified? Alba casts
doubt on the metaphor of brotherhood, and it is
unclear whether Egmont’s riposte, an appeal to
tradition and history, resolves this doubt. The
dialogue raises more questions than it answers.
Goethe does not provide easy solutions and
appears to critique the idealism of Egmont as
much as the tyranny of Alba.
Gender confusion is not brought to this play
by the critic; it preoccupies the characters, who
disagree with each other about how to explain
departures from sexual norms. For example,
Egmont describes the Spanish Regent Margarete
as a mustachioed virago in an attempt to stabi-
lize a distinction in his own mind between
good and bad versions of woman: “She has a
little moustache too, on her upper lip, and oc-
casional attacks of gout. A real Amazon!” But
Klärchen immediately counters this descrip-
tion of Margarete as some kind of gender mon-
ster with the ejaculation “a majestic woman!”63
Margarete herself voices criticism of the old
men at court who demean her as a woman, a
comment that rises above Egmont’s own at-
tempt at ridicule. Through the gentler tyranny
of her rule, which eschews force, Margarete
comes to embody just the type of benign despo-
62
Egmont, in Goethe: The Early Verse Drama and Prose
Plays, trans. Hamburger, p. 133.
63
Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” pp. 128–29, with
reference to Egmont in the trans. in Early Verse Drama
and Prose Plays, p. 119.
112
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tism to which Goethe generally subscribed.64
Not only does the play put Egmont on hold,
awaiting apotheosis, but it also subjects him to
critique.
Music and the
Female Heroic in EGMONT
Female heroism in Egmont is closely associ-
ated with music not least because almost all
the music in the play is connected with
Klärchen. As summarized in Table 1, Beethoven
supplied stage music to Goethe’s cues: two stage
songs for Klärchen (acts I and III); music signi-
fying her death in act V; a musical pantomime
during Egmont’s sleep; and a Victory Symphony
that ends the play, an unusual musical culmi-
nation but one consistent with the conception
of the final scene. Egmont’s invocation of sleep,
which precedes the pantomime, is set as a melo-
drama; the decision to do so was not Goethe’s
and may rest with Beethoven or someone con-
nected with the first production. The effect of
this is that the whole final scene unfolds musi-
cally, with only a brief rallying cry to the na-
tion and family by Egmont as he makes his
way to the scaffold. Beethoven scholarship has
missed this musical culmination of the play
and instead focused discussion almost exclu-
sively on the Overture, with passing reference
to the entr’acts.65
As a play, Egmont thematizes music, estab-
lishes it as part of its fiction. Music binds itself
to Klärchen, articulating her movement from
domesticity to androgyny to personification of
Liberty. She is the only character with access
to music. Her proximity to song is conveyed by
her two stage songs in acts I and III, “Die
Trommel gerühret” and “Freudvoll und
leidvoll” respectively. As the play unfolds, her
proximity to music narrows to equivalence.
The earliest sign of this is easily missed. While
64
Compare Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” p. 140.
65
Ernst Oster, “The Dramatic Character of the Egmont
Overture,” Musicology 2 (1949), 269–85, rpt. in Aspects of
Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983), pp. 209–22; Donald Francis Tovey,
“Overture to Egmont, Op. 84,” in Essays in Musical Analy-
sis, vol. 4, Illustrative Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1937/1972), pp. 45–47.
 Table 1
Beethoven’s Music for Goethe’s Egmont
(1774–87), Op. 84 (1809–10)
act musical number
Overture
Act I “Die Trommel grühret!” (Klärchen)
Entr’acte 1
Act II
Entr’acte 2
Act III “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (Klärchen)
Entr’acte 3
Act IV
Entr’acte 4
Act V Music Signifying Klärchen’s Death
Melodrama (Egmont)
Musical Pantomime (Klärchen)
Victory Symphony
she says that her first song is a standard, the
authorship of her second song is left undis-
closed, and so can be understood as hers (within
the fiction of the play). Goethe’s cue for music
“signifying Klärchen’s death” could be seen to
invite nothing more than music for a scene
change, or music to add solemnity to her death.
But at this point, Beethoven’s setting becomes
highly suggestive. A technique of thematic dis-
integration at the end of the piece, also used in
the funeral march of the Eroica and at the end
of the Overture to Coriolan, analogizes the
musical and physical bodies.
Klärchen’s death permits her disembodied
return as “Music.” Out of Egmont’s sleep, it-
self presented as and through music, Klärchen
appears not simply to an orchestral accompani-
ment but as the orchestra personified. Sus-
pended in a cloud, she is suffused by the music
that issues from in front of the stage; she has
quitted the material world for the ideal. At her
appearance, Beethoven projects her as a block
of orchestral sound, a bright A-major-seventh
chord in pulsing sixteenths and sixteenth-trip-
lets. He uses the scoring of woodwinds and
horns established previously as her scoring: the
scoring with which her Trauermusik opened.
From this point on she communicates to
Egmont solely through music in a pantomime
that consists entirely of physical gestures
matched to pictorial orchestral figures.
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MATTHEW
HEAD
“Die Trommel gerühret” Beethoven
Heroine
With that larger picture in place, I turn to the
construction of heroism in Klärchen’s stage song
“Die Trommel gerühret” (The drum beats). At
face value this is an innocent lyric in which a
female narrator fantasizes about joining her
military sweetheart by dressing as a solider (see
Table 2).
Love inspires Klärchen’s fantasy of military
life, but cannot explain away that fantasy. As
Wilson puts it, the song expresses “Clärchen’s
yearning for freedom from the narrow confines
of her conventional life.”66 The song culmi-
nates with Klärchen’s wish not just to be with
Egmont but to be like him: “The enemy is
retreating, / We shoot into them!/ What for-
tune beyond compare / To be a man.” Klärchen’s
love for Egmont involves emulation and so dif-
fers from the then current ideal of women as
providing a complementary and opposite sex
for men. There is even a hint of male homo-
eroticism in Klärchen’s fantasy of being Eg-
mont’s comrade in arms, his lover and his fel-
low soldier.
Klärchen is held up as a template for male
heroism. Subject to female embodiment, the
venerable trope of military heroism is projected
more vividly; it is defamiliarized. Klärchen en-
ables the audience to visualize the movement
out of bourgeois private interest (the world of
the home) into the defense of the state (the
battlefield), a movement made by all civilian
men called on to enlist and so broadly relevant
to Bürgerthum.67 The song represents this po-
tentially disorienting movement as a thrilling
liberation from domesticity and femininity.
This recruiting rhetoric is backed up with the
66
Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” p. 136.
67
On that theme (though not on Egmont), see Heinz
Schlaffer, Der Bürger als Held: Sozialgeschichtliche
Auflösungen literarischer Widersprüche (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). Schlaffer establishes a paradox
between the heroism depicted in the literature of classical
antiquity and the private interest of the eighteenth-cen-
tury bourgeois sphere. He notes that the age of Revolution
triggered memories of a classical heroic age and inspired a
discourse of the transformation of identity from bourgeois
to citizen (p. 128). The private socialization of art inspired
corrective fantasies of antique poetry as one and the same
with antique heroism (p. 135).
113
 19 TH Table 2
CENTURY
MUSIC “Die Trommel gerühret”: Text and Translation

