A first version of this essay was written in Paris in January 2020, a few weeks before the brutal disruption of everyday life caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This is how it began:

Predictions are always risky, be they grounded on science, on belief, or on tradition. They are especially risky for historians, who are supposed to be experts on the past, or rather, on a small part of it. On the other hand, the future tense in these opening sentences did not indicate an exercise in prophecy or in phenomenological protention, but a trivial reality of cultural life, namely, the fact that a commemoration of this kind always follows a long pre-established program.

For humanity, the sudden cancellation of Beethoven concerts, exhibitions, and conferences looks insignificant compared to so many catastrophes. Yet it is as good a spot as any to take the pulse of the random and dangerous reformatting of historicity in which humans are presently engaged. As the present second version of this essay is being written, in May 2020, some scholarly events are going virtual, and most concerts are being rescheduled. If this pattern holds, the disruption might eventually boil down to a chronological anomaly, with 2021 doubling for 2020.

The present publication was designed to accompany an exhibition mounted by the Paul Sacher Foundation at the invitation of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. As the Foundation's research archive centers on music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and as its holdings largely comprise collections and posthumous estates from composers (plus a few performer collections), it was logical to focus on the reception of Beethoven among composers of the last one-hundred-twenty years. The book thus deals with the manner in which artists have engaged creatively with Beethoven – with his music, his ideas, and everything his name has stood and continues to stand for. In contrast, the other two principal modes of musical reception – analysis and performance – are touched on only peripherally, the first in the form of a few verbal documents from composers, the latter in the form of sources for a Beethoven adaptation by Cathy Berberian. Although both these areas are represented in the Foundation's holdings by quite interesting manuscripts and recordings, they do scant justice to the wide-ranging spectrum of recent Beethoven interpretations and performance traditions. Another reason for limiting ourselves to the reception of Beethoven by composers was that the spatial restrictions at the Beethoven-Haus made it clear from the outset that ours would be a smallscale showcase exhibition.

Even within these limitations, however, the subject still remains vast. Although Beethoven's impact was most immediate in the nineteenth century, countless composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have grappled with him in a great many ways. It is all the more striking, then, that the subject is not nearly as well-researched as one might expect. True, much has been written about the verbal and imaginative ties to Beethoven, our changing image of Beethoven, and the various ways in which he has been politically and ideologically co-opted. We need only mention three earlier “classics”: Arno Schmitz's monograph on the Romantic image of Beethoven, Leo Schrade's study of Beethoven in France, and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's exhaustive investigation of writings on Beethoven. But to the present day, only halting attempts have been made to produce a broad-based study of Beethoven's reception among twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers that goes beyond isolated figures or pieces.

Nor does our book, being limited to the archival holdings of the Paul Sacher Foundation, seek to create such a larger picture.

Some 150 years lie between Johannes Brahms's quip to conductor Hermann Levi – “You can't have any idea what it's like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!”– and John Adams's confession: “Having Beethoven in the car while you are driving is exhilarating and terrifying and very humbling.” And yet, Franz Schubert's famous question notwithstanding (“[W]ho can do anything after Beethoven?”), generations of composers have done one thing above all else: they have composed music, even and especially if it meant engaging with Beethoven. The reasons why his music has been so uniquely important to subsequent generations is neatly summarized by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: “In each of his major works, Beethoven invents new categories of music altogether. We find novel and previously unknown procedures and approaches whose ground-breaking qualities came to fruition only in the heyday of modern music […]. There is hardly anything that Beethoven hasn't already considered, hardly any problems whose solution his music hasn't already prefigured.”

If Beethoven can function as a point of reference on such a scale for almost any form of composition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the range of strategies for referring to his music is virtually limitless. Almost every compositional technique could be shown in one way or another to derive from Beethoven, and the only way to refer to him explicitly would be through titles, explanatory notes, documented quotations, or the like. Beethoven is omnipresent, all-powerful, almost inescapable. To quote Steffen Schleiermacher, any attempt to approach a “great composer from the past is always a difficult business. Today, if you want to rise above blatant quotation and avoid the absurd temptation to compose ‘… in the style of …’, you quickly reach your limits as a composer. […] On the other hand, perhaps the most honest way of approaching the great composer– simply writing the best piece you can and dedicating it to him– is unavailable owing to the danger of arbitrariness. So how to proceed?”

