After Beethoven

Beethoven’s style, composers and critics agreed, could not be imitated. But his subjectivity—or, more precisely, his perceived attitude of subjectivity—could be emulated quite readily, and it became the new norm soon after his death. Critics, moreover, heard compositional subjectivity not only in new music but also in selected works of the pre-Beethovenian past. In the meantime, the increasingly public nature of musical life created a growing demand for journals, miniature scores, and composer biographies that could help listeners comprehend an instrumental repertoire that was becoming stylistically ever more diverse and technically difficult. Composer biographies, a rarity before 1800, had become commonplace by mid-century. Concert-hall audiences now assumed that the instrumental music they were hearing came from deep within the soul of the composer.

The Framework of Hermeneutics

After 1830 the idea of subjective expression in music became the new norm. The framework of rhetoric gave way to the framework of hermeneutics: audiences began to think about what they were hearing from the perspective of the composer, seeking to understand what each was trying to “say” in every new work. Composers, for their part, both encouraged and profited from the new premise of expressive subjectivity. They embraced the role of oracle. Liberated, as it were, from the obligations of comprehensibility, they were now in a position to cultivate increasingly idiosyncratic styles, which in turn were heard as reflecting their distinctive individualities. By the middle of the nineteenth century, listeners assumed that any composer with pretensions to seriousness of purpose would possess a unique “voice” that projected a deeper, inner self.

The Framework of Rhetoric

Composers’ lives inevitably shape what and how they write. And just as inevitably, our knowledge of those lives shapes how we hear what they have written. Prior to 1830, however, musical expression was understood not as the projection of an inner self, but rather as an objective construct. For composers, this meant creating works that would move listeners in desired ways. For listeners, this meant evaluating works on the basis of their effect, not on what a given composer might be trying to “say.” With the important exception of the fantasia—recognized already in the mid-eighteenth century as a unique and highly circumscribed genre—listeners did not begin to hear expression as a revelation of the compositional self in any significant way until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

The Endurance of Subjectivity

In spite of modernism’s aesthetics of objectivity, both the projection and the perception of subjectivity have endured. Having grown accustomed to hearing composers in their works over the course of multiple generations, beginning in the 1830s, listeners could not and did not suddenly change their assumptions about the nature of musical expression. The belief that music—particularly instrumental music—comes from deep within the human psyche was too firmly rooted in Western thought to be dislodged altogether. Composers’ claims of self-expression have nevertheless become considerably more muted and ambiguous. Critics, in turn, have become far more cautious about drawing direct connections between an artist’s works and inner self, even if the nature of that connection continues to fascinate, particularly in the realm of popular music.

Introduction

This introduction outlines the structure of the book’s three parts, which correspond to the prevailing paradigms of expression from the perspective of composers and listeners alike. From about 1770 to 1830 (Part One), this was a paradigm of expressive objectivity, which operated within a framework of rhetoric, a theory of poetics. From around 1830 to around 1920 (Part Two), the prevailing paradigm was one of expressive subjectivity, which operated within a framework of hermeneutics, a theory of interpretation. Instrumental music was at the center of this new mode of listening. Critics continued to perceive vocal music primarily as the projection of a text, but they now began to hear instrumental music as a manifestation of its creator’s unique individuality. Mixed paradigms have coexisted in a state of tension since 1920 (Part Three).

The Return of Objectivity

The New Objectivity of the 1920s heralded a return to the concept of expression as a construct, and objectivity would became a cornerstone of the high-modernist aesthetic that dominated throughout the middle decades of the century. The idea of music as a revelation of the compositional self was nevertheless too deeply ingrained in musical culture to disappear altogether, and a belief in the aesthetics of subjectivity has continued to manifest itself in a variety of ways down to the present. Concert-hall audiences have nevertheless continued to listen within a hermeneutic framework, that is, from the perspective of the composer, and they accept responsibility for understanding the work at hand. In the realm of popular music, by contrast, the framework of rhetoric persists. We thus find ourselves today in an era of dual expressive paradigms and dual frameworks of production and reception.

First-Person Beethoven

With the growing perception of composers as oracles, the person of Beethoven became the key to understanding his music. The reminiscences, biographies, and letters that came to light in the years immediately after the composer’s death, particularly the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, bolstered the perception of his works as an outpouring of his inner self. Critics came to regard Beethoven’s life as a nonfictional Bildungsroman, a record of personal growth and development that was audible in his compositions. Reviews of the late works in A. B. Marx’s Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the 1820s proved particularly influential in setting the tone for the future reception of Beethoven’s music within a hermeneutic framework. Later biographies would posit highly detailed connections between specific works and events in the composer’s life.

Hearing Composers in Their Works

Because of its inherently abstract nature, untethered to the demands of language or representation, instrumental music was the art form that more than any other was deemed capable of revealing glimpses of a creator’s “true” self. Fantasy, humor, and irony were the three qualities perceived as most readily capable of revealing that self. These happen to have been the three qualities heard more often in the music of Beethoven than of any other composer of his time: contemporaries frequently found his music obscure. In retrospect, we can see that Beethoven was moving further and further from the long-standing framework of rhetoric toward a framework of hermeneutics, which challenged audiences to understand what they were hearing by listening from the perspective of the composer.

Toward the Perception of Subjective Expression

The idea of artistic expression as an outward manifestation of the self arose in literature and philosophy at least two generations before it came to be applied to music. Lyric poetry in particular provided a conceptual model for perceiving art as a form of autobiography; Goethe and Wordsworth encouraged such a reading of their works. In the meantime, philosophers were questioning the very nature of the self, and particularly the unconscious, which is to say, the primordial self. They began to recognize that while the unconscious might defy observation, its products could provide indirect evidence of its workings, and they regarded artworks as a synthesis of conscious and unconscious thought and as such capable of offering at least an occluded window onto the nature of the true inner self.

Conclusion

In his 1845 memoirs, the Czech composer Wenzel Johann Tomaschek compared Beethoven to a comet, an omen of the future whose unusual path that had attracted “superstitious” interpretations. As Thomas Kuhn argued in his classic study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), prevailing paradigms of thought are rejected when they can no longer explain significant anomalies. And the orbits of comets were among the unusual and seemingly inexplicable phenomena that had led Isaac Newton to develop the theories he would set down in his paradigm-shifting Principia of 1687. In similar fashion, Beethoven’s works provoked the kind of cognitive crisis that precipitates the overthrow of an existing paradigm. Unable to accommodate his instrumental music within the prevailing paradigm of expressive objectivity, listeners began to regard expression as self-expression, and they began to perceive all new music (and some old) from the perspective: that of the composer.