line goethe’s lyric translation*

[1] Die Trommel gerühret! The drum beats,

[2] Das Pfeifchen gespielt! The fife squeals,
[3] Mein Liebster gewaffnet My lover, fully armed,
[4] Dem Haufen befiehlt, Leads on his troop;
[5] Die Lanze hoch führet, Lance held high,
[6] Die Leute regieret. He rules the people.
[7] Wie klopft mir das Herze! How my heart beats!
[8] Wie wallt mir das Blut! How my blood races!
[9] O hätt’ ich ein Wämslein O had I but a doublet,
[10] Und Hosen und Hut! Breeches and helmet!

[1] Ich folgt’ ihm zum Tor’ ‘naus I’d follow him with bold steps
[2] Mit mutigem Schritt, Through the city gates
[3] Ging’ durch die Provinzen, And go through the provinces,
[4] Ging’ überall mit. Go everywhere with him.
[5] Die Feinde schon weichen, The enemy is retreating,
[6] Wir schießen hinterdrein! We shoot into them!
[7] Welch Glück sondergleichen, What fortune beyond compare
[8]** Ein Mannsbild zu sein! To be a man!

* Translation by Lionel Salter for the Complete Beethoven Edition (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1997), III, 131.
** (Beethoven’s repetition of lines 7 and 8 in stanza two yields ten lines.)

implicit caution that if the men of the audi-
ence fall short of such heroic ideals, their wom-
enfolk may shame them by taking the initia-
tive.68
At a more abstract level, however, “Die
Trommel” is not about military heroism spe-
cifically but about the heroism of self-realiza-
tion. It represents a moment of “breakthrough”
in which Klärchen overcomes, if only in fan-
tasy, the category of woman as fragile and pas-
sive, as constructed in the contemporary dis-
course on the characteristics of the sexes.69 In
68
This caution was a trope of the Revolutionary period. In
her account of Eleonore Prohaska, Freia Hoffmann notes
the ambivalence that is shot through Friedrich Rückert’s
poem “Auf das Mädchen aus Potsdam, Prohaska” (1813)
in which the narrator confesses: “I would be ashamed, to
call myself a man, / If I couldn’t wield the sword / And
wanted women to take it up / So that they could wield it
[instead]!” See Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, p. 390.
69
On the relationship between sexual character and music
in the later eighteenth century, see Matthew Head, “‘Like
this context, Klärchen’s name, a diminutive of
Klara, becomes ironic. Burnham reads the
“struggle to create one’s own destiny” as a
central preoccupation of German dramas of the
Goethezeit. This struggle, he continues, is “usu-
ally expressed as the heroic quest for freedom.”70
What he doesn’t mention is that the heroines
of German drama offer vivid instances of this
quest for autonomy because they are more con-
spicuously the subject of social discipline than
the male characters with whom they share the
stage.
In dramatic context there is an economy to
Klärchen’s masculinization that is purchased
at the price of another character’s feminiza-
Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man’: Gender in 18th-Cen-
tury North-German Discourse on Genre,” Journal of Mu-
sicology 13 (1995), 143–67, and “‘If the Pretty Little Hand
Won’t Stretch’: Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 52 (1999), 203–54.
70
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 114.

