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The Beethoven Syndrome
The Beethoven
Syndrome
Hearing Music as Autobiography
M A R K EVA N B O N D S
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Oxford University Press gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the
American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for support in
the publication of this book.
To Sam Hammond
Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
PA RT O N E T H E PA R A D IG M O F O B J E C T I V E
E X P R E S SIO N : 1 7 7 0 –1 8 3 0 19
1. The Framework of Rhetoric 21
Expression as a Means of Persuasion 22
The Composer as Actor 25
Mimesis 33
2. Toward the Perception of Subjective Expression 38
Art as a Window on the Self 40
The Prestige of the Passions 50
Lyric Poetry 54
3. Hearing Composers in Their Work 58
Fantasy 58
Humor and Irony 73
Beethoven’s Subjectivity in an Age of Objectivity 82
PA RT T WO T H E PA R A D IG M O F SU B J E C T I V E
E X P R E S SIO N : 1 8 3 0 –1 9 2 0 95
4. The Framework of Hermeneutics 97
The Perception of Sincerity 98
The Perception of Oracularity 106
5. First-Person Beethoven 120
From Rhetoric to Hermeneutics 120
The Heiligenstadt Testament 128
Biographies 134
viii Table of Contents
PA RT T H R E E DUA L PA R A D IG M S : SI N C E 1 9 2 0 169
7. The Return of Objectivity 171
The Composer as Chameleon 175
The Composer as Medium 178
The Composer as Engineer 179
8. The Endurance of Subjectivity 183
Notes 201
Bibliography 277
Index 307
Figures
1.1 Title page of Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe,
2nd ed. (Paris, 1747) 35
5.1 Detail from Rochlitz’s publication of Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament,
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 29 (17 October 1827): 709–10 130
5.2 Hugo Höppener (“Fidus”), “Beethoven,” Die Jugend 11 (1903): 171 141
6.1 Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman, Haydn Composing His “Creation” 162
Acknowledgments
As always, my family helped in far more ways than they could possibly re-
alize. While often indirect, those ways were no less important to bringing this
project to fruition. To Dorothea, Peter, and Andrew: Thank you.
***
Beethoven struggled with many things during his life, but neglect was not
one of them. By the time he died in 1827, his contemporaries had written
so much about his music that the most recent anthology of their collected
criticisms runs to almost seven hundred pages.1 Yet aside from a few reviews
from the composer’s final years that speculate on the effects of his increasing
deafness, these commentaries make almost no attempt to relate his works
to his life or vice versa. The overwhelming majority of critics at the time in
fact knew little or nothing about him beyond the barest outlines of his ca-
reer, and the few who did, based mostly in Vienna, did not consider his per-
sonal self particularly relevant to the music he was creating. Writing from
faraway Thuringia in his 1812 biographical dictionary of musicians, Ernst
Ludwig Gerber acknowledged the “serious and gloomy” nature of many of
Beethoven’s works but explained this by pointing to the wartime conditions
being endured by so many composers in German-speaking lands during a
period of seemingly endless conflict.2 In short, no one during Beethoven’s
lifetime perceived his music as an expression of his inner self.
Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century listeners were routinely
hearing Beethoven’s music as a revelation of his soul, and they regarded his
soul, in turn, as the key to understanding his music. Critics eagerly mapped
his life onto his works and his works onto his life. This new way of listening,
moreover, extended well beyond Beethoven: audiences were now predis-
posed to hear the music of all composers—particularly their instrumental
works—as a personal outpouring of the self, a form of sonic autobiography.
What changed? Why did listeners begin to hear music in such a fundamen-
tally new way in such a short span of time? And why, in turn, has this mode
of listening become increasingly suspect over the past hundred years? The
inclination of listeners to hear composers in their music—the “Beethoven
syndrome”—is so deeply ingrained that it is easy to forget just how novel and
powerful it was for almost a century. “Syndrome” is not too strong a term.
The Beethoven Syndrome. Mark Evan Bonds, Oxford University Press (2020) © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190068479.001.0001
2 introduction
(1) 1770–1830. Not until the closing decades of the eighteenth century did
critics begin to address the relationship between a composer’s output and
innermost self. Commentators had long kept the two quite separate, for
they conceived of expression not as a subjective outpouring of the self, but
as an objective construct, which is to say, as the projection of a text (in the
case of vocal music) or the representation of an emotion (in the case of in-
strumental music), consciously crafted in either case to evoke a calculated
response in listeners.
