II
In 1809, Beethoven wrote to one of his publishers: "I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood on I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works." As Maynard Solomon points out in his biography of the composer, this statement is perfectly trustworthy.[7] Beethoven's intellectual curiosity was voracious, driven by the same kind of demanding idealism that led him to slave tirelessly over his composition sketchbooks and repeatedly to redefine the major genres in which he composed. From the heady mix of Enlightenment and Romantic concepts that made up his intellec-
[7] Quoted by Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York, 1977), 37.
tual milieu, three seem to have had an especially forceful impact on his work as a composer. The first, and best documented, is the conflict between political liberty and tyrannical authority, which decisively influences a series of landmark works from the Eroica through Fidelio to the Ninth Symphony.[8] The second is the assumption of a strong subject-object polarity, with emphasis on the sometimes intractable forcefulness of the subject. As M. H. Abrams puts it, this cardinal principle of Romantic culture rests on the "split in the mind's unity with itself that converts unself-consciousness to self-consciousness—the awareness of the self as a subject distinct from the object it perceives, and the intervention of reflection and choice between instinct and action.[9] Romantic literature and philosophy represent the interplay of subject and object in agonistic terms that also give the measure of vitality. As Goethe put it, "where object and subject touch each other, there is life."[10]
In 1820, Beethoven wrote out a paraphrase of Kant that may have served him as a touchstone on this matter: "The moral law [with]in us, and the starry sky above us—Kant!!!"[11] What is most revealing about this jotting is its presumably unconscious editing. Beethoven picked up Kant's famous sentence from a newspaper article;[12] his alterations suggest a classical Freudian slip of the pen. The original reads: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and reverence the oftener [and more steadily] the mind dwells on them—the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."[13] Positioning the starry sky and moral law as sources of wonder and reverence, Kant follows a religious hierarchy from height to depth.
[8] On this subject see Solomon, Beethoven , 131–41, 197–200, 260–61, 309–16.
[9] M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), 213–14. For a fuller discussion, see Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, 1981), 289–341.
[10] Quoted by McFarland, Romanticism , 311.
[11] Quoted by Solomon, Beethoven , 37.
[12] A point noted by William Kinderman, "Beethoven's Symbol for the Deity in the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony," Nineteenth Century Music 9 (1985): 102n . Kinderman's analysis of the mass persuasively suggests Beethoven's "affinities" with the Kant of the famous dictum.
[13] Text as quoted by Solomon, Beethoven , 37. Kant's statement is from the conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason .
The sky above precedes the law within, in a rhetorical sequence that cannot plausibly be reversed. Beethoven's paraphrase sweeps the two terms into an absolute, unqualified polarity between inner and outer, self and nature, in which the subjective term (democratically expanded to "us") gets pride of place.
It is no doubt simplistic to remark that this reversal of hierarchies spells the difference between Enlightenment and Romanticism, but the temptation to say so is too great to resist. In any case, Beethoven's commitment to the Romantic subject/object polarity forms a basic subtext to the conflict in his music between the impulse to revise, violate, or transfigure the high Classical style and the impulse to preserve it. This linkage finds something like a manifesto in the finale of the String Quartet in B
The third of what might be called Beethoven's masterplots rests on the principle that art, and in particular Romantic (i.e., "present-day") art, is essentially utopian. As Schiller puts it, the Romantic artist must
set himself the task of an idyll . . . that will lead humanity, for whom the path back to Arcadia is forever closed, onward towards Elysium. . . . It is of infinite importance for the man who follows the path of civilization to see confirmed in a sensuous mode the belief that this [utopian] idea can be realized in the world of sense.[15]
[14] This finale is the culminating point of the impulse towards disruption that Joseph Kerman identifies in the last three of the Op. 18 quartets to be composed; see his The Beethoven Quartets (New York, 1966), 54–86.
[15] Schiller, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," in Sämtliche Werke , ed. Otto Güntter and Georg Witkowski (Leipzig, n.d.), 17:542.