114

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 Table 3
“Die Trommel gerühret”: Musical and Poetic Form
poetry (stanza/line) musical length
1/1–10, 1/9–10 1–27
None 27–36
2/1–8, 2/9–10, 2/10 36–66
None 66–74
2/10 75–79
None 79–93
tion. Brackenburg, a plausible bourgeois suitor
for whom Klärchen has no romantic inclina-
tion, attempts unsuccessfully to join in the
song. As Klärchen’s fantasy of battle intensi-
fies, he is left holding her thread, and even this
he drops as he moves to the window, tears
welling in his eyes.71 Brackenburg is more like
Gretchen than like Faust. In her documentary
commentary on Egmont, Irmgard Wagener notes
the mythic reference in this scene to Queen
Omphale, who enslaved Hercules and, having
cross-dressed him, made him spin thread for
her clothes. Later in the play, Egmont invokes
this scenario in describing Margarete: “She is a
woman . . . and women always wish that every-
one will meekly creep under their gentle yoke,
that every Hercules will doff his lion’s skin and
join their knitting group.”72 Brackenburg la-
ments out loud the antiheroic attachment to
love and to Klärchen that has rendered him
unable to act in defense of his country. He
recalls his school days, when he spoke passion-
ately in defense of freedom:
How very different I was when I was a schoolboy!
When they set us a piece called “Brutus’s Speech on
Liberty, an Exercise in Oratory,” it was always Fritz
who came first, and the headmaster said: “If only it
were more tidy, not such a jumble of enthusiasms.”
I was all drive and ferment then! Now I drag myself
71
Egmont, in Goethe: The Early Verse Drama and Prose
Plays, trans. Hamburger, p. 95.
72
Ibid., p. 109. Erläuterungen und Dokumente: Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, “Egmont,” ed. Irmgard Wagener
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), p. 18, cited in Wilson, “Ama-
zon, Agitator, Allegory,” p. 131.
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MATTHEW
HEAD
Beethoven
Heroine
musical form
||: A
B (orch.)
Cont. (orch. + voice)
First time mm. (orch.) :||
Second time mm. (orch. + voice)
Coda (orch.)
along, hanging on that girl’s eyes. . . . When the
bugle sounds, when a shot rings out it pierces me to
the marrow. Yet it doesn’t provoke me, doesn’t chal-
lenge me to enter the fray, to save and dare with the
rest.73
Beethoven Heroine
By rewriting the poetic form of “Die Trommel
gerühret,” Beethoven thematizes the “overcom-
ing” that Klärchen narrates. He transforms the
poet’s lyric into a mini-epic that breaks through
the domestic setting of the stage song. He over-
writes the poet’s strophic design with a through-
composed setting. There is different music for
strophes 1 and 2, creating an AB form. This
form is then repeated, creating an ABAB design
that nests the two strophes of poetry within a
musically conceived structure. This “nesting”
of poetic form within a broader compositional
pattern was not unusual in orchestral song of
the period, but it takes on additional meaning
in this dramatic context, not least because of
the way in which Beethoven handles the bound-
ary between the first two strophes of poetry as
a moment of heroic overcoming (see Table 3).
This epic overwriting of the strophic Lied, a
genre associated with the female domestic prac-
tice of music, is an apt musical metaphor of
Klärchen’s movement beyond the home and
beyond the bourgeois category “woman.” In
other words, both music and Klärchen “over-
come” their given, inherited positions in the
73
Egmont, in Goethe: The Early Verse Drama and Prose
Plays, trans. Hamburger, p. 98.
115
 19 TH world, positions that threaten to delimit their
CENTURY
MUSIC sphere of action and significance. 74 Given
Goethe’s strong views on the necessity of mu-
sical settings respecting poetic (or his poetic)
forms, it would be underinterpretive to ignore
the power issues at stake here. Beethoven re-
sists the authority of poetic form and the poet,
an authority that brought strong associations
of service and servility to the composition of
strophic Lieder. Within the fiction of this song,
a discourse of music-authorial autonomy is
fused with (some idea of) female emancipation.
The discourse is not robustly woman-centered
or feminist in a modern sense; Klärchen’s
“emancipation” is one and the same with her
masculinization, and her “liberation” is wed-
ded to patriarchy. Female masculinization func-
tions as a sign of overcoming in general, not as
a sign of women’s equality to men in particu-
lar.
This overcoming is depicted musically
through the contrast between a nervously ex-
pectant A section in F minor employing rela-
tively modest instrumental resources, and a
more expansive, heroic B section employing
the full ensemble fortissimo in the tonic major.
The change from tonic minor to major (ex. 1,
mm. 27–28) and the bold triplets that sweep
through the orchestra (ex. 1, mm. 28–29) con-
struct the movement from A to B as exhilarat-
ing breakthrough. The movement from F mi-
nor to F major replicates the pattern of the
Overture and draws on the meaning of modal
change in that opening piece. Specifically, the
F-major coda of the Overture is one and the
same with the “Victory Symphony” that con-
cludes the work; it predicts or imagines a time
when the Netherlands will be liberated from
Spanish tyranny. Thus an idea of freedom and
overcoming attaches to the celebratory F-major
passages of both the Overture and Klärchen’s
“Die Trommel.”
Throughout the song, the cross-dressing that
Klärchen fantasizes is musically inscribed
through a melody that imitates a trumpet fan-
fare. This instrumentalized melody fuses the
74
For an overview of this issue, see Lisa Fishman, “‘To
Tear the Fetter of Every Other Art’: Early Romantic Criti-
cism and the Fantasy of Emancipation,” this journal 25
(2001), 75–86.
116
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voice and the orchestra, a fusion that resists
the conventional objectification of the female
voice as (some version of) “nature.” This
instrumentalization of the female voice is par-
ticularly marked in the B section at mm. 36–
44, where Klärchen’s “song” evokes regimen-
tal marching through the alternation of the
pitches A and G (ex. 2). A more lyrical presen-
tation of the last line of text (“ein Mannsbild
zu sein”), particularly the second time in mm.
67b–70b, is sufficient to remind the audience
that this is still for Klärchen a fantasy, a wish;
lyrical closure reinscribes femininity amid this
fantasy of being a man.
E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his review of Beet-
hoven’s music for Egmont, completely rejected
Klärchen’s stage songs on the grounds of their
being “much too elaborate”: “In a play . . .
songs should actually be songs, just as they are
sung in everyday life, and so any orchestral
accompaniment, being a totally extraneous ac-
cretion, nullifies the general effect intended.
. . . It is as though we are suddenly wrenched
from the little room . . . and deposited on an
open plain with Brackenburg and Klärchen dis-
appearing in the far distance.”75 This criticism
turns on the issue of theatrical plausibility and
naturalness at the point where characters move
from speech to song. But Hoffmann’s sense of
the excess of Klärchen’s musical discourse, one
and the same with an excess of compositional
input, resonates with precisely the drama that
the song unfolds: Klärchen’s wish to step be-
yond her socially determined role as woman. In
this context, Hoffmann’s reference to being
wrenched from a “little room” (the private
sphere) into a wide, agoraphobic space is highly
suggestive of how Klärchen is catapulted from
domesticity into political action.
In his reviews of Beethoven’s instrumental
music, Hoffmann argued for the special achieve-
ment of the composer in accessing the musi-
cal ideal, the otherworldly. The critic might
well have invoked this notion in discussing
75
Originally published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
15 (21 July 1813), cols. 473–81. The review is available in
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The
Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David
Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 341–51 (at p. 346).
 MATTHEW


2 

27



4
Fl. Picc.    HEAD
Beethoven
cresc. ff Heroine

2 



4
Ob.  
cresc. ff

24  


Cl. in B  
ff

Bsn. 



24  
  
cresc. ff
 24   
Hn. in F

cresc. ff
24    
Trb. in F 
cresc. ff
 24  
Timp. in F, C    
cresc. ff


2 

Vn. I  

4   
cresc. ff


2 

Vn. II


4   
( )
cresc. ff


2 

Vla. 

4   
( )
cresc. ff


2  



4
Clärchen     
Ho - sen und Hut!






24 

( )

Vc.
  
( )
cresc. ff




24 

( )
 
Cb.
  ( )

cresc. ff
Example 1: Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen), mm. 27–31.

Klärchen’s “Die Trommel” because, as Catriona androgyny is a sign of transcendence because it

MacLeod argues in a reading of the numerous overcomes determination by given social cat-
cross-dressed women of Goethe’s novel Wil- egories (male/female, masculine/feminine).
helm Meister, Goethe employs female an- Thus the compounding of contrary gendered
drogyny as a sign of transcendent art.76 Though signs was a means through which the
MacLeod doesn’t put it quite like this, female “otherworldly” could be signified. In this con-
text, Klärchen’s musical excess is, like her fan-
76
tasy of cross-dressing, a discourse of transcen-
Catriona MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre,” Modern Language Notes 108 (1993), dence that opens out onto idealist aesthetics in
389–426. which art is beyond the mundane.

117

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 19 TH

36
 
CENTURY

     
MUSIC


       


    
 


    

       
 

       

       

 
     
 

  

        


  

     

    



        
Ich folgt’ ihm zum Tor aus mit mu - ti - gem



          



          

Example 2: Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen), mm. 36–45.

