The funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna on 29 March 1827 was a grand affair. So great was the crowd that the cortège took 90 minutes to struggle its way from his last residence to the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Alsergasse. From there the procession moved on to the Währing cemetery, where Heinrich Anschütz, the leading actor of the day, delivered an oration written by Austria’s most eminent dramatist, Franz Grillparzer. Short but eloquent, it had two striking features. First, it made no reference to a Christian God. The only deity it associated with the deceased was ‘the sister and peer of the Good and the True, the balm of wounded hearts, heaven-born Art!’ Second, it claimed Beethoven for the German nation in the name of ‘the whole German people’.
How Beethoven might have responded to this latter appropriation is unclear. Most of his biographers have ignored or played down any nationalist elements in his life and works, preferring to highlight both his cosmopolitan ideals and his universal appeal. The adoption in 1972 of his setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy as the anthem of the European Union has made at least one part of his Ninth Symphony more familiar to more people than any other piece of classical music (although it was dismissed by Schiller as ‘a bad poem’ dating from a period of his life he had outgrown). Its appeal today is greater than ever. Recent examples include its performance at the concert staged after the fall of the Berlin Wall (with Freude, ‘joy’, changed to Freiheit, ‘freedom’) and its use by Emmanuel Macron to greet his appearance on stage at his election victory rally in 2017. That it was preferred to the Marseillaise says a lot about its status (and Macron’s ambitions).
Beethoven’s pronouncements on this, as with any other topic, are terse and inconsistent. Selective quotation can allow his portrayal as both a sympathiser with the French Revolution and an ardent supporter of the Habsburg monarchy, with the weight of evidence leaning to the latter. Among other things, in the course of the Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) he composed a great deal of patriotic songs. A typical example is the Battle Hymn of the Austrians of 1797, which began:
We are a great German nation
We are mighty and just
And if you French doubt that
Then you don’t know us well.
For our Prince is good,
Our courage is indomitable,
Our wine is sweet,
And our women are fair;
What more could we ask for?
As this suggests, Beethoven and his fellow Austrians had no problem in combining Francophobia, German nationalism and loyalty to the Habsburg emperor. There was nothing unusual in this. Although Mozart is usually presented as the poster boy of the Enlightenment, he also had a keen sense of his German (not Austrian or Salzburgian) nationality; he wrote to his father from Paris in 1778 that ‘my body burns with passion and my hands and feet tremble with the desire to teach the French how to know, esteem and fear the Germans’. The absence of a German nation state did not preclude strong national feelings driven by pride in German culture and disdain for foreign rivals, especially the French.
Celebrate good times
This was a development intensified by war. So overwhelming was the power unleashed by the Revolution that a reaction of equal force was generated, not least because the French brought with them cultural, as well as political, imperialism. As Napoleon’s empire began to fall apart following his Russian campaign of 1812, artists of every genre flocked to celebrate their impending liberation. Among them was Beethoven, whose symphony celebrating the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Vitoria in June 1813 was a huge success. So was The Glorious Moment, written for the opening of the Congress of Vienna in 1814. These and his other triumphalist works have been as much derided by later commentators as they were acclaimed by contemporaries: ‘the worst that Beethoven ever wrote’, ‘the nadir of Beethoven’s artistic career’, ‘valueless’, ‘shameful’ and so on. He has been the posthumous victim of a ‘Whig’ view of European history even more common among musicologists than historians. The victory of the Allied Powers (Russia, Austria, Prussia and Britain) is seen as a victory for conservative reaction and so any celebratory music is dismissed as inferior, if not offensive.
More recently, however, a more balanced approach has rehabilitated both the Vienna peacemakers and the music Beethoven wrote for them. Among other things, it shows that Beethoven was justifiably proud of his patriotic works, whose musical value has been ignored. Referring to his triumphant charity concert of December 1813 in aid of soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau, he wrote that it represented ‘the fulfilment of an ardent desire which I had long cherished, that is to say the desire to be able to place some important work of mine on the altar of our Fatherland’. A presumptuous critic of Wellington’s Victory was dismissed with withering contempt: ‘Oh you pitiful scoundrel, what I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.’