(3) Since 1920. In the wake of World War I, the assumption that all expres-
sion came from the inner self lost its dominant position almost as quickly
as it had attained it: many leading composers and critics returned to an
outlook that openly acknowledged expression—and art in general—as
an artifice. This renewed conception of expression as an objective con-
struct became a key element of modernist aesthetics, beginning with
the New Objectivity of the interwar years and running through the high
modernism of mid-century. The inclination to hear a musical work as
an audible manifestation of its composer’s essential being has neverthe-
less proven remarkably resilient. The notion of works as life continues to
flourish in the public mind, particularly in the realm of popular music, and
it continues to play a role in the ways we hear the works of composers from
both the past and present.
Perforating ulcer of the foot begins on the sole, beneath any of the
metatarso-phalangeal articulations, preferably the first or the fifth, or
under the heel, as a small pustule under the epidermis. This
ruptures, and the ulcer which results begins to extend in a direction
vertical to the surface, involving the deeper tissues or even opening
into the joint and destroying the bone. It appears rather like a sinus
than an ulcer, and is remarkable from the fact that it is not painful
and is insensitive to touch, although it may prevent the patient from
walking on account of extreme tenderness. The epidermis around
the sinus is thickened and insensitive, and there may be anæsthesia
of the entire sole of the foot, and even of the leg, although this is due
to the neuritis present, which is also the cause of the ulcer, rather
than to the ulceration. The circulation is sluggish in the affected
extremity; it becomes cyanotic on exposure to cold, and seems
peculiarly liable to become œdematous. The œdema may go on to
suppuration, and involve the articulations, and ankylosis of the
smaller joints may follow. This, too, is to be traced to the neuritis.
The skin of the foot becomes pigmented, and may be dry or covered
with offensive sweat. As the patient cannot walk while the ulcer
remains, the condition demands treatment. Rest, moist warm
applications, antiseptic lotions, scraping out the sinus, and other
surgical means appropriate to the treatment of ulcers and sinuses do
not often prove of benefit, and in obstinate cases recourse has been
had to amputation of the foot. Electrical treatment has been tried in
vain.
INDEX TO VOLUME V.
A.
684
in tubercular meningitis,
726
727
Abscess of the brain,
791
792
808
Achromatopsia, hysterical,
247
1224
1227
hypodermically in exacerbations of cerebral syphilis,
1015
40
41
Acrodynia,
1254
387
alcoholism,
586
cerebral anæmia,
776
encephalitis,
791
myelitis, spinal,
810
596
simple meningitis,
716
spinal meningitis,
749
pachymeningitis,
747
Æsthesodic system of encephalon, localization of lesions in,
81
69
153
750
of catalepsy,
315
of cerebral anæmia,
777
of chorea,
441
of chronic lead-poisoning,
680
686
688
of disseminated sclerosis,
883
951
of epilepsy,
470
of family form of tabes dorsalis,
871
77
707
of hysteria,
216
of hystero-epilepsy,
293
of insanity,
116
117
of intracranial hemorrhage and apoplexy,
927
of labio-glosso-laryngeal paralysis,
1173
of migraine,
406
1230
of myxœdema,
1271
of neuralgia,
1217
of paralysis agitans,
433
of progressive unilateral facial atrophy,
694
1000
of tabes dorsalis,
856
650
983
of tubercular meningitis,
725
spinal cord,
1090
of writers' cramp,
512
1147
Agraphia in hemiplegia,
957
42-44
Alalia (see
Speech, Disorders of
).
31
682
689
716
of cerebral hyperæmia,
765
of intracranial hemorrhage and apoplexy,
929
933
of tabes dorsalis,
854
of writers' cramp,
512
642
644
in cerebral anæmia,
789
in heat-exhaustion,
388
in insomnia,
380
381
677
673
675
in thermic fever,
397
Alcoholic abuse as a cause of epilepsy,
472
insanity,
175
202
630-633
LCOHOLISM
573
Classification,
573
Definition,
573
Diagnosis,
637
of acute alcoholism,
637
of chronic alcoholism,
638
of dipsomania,
639
of hereditary alcoholism,
639
Etiology,
575