Klärchen’s masculine womanhood was a sign ible the very fact of make-believe. As Goethe
of art’s ability to transcend mimesis. Goethe puts it, the actor doesn’t play himself, nor is he
himself made a related point about cross-dressed a woman; he possesses “a third [and entirely
men in his article “Women’s Roles Played by strange] Nature.”77
Men on the Roman Stage” (1788). Here Goethe MacLeod connects this third nature “to the
argues that the visible artifice of cross-dressing androgynous aesthetic proposed by writers such
exemplifies the very condition of art as irreduc-
ible to mimesis. He is not thinking of the drag 77
Goethe, “Frauenrollen auf dem römischen Theater durch
act that manages to pull the wool entirely over Männer gespielt” (1788) cited in MacLeod, “Pedagogy and
one’s eyes. The cross-dressed actor makes vis- Androgyny,” p. 395.

118

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 MATTHEW

41

     HEAD
 Beethoven
Heroine

    



 ( )

(

 )

     


     

     

     
 
  

     


  

       


  

    
Schritt, ging durch die Pro - vin - zen, ging ü - ber - all mit.

        

       


Example 2 (continued)

as Friedrich Schlegel”: it is an image of the
creative soul, an emblem of the artist.78 Not
just the artwork but also the artist possesses an
androgynous character. “Die Trommel” enacts
for women, and for the artist, a discourse of
overcoming the private, amateur, and feminine
spheres that was proliferating at this time in
78
MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny,” p. 395.
reviews of works by both Beethoven and others
called on to measure his greatness through the
example of their much smaller significance.79
Indeed, “Die Trommel” fulfills the fantasy of
grandiose creation in Goethe’s unpublished trea-
tise on dilettantism, which relegates private,
79
The literature is extensive. A useful starting point is Tia
DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Mu-
sical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley and Los An-
geles: University of California Press, 1995).

119

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 19 TH amateur, and female artistic production of art
CENTURY
MUSIC to a lesser and flawed type of authorship.80
In his review of the Egmont music, Hoffmann
does not come to terms with Klärchen’s “Die
Trommel,” and he leaves unresolved, or
uninterpreted, his own paradoxical censure and
praise. On the one hand, he chastises Beethoven
for a song that is “far too elaborate,” and on the
other, he concludes by praising music that
“without in the least attempting to shine by
itself, it follows exactly the spirit of the poet
and conforms closely to his objectives.”81 These
paradoxes of the composer as autonomous and
subservient, as emancipated from and in ser-
vice to the male poet, as freely inventive musi-
cally and yet receptive to words, are precisely
the paradoxes acted out on stage by the cross-
dressed military heroine.
Like “Die Trommel,” Klärchen’s second
stage song, “Freudvoll und leidvoll,” receives a
compositionally ambitious setting. Beethoven’s
music breaks the decorum not only of the text’s
generic title, “Lied,” and of its domestic con-
text within the drama, but also exceeds Goethe’s
own conception of this number (ex. 3). In the
play, Klärchen remarks that “more than once
I’ve lulled a big child to sleep with [this song].”
The remark, referring to Klärchen’s nocturnal
intimacy with Egmont, suggests Goethe’s con-
ception of the song as something like a lullaby.
He may have anticipated a strophic Lied in
“folksy” (volkstümlich) style, something along
the lines of Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s set-
ting of this lyric. Beethoven’s setting, however,
breaks this frame, again as a sign of Klärchen’s—
and music’s—transcendental character. Eschew-
ing a contained, circular strophic structure in
favor of a two-tempo aria, an open-ended se-
quential form associated with opera buffa,
Beethoven sets the styles of the strophic Lied,
opera buffa and opera seria side by side. The
breach of generic decorum again figures Klär-
chen as beyond normal, mundane categories.
80
Goethe’s unfinished treatise “Über den Dilettantismus”
(On Dilettantism) (1799), a collaboration with Schiller, is
available in Goethe: The Collected Works, vol. 3, Essays
on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von
Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardoff (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), pp. 213–16.
81
Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 351.
120
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“Freudvoll und leidvoll” moves from a do-
mestic Lied topic in mm. 1–17 to the public
idiom of opera, thus retracing the trajectory out
of the home, and out of Klärchen’s modest so-
cial position, already met in “Die Trommel.”
The Lied topic ends abruptly at m. 18 with the
introduction of accompanied recitative, a tex-
ture belonging more to opera seria (ex. 3). It is
dramatically apt that Klärchen’s words here are
stylistically at once high-flown and down to
earth: “himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode
betrübt.” Literally this means “rejoicing heaven-
high, cast down to death,” but the phrase is also
a commonplace idiom translated as “up one
moment, down the next.” The stylistic paradox
is expressive of Klärchen’s doubleness as lowly
Burgher’s daughter and as a heroine; she en-
compasses extremes. The second section of the
aria, mm. 21–46, is based around the textual
idea of the happiness of one in love and shifts
the musical topic to that of an opera buffa aria.
In its evocation of three different types of
singing, “Freudvoll und leidvoll” is a meta-
aria, a song about song. Its topical-generic mix-
ture does not function as a type of humorous
play with signs or a compositional joke. Rather
it reveals Klärchen’s transcendence of those
categories by which female singers, music, and
composers are elsewhere constrained. While
ultimately dependent on categories, the aria
nonetheless breaks with the rule of adherence
to one category at a time.
As part of the dramatic action, this song can
be understood as Klärchen’s own. As noted ear-
lier, no reference is made to its provenance or
authorship, and in this it differs from “Die
Trommel,” which Klärchen describes as a stan-
dard. When her mother tells her to leave off
with the singing, Klärchen defends the song as
if a composer were dismissing a critic: “No,
don’t say anything against it. It’s a powerful
song.” E. T. A. Hoffmann did not take the hint:
“[I find] this song too protracted and operati-
cally treated even in its melody. Reichardt has
set it much better, with the utmost simplicity
yet deepest feeling. At the end Beethoven’s com-
position almost completely degenerates into
an aria.”82
82
Ibid., p. 348.
   MATTHEW


16   Allegro assai vivace HEAD
        Beethoven
Fl.  Heroine


         
Ob.   
    
    
Cl. in A


  
      
Bsn.   

 
arco
            
Vn. I       cresc.
cresc.

 

arco
   
Vn. II 
       
  
cresc.  cresc.
arco 
       
Vla.   
( )
 
cresc.
   
     
Clärchen

him - mel - hoch jauch - zend, zum To - de be - trübt; glück -

 
arco  
pizz.
       
Vc. &
Cb.   
 
Example 3: Beethoven, Egmont, “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (Klärchen), mm. 16–21.