As his funeral demonstrated, like no musician before him Beethoven had achieved the status of what today would be called a ‘national treasure’. The yoking of German nationalism and German music was already of long standing. Back in 1741 the editor of the Musical Patriot had crowed that German music was now supreme and that even ‘the high and mighty Parisians’, who used to sniff at it as ‘provincial’, now had to change their tune. Justifiable in the age of Telemann, Bach and Handel, this was a boast that could be paraded with even more stridency once Haydn, Gluck and Mozart had appeared. In the meantime, the status of music had changed radically. No longer the handmaid of princes and prelates, it had become the master art form of the German-speaking world. In an article in the New Musical Journal in 1842, the composer Julius Becker claimed that music was now ‘ubiquitous, the vital principle of social life, the central element in public discourse’.
Mass participation
Becker pointed, as illustration, to the mass participation in music festivals. From a standing start in 1800, they had spread with astonishing speed across the length and breadth of German-speaking Europe. Typical was the festival staged at Rathenow in Brandenburg in 1836, which brought together several hundred singers and most of the local population, including peasants. The eminent Prussian music critic Ludwig Rellstab claimed that there was no town in Germany of even modest size that did not have a musical association.
These festivals were distinguished both by the numbers participating and the ambition of the programming. To the fore were works by Beethoven, not just choral works such as Christ on the Mount of Olives (a favourite) but also the symphonies and concertos. Contemporary accounts show that his appeal was more than musical. This was a time when intensifying nationalism demanded cultural as well as military or political heroes. Whether he liked it or not, Beethoven was perfectly cast to be the German representative in the musical battle of the nations. It was a common boast of the flourishing musical press that German music was distinguished by its profundity, originality and sophistication – as opposed to the tinkly tunes and crude orchestration of Italian opera. Representative was a review of the Rhenish Musical Festival of 1853, at which Joseph Joachim played Beethoven’s violin concerto. The whole event was hailed as a ‘truly national festival’, parading ‘the most noble treasures of the nation’ and thus confirming the belief ‘there is a God present in this world! For that is the spirit of Germany which looks out from Beethoven’s symphonies with a thousand eyes!’
There was a colossal expansion of music in the public sphere during the 19th century, revealed by the proliferation of concerts, spaces for music of every kind, musical associations, the musical press and so on. This process went hand in hand with technological innovations in the manufacture of musical instruments. The cost of pianos tumbled to within reach of even the lower middle classes and artisans. Beethoven’s Für Elise and other favourites could be heard in parlours across the country. He was not the only composer to benefit, but he was one of them.
What did make Beethoven stand out from the crowd was his personification of the Romantic revolution, which coincided more or less with his lifetime. In the popular imagination, Beethoven was the quintessential romantic hero: a lonely, tortured, afflicted, uncompromising, utterly original genius, a man who ‘treated God as an equal’, as his friend Bettina von Arnim remarked. It was not just the revolutionary nature of his music and his phenomenal piano skills that forced contemporaries to view Beethoven as so much more than a musician. It was also his rackety way of life, his dishevelled clothes, even – one might say especially – his wild appearance.
The number of people who actually experienced Beethoven at first hand was very small, but his image was broadcast far and wide, not least by the invention of lithography. He was the first musician to become the centre of a cult, a legend in his own lifetime. If it was a cult that knew no frontiers, he was always claimed as one of their own by Germans, who welcomed his widespread veneration by foreigners as further proof of the superiority of German culture.
This was also a cult that could be pressed into service by the rulers. That was shown by Beethoven’s apotheosis at Bonn, his birth-place, in August 1845, when an enormous statue of him was unveiled on the main square. Tens of thousands of enthusiasts poured into the small Rhenish city for the celebrations, including the composers Berlioz, Meyerbeer and Spohr, Charles Hallé, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind and an army of journalists and critics. Also in attendance were Frederick William IV and Elizabeth of Prussia, whose presence dominated the proceedings. From Bonn the royal party (including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) moved on to Cologne to inspect work on its Gothic cathedral. Both projects were hailed by the Prussian king as manifestations of ‘the spirit of German unity and strength’. This determination of the Hohenzollerns to identify Prussia as a Kulturstaat (a state in which culture was cherished and promoted) prompted the liberal politician and historian Friedrich Dahlmann to employ a phallic image when conceding ruefully that ‘the Prussian state is the magic spear that heals as well as wounds’.
Beethoven’s genius was so bright that it would have shone in any day or age. Yet his impact on both his immediate contemporaries and on posterity was greatly magnified by developments beyond his control. Put simply, he benefited from being the right person in the right place at the right time.
Tim Blanning is Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.