Beethoven could have taken versions of this idea from Schiller himself, or from Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, or Hoffmann, or simply from the intellectual vernacular of the day.[16] A diary entry that probably dates from 1815 shows him working out a typical formulation:
All things flowed clear and pure from God. If afterwards I became darkened through passion for evil, I returned, after manifold repentance and purification, to the elevated and pure source, to the Godhead. —And, to your art.[17]
Early and late, Beethoven's career is driven by the effort to give utopian esthetics a practical realization—an effort that culminates in the communal ritual of the Ninth Symphony and in the "vocal impulse" that Joseph Kerman finds in the late quartets, where "[instrumental] evocations of the human voice . . . mean to sing or to speak instantly to the heart, like the songs imagined by Beethoven's poet at the climax of An die Ferne Geliebte ."[18]
Beethoven's comments on this subject regularly resort to the rhetoric of striving and apotheosis evident in the 1815 diary entry. The idiom (which is also Schiller's) is consonant with his habit of relentless self-criticism and with his belief, half a rationalization of suffering, half compulsive self-punishment, that art demands sacrifice from the artist—and further that the only reward for such sacrifice is art itself. ("Only in my divine art," he writes, "do I find the support which enables me to sacrifice the best part of my life to the heavenly
[16] On Beethoven and Schiller, see Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 205–15. Beethoven may have been familiar with one important claim that his music "wakens just that longing for the infinite which is the essence of Romanticism," namely Hoffmann's. In a letter to Hoffmann, he says that a friend "showed me in his album some lines of yours about me" (March 23, 1820). We do not know which lines, but Hoffmann's essay repeatedly reasserts its idealizing argument. Both the essay and the letter are reprinted in Source Readings in Music History: The Romantic Era , ed. Oliver Strunk (New York, 1965), 35–41.
[17] Beethoven's diary of 1812–18, entry 67a; the whole diary is reprinted in Solomon, Beethoven Essays , 246–95.
[18] For a full discussion of the "vocal impulse," see Kerman, Quartets , 192–221. On the Ninth Symphony in this context, see Solomon, "The Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order," in Beethoven Essays , 3–34.
muses.")[19] Two expressions of Beethoven's esthetic idealism are particularly revealing. The first has a special authority because it was addressed to a ten-year-old girl, Emilie M., who had given the composer a pocketbook. The gift moved him to a spontaneous outburst of goodwill that also reflected his wishful identification with the innocence of the giver. Beethoven's remarks are offered as universally intelligible, almost proverbial advice:
Persevere, do not only practise your art, but endeavour also to fathom its inner meaning; it deserves this effort, for only art and science can raise men to the level of gods. . . . The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits; he has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal.[20]
In a similar vein, he writes five years later to Xaver Schneider, an aspiring composer: "Continue to raise yourself higher and higher into the divine realm of art. For there is no more undisturbed, more unalloyed or purer pleasure than that which comes from such an experience."[21]
The esthetic quest outlined in these statements appears as a subtext in much of Beethoven's music, especially after 1801. Repeatedly the music projects an almost hermetic formal discipline as the means to resolve conflict and ascend toward a vision of human happiness—what Schiller called "an effigy of the ideal."[22] Repeatedly the vision acknowledges, but without dread, the possibility of its own disruption. This last element is critical. For Beethoven, the utopian joy achieved through art is as free as possible, but never entirely free, from suffering and doubt. This limitation springs in part from personal sources—Beethoven's emotional balance was precarious at the best of times—but it is also a basic tenet of Romantic esthetics after Schiller. The Romantic artist, Schiller argued, must always deal "with two conflicting ideas and feelings, with the actual as a limit and
[19] Letter to Georg Nägeli, September 9, 1824; in Letters of Beethoven , coll., trans., and ed. Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (New York, 1961), no. 1306.
[20] Letter of July 17, 1812; in ibid., no. 376.
[21] Letter of August 19, 1817; in ibid., no. 803.
[22] Cited by Solomon, Beethoven Essays , 214.
with his idea as the infinite."[23] The actual may even be allowed to dominate the content of a work of art while the utopian idea retreats to the play of pure form. In giving his advice to Emilie M., Beethoven neatly pirouettes on the problem of the actual: he first proposes an apotheosis, then quickly sets it at an infinite distance.