The Dungeon Scene: At the beginning of the final scene, Beet-

A Musical Culmination hoven’s setting of Egmont’s soliloquy as a melo-
drama already engages this trope of the eman-
The topos of transcendence in Klärchen’s songs cipation of music from words (ex. 4, mm. 1–
informs the entire final scene of the drama, in 14). As the melodrama unfolds, the string ac-
excess of Goethe’s own conception of it. Aside companiment eases Egmont from waking words
from the domination of the scene by music, into sleep. This rather antiheroic transition is
already detailed, the close of the whole with projected at m. 7 where the texture changes
the “Victory Symphony” is especially telling. from broken to sustained chords. Egmont him-
Not only does the entire last scene unfold to self draws an analogy between music and sleep
music, but the play concludes not with words, at this point: “[In sleep] freely flows the circle
as one might expect of a five-act tragedy, but of inner harmonies” (ungehindert fließt der
with a frenetic musical outburst. The conclu- Kreis innerer Harmonien). Beethoven doesn’t
sion of Egmont not only decenters words but
jeopardizes their prestige.83
ping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and
Local Knowledge, ed. Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord,
83
Compare Annie Janeiro Randall, “Music in Weimar circa Simon Richter (London: Camden House, 2000), pp. 97–
1780: Decentering Text, Decentering Goethe,” in Unwrap- 144.

121

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 19 TH


Poco sostenuto

 

   
CENTURY
MUSIC Vn. I

 sotto voce sempre 



Vn. II 

  
  
sempre 
 sotto voce


Vla.


  
  
[ sempre 
 sotto voce (Egmont.) Süßer Schlaf!
]
Du kommst wie ein ungebeten, unerfleht
reines Glück am willigsten.

Vc.


      
 sotto voce sempre 
Cb. 


      
 sotto voce sempre 
5

Vivace
 
Tempo I Più moto

 

 
 ! ! 





   
  
 ! !

   !! 


 !  

Du lösest die Knoten und des ungehindert fließt der und eingehüllt in versinken wir und hören
der strengen Gedanken, schmerzes; Kreis innerer Harmonien, gefälligen Wahnsinn, auf zu sein.
vermischest alle Bilder
der Freude

     
   ! !


     
    ! !


10


 

       

 "





   
 
"




 
   
" (Er entschläft,
die Musik begleitet
seinen Schlummer.) divisi unis.



 ! !! !  !!
"



     
"

Example 4: Beethoven, Egmont, Melodrama, Egmont’s monologue, mm. 1–14.

122

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miss the chance of a “circle” progression here
(V7–I–IV in B major, mm. 7–9) while the four-
part string texture, a string quartet writ large,
suggests inwardness and depth.
Just as Leonore appears to the imprisoned
Florestan as an angelic vision leading him to
freedom, Klärchen appears in Egmont’s sleep
“shining . . . on a cloud” as “Liberty in heav-
enly raiment” (ex. 5, mm. 15–25).84 Beethoven
responds to the apparition of Liberty at the
Poco vivace (m. 15) with a bright A-major-sev-
enth chord (D/V7) sustained for five measures.
This dominant seventh quivers in sixteenth
notes and triplets like the strings of a harp. The
scoring for high winds and brass perhaps refers
to musical purity and the sacred. As noted ear-
lier, Beethoven takes seriously, and musically
“points,” Goethe’s elision of Klärchen and Lib-
erty by using for Liberty the woodwinds and
horns that began Klärchen’s Trauermusik.
Through this textural connection, the topos of
mourning is transformed into Klärchen’s re-
birth as spirit. Her apparition on a weightlessly
hovering cloud offers the audience a glimpse of
the musical otherworldly. Beethoven and
Goethe thus use the visual realm as a way of
signifying a musical “beyond.”
At the Andante con moto, m. 20, Liberty (in
Goethe’s stage directions) “bows down towards
the sleeping hero” and “expresses a feeling of
compassion, she seems to commiserate with
him” (ex. 5, mm. 20–25). Beethoven projects
this affectively and visually by overlaying the
slumbering motif in the strings (representing
Egmont) with a tender, even regretful band of
woodwind and horns (representing Liberty/
Klärchen). The melody of the first flute in mm.
21–25 (D, F , G, F ) traces, so to speak, the
profile of the slumbering hero without literally
doubling his melody in the first violin. The
scene recalls Wright of Derby’s Corinthian
Maid, or The Origins of Painting (1782–84).
This image recounts the Greek story of the
invention of painting by the Corinthian maiden
who, about to be separated from her soldier
lover, traced his silhouette on a wall where the
84
On Florestan’s vision of Leonore, see Paul Robinson,
Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio, Cambridge Opera Hand-
books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.
16–17.
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image had been thrown by candle light. This MATTHEW
HEAD
conceit of a woman’s effort to trace the linea- Beethoven
ments of a sleeping hero is similarly evoked by Heroine
Beethoven as Liberty/Klärchen bows down and
traces the string contour of slumbering Egmont.
Coupled with the onstage spectacle, Beethoven’s
music similarly projects an image of heroic
tranquility, heroism in repose.
The fusion of music and sight, sound and
vision, again enacts the transcendence of cat-
egories, and it is appropriate that Liberty/
Klärchen—the original boundary crosser of the
play—should oversee this scene. Situated in
the realm of spirit, she communicates with
Egmont through musical pictorialisms; these
constitute her (otherwise missing) voice, at least
in dealing with mortals. This, perhaps, is why
Beethoven closely matches his score to Liberty’s
mime as specified by Goethe.
Liberty’s musical pantomime begins with “an
enlivening gesture” (ex. 6, Allegro, dotted fig-
ure for clarinet, horns, and viola, mm. 35–41),
after which she shows Egmont her quiver of
arrows, staff, and helmet, which Beethoven
matches with “arrow-flight” pictorialism, the
strings picking out an ascending pizzicato ar-
peggio in mm. 44–51. The pantomime culmi-
nates with Liberty’s message that the libera-
tion of the Netherlands from the Spanish will
follow Egmont’s death. To represent that death,
Beethoven provides a scalar “chopping motif”
on bowed, unison strings and follows it with a
trumpet fanfare. The fanfare is coupled with
the textual sign of Klärchen/Liberty—wood-
winds and horns—such that Egmont’s death,
the liberation of the Netherlands, and Klärchen/
Liberty are all connected in a metonymic chain.
At the first distant rumble of Spanish drums
signaling Egmont’s impending execution, Lib-
erty vanishes, as if repelled by this slippage
from the musical ideal to the mundane.
Beethoven’s matching of gesture and music
establishes Klärchen/Liberty as a musically au-
thorial figure. Phenomenologically, in the lived
experience of performance, Beethoven’s musi-
cal pictorialisms appear to be orchestrated by
her and to issue from her. In dramatic context,
the orchestral music we hear is her voice, not
background music or underscoring. As we
know, during her pantomime she hovers above
stage on a cloud. This distance from the or-
123
 19 TH Beim Anfange dieses Stücks erblickt man die Erscheinung, welche nach und nach aus den Wolken hervordringt.
CENTURY Poco vivace
MUSIC 
Fl.
   

15
     34
   
Ob.
 34
     

Cl. in A    34

 


Bsn.     
 3
      4

     3
   4

Hn. in D

  34
    
  ! !

      34
    

      34
   
      34
  

      34
 

34
pizz.

      

Example 5: Beethoven, Egmont, Melodrama, Liberty’s apparition, mm. 15–25.

chestra (qua her voice) purifies her bodily ex- as much to the early-idealist as to late-Enlight-
pression and downplays the physical produc- enment aesthetics of music.86
tion of sound.85 This Liberty is an image of W. Daniel Wilson, a literary scholar, reads
music’s otherworldly source, one that belongs Klärchen’s appearance in this scene as belong-
ing to Egmont, to the hero’s dream. Indeed,
Wilson sees this as a disciplinary move on
85
Compare Claudio Abbado, dir., Berlin Philharmonic in
Complete Beethoven Edition, vol. 3 Orchestral Works,
Music for the Stage. In this recording, Klärchen’s panto-
mime is replaced with a monologue in which Egmont 86
For more on figures of woman, the feminine, and the
describes Klärchen’s gestures. This concert version was musical ideal in this period, see Lars Franke, Music as
not the work of Goethe and/or Beethoven and imparts an Daemonic Voice in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-
utterly misleading logocentrism to the otherwise musico- Century German Aesthetics (Ph.D. diss., University of
visual scene. Southampton, U.K., 2005).

124

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 Von hier an geht die Musik mit den von dem Dichter MATTHEW
vorgeschriebenen Gebärden und Ausdrücken HEAD
Andante con moto Beethoven
molto 

20
34    
Heroine

    
molto 
34      

3    

4
]
molto  molto 
[

34    
   
 34    
 
  
molto 
 34   
 
  
molto 
34      

 34      

pochi Vn.

 34 
con sordino
     
 
sempre ligato
 34      

con sordino
3           
 4
sempre ligato

(Vc. I)
con sordino

34       
sempre ligato

(Vc. II e Basso)
(Vc. II arco)
34
pizz.

          

Example 5 (continued)

Egmont’s part, an effort to rehabilitate Klärchen Monuments and Maidens, has alerted us to the
as a correct version of woman, a disembodied paradoxical use of the female form in statues of
allegory in place of a free-loving Amazon. Femi- Liberty, Justice, and the Nation in historical
nist criticism, especially Marina Warner’s eras when real women arguably enjoyed few

125

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 19 TH Allegro ma non troppo
35
CENTURY
 Aufmunternd etc.
 
MUSIC        
Fl. 
 dolce
   
Cl. in A 
        
" dolce 
dolce



        
 
Bsn.

          
   
 
Hn. in D sempre  dolce 
 
            
 ! !
sempre  dolce ( )
 [senza sordino]
         
Vn. I  
 [senza sordino]
         
Vn. II

[senza sordino] pizz.
  
 
   
Vla.
   
 dolce
[senza sordino] pizz.
Vc.
            
[senza sordino] pizz.

Cb.           

Example 6: Beethoven, Egmont, Melodrama, Liberty’s pantomime, mm. 35–51.

public privileges.87 In dramatic and musical con- Liberty, who might equally be called “Music,”
texts, however, the meanings accruing to alle- blurs the distinction between woman as a muse
gories of woman are not always so constrained. for the male composer and an early idealist or
Romantic experiment with the male composer
cast as woman. With the snoozing Egmont op-
87
Klärchen’s appearance in the dungeon scene may refer to erating as a hidden signature of male author-
the classical Greek goddess of Victory, Nike, who became
the Roman goddess Victoria. Warner (Monuments and ship, Klärchen/Liberty emerges as a visual sym-
Maidens) notes that in Athenian tradition, Nike was not bol of the composer as artist. Strongly associ-
just the figure of Victory or simply its bringer, but Victory ated with music throughout the play; slipping
itself (p. 128); this substantiates my suggestion above that
Klärchen achieves synonymity with Music and ultimately into and out of music with her death; commu-
with the Victory symphony at the end of the play. Rel- nicating nonverbally with Egmont in a musical
evant here is that Nike granted victory to not only mili- pantomime that she appears to author, Klärchen
tary heroes and athletes but also musicians, poets, and
dramatists (p. 128). A relationship between Nike and is persistently aligned with music as its alle-
Klärchen/Liberty in Egmont is further evident in Liberty’s gorical figurehead as well as with its practice
hovering above stage in the final dungeon scene. As Warner and even composition.
observes, “Nike acts above all as Athena’s emanation, en-
hancing the goddess’ might and stature by her hovering, This connection with music is only part of
often discreet, but always graceful presence” (p. 129). why I read Klärchen/Liberty as a symbol of the

126

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 45 MATTHEW
           HEAD
 Beethoven
Heroine


         

   
     
  

 !   !   
  !   !     

       
  
! ! ! !  ( )

Tutti

 pizz. arco

      

 pizz. arco

         

arco

      


             
arco


arco
         


Example 6 (continued)

composer. Her cross-dressing and masculine
behavior prior to her suicide are images of over-
coming a prescriptive identity, a social role,
that resonate with the changing status of the
composer and of music. Posthumously, Beet-
hoven’s name grew synonymous with these
changes. The musical excess of Klärchen’s stage
songs, with their disruption of the fictional
world on stage, speak to the extremely unusual
way in which the play (partly on Goethe’s au-
thority) moves toward and culminates in mu-
sic. The Victory Symphony, which has no
source within the world of the play but issues
from Klärchen and the musical ideal, takes the
last word from Egmont and the playwright.
Whatever Goethe’s intention, this culmination
resonates with the championing of music over
words in the aesthetics of idealism that filled
the gap between Goethe’s writing of the play
and Beethoven’s setting of it.88 In Egmont, it is
music that overcomes: overcomes words, liter-
88
For an introduction to musical idealism, see Carl
Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); David
Charlton, “Hoffmann as a Writer on Music,” in E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, pp. 1–20; Andrew Bowie,
“German Idealism and the Arts,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 239–57; Mark Evan
Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Mu-
sic at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (1997), 387–420.

127

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 19 TH ary form, the authority of the poet, and the
CENTURY
MUSIC mortal life of the eponymous hero, sending him
first to sleep and then to his death.
The Victory Symphony and
the Limits of the Heroic Sign
The famous Victory Symphony (ex. 7) that con-
cludes both the Overture to and final act of
Egmont has been subject to contradictory valu-
ation by twentieth-century critics. This uncer-
tainty itself reveals the critics’ conceptions of
the heroic as a discourse—conceptions that are
useful to tease out from under the often arbi-
trary-seeming censure and praise. The issue of
value is almost always on the cards in discus-
sions of music, but this issue intensifies in
writing about those pieces by Beethoven deemed
heroic in idiom or subject. As Nicholas Cook
has shown, this can be explained in part by
canonic discourse that values some types of
music over others. Canonic discourse has tended
to denigrate those works by Beethoven that
engage too explicitly with the celebration of
specific military and political victories of the
Napoleonic era. The aesthetics of musical au-
tonomy and organicism have demurred at the
primarily celebratory character of such works
for which, as Cook notes, there are no recog-
nized terms of value and standards of excel-
lence.89
The denigration of this topically heroic mu-
sic is rhetorically required for other heroic pieces
to be canonized and praised. In simple terms, a
“good” version of the musical heroic is made
possible by a contrary “bad” version. These
binary oppositions operate throughout the criti-
cal literature, but are brought into crisis when
writers perhaps unwittingly place the same
piece on both sides of the canonic divide—
which is the case with the Victory Symphony
of Egmont. Analytical attempts to relate the
Victory Symphony motivically to the Overture
(it is first heard as the coda to this movement)
register, albeit in the guise of analytical correc-
tive, its stylistic and affective incongruity. Ul-
timately, the attempt analytically to render the
Victory Symphony integral only adds to the
89
Cook, “The Other Beethoven,” pp. 11–12, 23–24.
128
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underlying anxiety that it is tacked on and
unmotivated. I say “anxiety” because if the
Victory Symphony were deemed a noisy and
mechanically added curtain call, it would, ac-
cording to the pervasive aesthetic standards,
lack persuasiveness and seriousness as utter-
ance about the heroic. Ultimately, then, it is
the nature and value of the heroic that is at
stake in discussions of whether a piece is a
“good” or “bad” example. A reader alive to the
contradictory valuations of the Victory Sym-
phony is left with the impression that critics
would prefer the heroic to be something more
than a topic or sign. Heroic triumph, it seems,
must—if it is to achieve canonic status—jus-
tify itself through a journey, a process of which
it is the desired and naturalized outcome.
To relate this to the Victory Symphony in
more detail, I place the positive assessments by
Solomon and Kinderman next to Burnham’s
characterization of this conclusion as a monu-
mentalizing of the banal.90 Burnham’s memo-
rable description of “the brutish cheer of a ba-
nal cadential progression” encapsulates the
Symphony’s celebratory use of cadential
commonplaces, something already flagged by
E. T. A. Hoffmann. Intending to praise, Hoff-
mann found the Symphony an effective con-
clusion because it is “fashioned almost entirely
from cadential figures.”91 While we cannot rule
out the possibility that Beethoven’s music cri-
tiques the more obvious (and possibly the male-
centered) aspects of heroism by presenting them
as hollow, such a reading remains hypotheti-
cal. Wilson notes that Egmont’s little rallying
cry to family and nation on his way to execu-
tion is not entirely convincing—more whim-
per than bang—and an argument could be made
that Beethoven’s musical banalities similarly
undermine the notion of male heroic Victory
through compositional bathos. But this line of
argument is difficult to substantiate.
Adorno’s negative comments on the Over-
tures to Egmont and Coriolan, which he styled
“symphonies for children,” bring us back to
90
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 129. Burnham also speaks
of “the most garish treatment imaginable” (of the pitch A
in an F-major chord).
91
Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 350.
 [Allegro con brio] MATTHEW
  HEAD
Beethoven
Fl.
9
Heroine

$ $ $ $ $ $
 


Picc.  $ $ $ $ $ $
 


Ob. 
$ $ $ $ $ $
 
Cl. in B


$ $ $ $ $ $
 
Bsn.


$ $ $ $ $ $
  
Hn. in F
 
$ $ $ $ $ $
        
Hn. in E

    
$ $ $ $ $ $
$ [ $ [ $ $ $ $
 
] ]

Trb. in F   
$ $ $
]

$ $
]

$
[ [

 % %
       
Timp. in
F, C     
$ ($ ) ($ ) ($ ) ($ ) ($ )


Vn. I  
$ $
$ $ $ $

Vn. II

$ $ $
$ $ $
      
Vla.


$ $ $ $ $ $


Vc.

$ $ $ $ $ $



Cb. 
$ $ $ $ $ $

Example 7: Beethoven, Egmont, Victory Symphony, mm. 9–15.

the issue of critics’ expectations about heroic a political ideal. This distaste underwrites the
discourse. Adorno is not alone in his objections reception of Beethoven’s reportedly bombastic
to Beethoven’s “sacrifice” of musical processes “failures” of the Congress period, Wellingtons
and the meanings supposedly arising from them Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria, op. 91 (1813)
for music as the sign, more or less arbitrary, of and Der glorreiche Augenblicke, op. 136 (1814).

129

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 19 TH 

13



CENTURY
MUSIC









 


a2
 


 
$
     
 
$
 

$

 

     



 


 







$



  
$


  

Example 7 (continued)

What Adorno disliked about the Victory Sym-
phony of Egmont was its presentation of tri-
umph without a preceding conflict, so that tri-
umph does not arise from a musical process
(from “dialectical development” as Adorno
terms it) but is imposed from without. Such a
process can naturalize and so justify triumph
by, in narrative experience, rendering it com-
pelling, desired, seemingly inevitable. Adorno
is asking that the ideology of the heroic remain
invisible; that, through advanced musical tech-
nique, triumph appear both pleasurable and

130

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just.92 Evoking the terms of his critique of the
Enlightenment, Adorno speaks of “something
brutal, Germanic, triumphalist” in the Victory
Symphony; its musical simplification “results
in the crudity of fanfare.”93 Adorno is unsettled
here by the fantasy of Germanic hegemony he
hears in the celebratory, militaristic noise.94
One of the reasons why the Victory Sym-
phony appears an unmotivated, topical conclu-
sion to the Overture is that the Overture, like
the play, focuses on the love story between
Klärchen and Egmont. The political ideals of
freedom and humanity are attached to this love
story, but they do not arise from it. Rhetorics
of freedom and humanity are made concrete
through Klärchen’s emancipation from the cat-
egories “woman” and the “feminine” (even ad-
mitting that this emancipation is partial,
tropological, and male-authored). Thus it is not
a slip from compositional greatness, but deeply
appropriate, that these rhetorics are rather
bluntly reattached at the end of the Overture,
just as they are at the end of the drama as
Egmont is led to the scaffold. Admittedly, Beet-
hoven does provide an eight-measure build-up
to the fortissimo Victory motif, a sort of struggle
and overcoming in miniature. But this build-up
comprises highly conventionalized sequences
that rise in pitch and volume over a timpani
roll. It points to little more than the conven-
tionalized nature of heroic overcoming itself.
Crucially, for Beethoven this does not seem
to have been a problem. He treats the heroic as
a topic, just as, along with his contemporaries
of the late German Enlightenment, he treats it
as an occasion for gender trouble and subjects
it to female as well as male embodiment. That
Beethoven in other contexts embedded heroic
victory in a narrative of struggle and overcom-
92
Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophy of Music:
Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1998), p. 78.
93
Ibid., p. 79.
94
Literature on the issue of motivic and tonal organicism
in the Victory Symphony is reviewed in Burnham,
Beethoven Hero, pp. 126–42, with particular reference to
Oster, “The Dramatic Character of the Egmont Overture,”
pp. 209–22; and Martha Calhoun, “Music as Subversive
Text: Beethoven, Goethe, and the Overture to Egmont,”
Mosaic 20 (1987), 43–56.
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ing represents nothing more or less than a com- MATTHEW
HEAD
positionally sophisticated naturalization of the Beethoven
ideology of the heroic—as if victory were the Heroine
necessary and willed outcome of a dialectical,
conflict- and music-based process. Beethoven
explored this option particularly in sympho-
nies. In Klärchen’s stage songs, overcoming is
signified differently, through the breach of ge-
neric and stylistic decorum.95
In the Egmont Overture, Beethoven renders
the heroic through a set of signs that function
in a highly compressed, even shorthand, way.
As part of this topical treatment, he links mu-
sic to other discourses through association,
without those discourses literally being “in”
the music in the sense of being composition-
ally and formally immanent. Indeed, the Vic-
tory Symphony signifies future triumph—na-
tional freedom—through materials that are, in
Burnham’s word, banal. This way of creating
meaning, in which music is a signifier that
does not resemble the signified beyond an af-
finity of affect or expression, may itself under-
write the distrust that critics schooled in Ger-
man Romantic aesthetics displayed toward
some of Beethoven’s occasional music.
The heroic, however, does not offer guaran-
tees of authenticity. The Victory Symphony
discloses that the heroic is essentially nothing
more or less than noise—a round of applause—
through which culture honors one person or
idea above others. In celebrating our grandest
and highest aspirations and achievements
through the discourse of the heroic, we forget
that the heroic itself is ceremonial, the award
of a medal or laurel, and thus, in itself, in
danger of becoming hollow, banal. What we
choose to honor as heroic may set a temporary
gold standard, but the fact that we honor it as
heroic is a matter of convention. People have
always looked askance at their heirloom he-
roes and heroines, have found fault with the
ideals of the past, while the heroic itself, as
ceremonial, has remained relatively insulated
from critique. For example, while early Chris-
tians rejected the blood and gore of classical
military heroes, they remained sufficiently at-
tached to the heroic as a discourse to install
95
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, p. 117.
131
 19 TH Christ as a newer, better heroic paradigm. The
CENTURY
MUSIC idea of progress, particularly of moral and spiri-
tual progress, is endemic to the rapid changes
in the subjects venerated as heroic.
The history of criticism surrounding Beet-
hoven’s Egmont notwithstanding, the princi-
pal type of heroism explored in Egmont is a
woman’s overcoming of nothing less than her-
self and her sexual character as then crystalliz-
ing in discourses on the nature of the sexes.
Egmont shares this theme of heroic woman-
hood with Fidelio. In both dramas female hero-
ism is seen to spring from love of the largely
passive male hero. But whereas in Fidelio
Leonore’s rescue of her husband celebrates the
conjugal fidelity of the good wife, in Egmont
Klärchen acts without that institutional sup-
port. She is the hero’s mistress, and Beethoven’s
representation of her heroism focuses on the
process of overcoming itself.
At the same time, it appears, Klärchen’s
womanhood functions as a moral and patriotic
insurance policy within a discourse of the he-
roic that could no longer champion men and
masculinity unreservedly. In Egmont, female
heroism and androgyny are stepping stones to
the ideals of liberty and freedom that informed
both bourgeois identity formation and concepts
of authorship. In Klärchen’s trajectory from
Burgher’s daughter to allegory of music, au-
thorship, and liberty, female heroism occupies
a middle station, at once overcoming the
worldly and mundane and beginning an “as-
cent” into the otherworldly and the ideal.
Through Klärchen, Egmont achieves its dis-
tinctive doubleness as a text engaged at once
with Enlightenment themes of society and the
individual, identity and freedom, despotism and
democracy; and at the same time with early
idealist topics of an otherworldly realm in which
liberty, heroism, and music find their most
intense and purest expression. The oscillation
between these registers simultaneously con-
nects Egmont with and distinguishes it from
the contemporary musical supernaturalism of
Hoffmann, Wackenroder, and Tieck, what
Dahlhaus calls the “romantic metaphysics” of
132
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music.96 Klärchen breaches not only the deco-
rum of the Lied and the category of “woman”
but also the historical periodization that claims
Beethoven for the Enlightenment over
early-Romantic idealism. l
96
Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 10.
Abstract.
Almost a decade ago, Sanna Pederson observed that
the heroic in the posthumous reception of Beet-
hoven’s life and music functions as a sign of the
composer’s unassailable masculinity. What Pederson
did not explore, however, is how the construction of
the heroic in Beethoven’s works courts androgyny
and so exhibits flexibility in precisely the realm of
sex/gender that ossified after his death. In Beethoven’s
dramatic music, cross-dressed heroines move center
stage, and their music courts a mixture of masculine
and feminine signs that is not simply descriptive of
their transvestism. Admittedly, female heroism in
Beethoven’s dramatic music is associated with con-
jugal fidelity (Leonore in Fidelio) and with the na-
tionalist defense of Prussia against French invasion
(Leonore Prohaska in Beethoven’s incidental music
of that name), but it also functioned as an allegory of
the semiautonomous male artist and of transcen-
dent authorship. Precisely because women were sub-
ject to severe constraints on their public actions,
heroines who broke through those constraints were
emblems of freedom. At the boundary of the real and
the symbolic, women who transgressed sexual and
gendered norms could serve as epitomes of transcen-
dence in the aesthetic sphere. A case study of
Beethoven’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont
traces a metonymic chain linking the lead female
character Klärchen to music, heroic overcoming, and
authorship. Much of the music Beethoven composed
for the play was for, or associated with, Klärchen,
who comes to embody music and its production.
Through music, Egmont is lulled to sleep in the
concluding dungeon scene. And in this sleep,
Klärchen appears to him as “Liberty,” hovering on a
cloud above the stage to a shimmering A-major-
seventh chord. Communicating to the dozing hero
through wordless musical pictorialism, she offers a
glimpse of what in contemporary idealist aesthetics
was music’s otherworldly source.
Key words: Beethoven, Egmont, heroism, Goethe,
gender.