Reception mechanisms more than a century old cannot be switched off overnight. If Beethoven's music already bore a heavy ideological burden in the nineteenth century, myriad twentieth-century attempts to free his sounds from these fetters miscarried. Claude Debussy's early critique of 1901 was, for example, itself not free of ideological taints. Writing in a concert review of the Ninth, the sharp-tongued French composer stated that it “has long been surrounded by a haze of adjectives.” It goes so far, he continued, that one marvels that the work had not been buried long ago beneath the avalanche of prose. Explaining that Beethoven's thought was entirely musical, he attempted to divest it of the “stupid comments” that the work has excited. Yet his line of argument ended in the conclusion that an “excess of humanity” has burst the conventional bounds of the symphony, which sprang from a soul “drunk with the idea of freedom.” His attempt to break away from the reception tradition thus perpetuates one of its powerful topoi: the Ninth as a monument to liberty. In short, the attribution of ideas to Beethoven's works continues stubbornly apace. Nor are the attributions limited to verbal discussion: they equally mark the music's performance and find reflection in the visual depiction of Beethoven and his music. Even composers fall under their spell, either strengthening or interrogating them by their references to Beethoven.

If the tradition of ideological attributions can't be easily dispensed with, the things attributed are at once constant and variable: some cliches, such as romanticized heroism or the narrative of overcoming adversity, have been stubbornly perpetuated since the dawn of Beethoven reception; other attributions emerge from specific historical contexts, receive contradictory interpretations, and are often short-lived for that very reason. The constants seem to appeal to general needs for understanding, whereas the variables offer a broad range of possibilities for political, cultural, or philosophical appropriation. Perpetuations and reinterpretations form part of a complex system of meaning.3 By being endlessly repeated, they impart recognizability while broadening the spectrum of musings on “the Beethoven myth.”4 The constants will be briefly presented below with a backward glance at the nineteenth century. Then, proceeding from four documents on reception, the interplay of variable interpretations will be discussed insofar as they clarify specific twentieth-century Beethoven labels: the humanist, the revolutionary, the patriot, and the virile male.

The music of Ludwig van Beethoven is considered to have been a driving force behind a fundamental change in listening expectations between the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In this period, we have been told again and again, the listeners’ attention was increasingly directed toward teleological progress and the seamless unifying development of musical processes in accordance with “unalterable rational laws.” Until well into the twentieth century Beethoven's music was a major field of activity for music historians and educators. Accordingly, the ideas ascribed to it were also transferred from the world of aesthetics to everyday existence: no other music, it was argued, was better suited to give cultural credence to the guiding economic principles of the modern era, such as labor and rationalization, development and growth. Whether this view can be accounted for primarily by the quality of Beethoven's music, the ease with which it can be taught, or simply by the ideology of “aggressive nationalism” eludes an easy answer. But there can be no doubt that it resulted in the establishment of a long-lasting “Beethoven paradigm” for the whole of Western musical thought, a paradigm with a powerful impact on compositional technique and aesthetics.

Traces of this epochal breech around 1800, between a seemingly natural “sense of tradition” and a newly fertile “awareness of the past,” were already evident during Beethoven's lifetime. The associated loss of a “self-evident bidirectional gaze” at past and present already appeared in the way contemporaries dealt with the unique phenomenon of Beethoven. At an early date disconcerted critics spoke of the “dark artificiality or […] artificial darkness” of Beethoven's piano sonatas, uncomfortably accentuating their artistry and deliberateness. A few decades later, on the other hand, criticism had turned positive and established the “paradigm”: all composition textbooks that touched on Beethoven now praised the deliberate balance he struck between uniqueness and convention, originality and accessibility.

One of the foundational documents of the “Beethoven paradigm” is the well-known adage that Count Ferdinand von Waldstein entered in the young composer's album: “With the help of unceasing diligence you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” Its binding character led not only to a far-reaching battle for Beethoven's legacy between the New German School and the circles associated with Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, but also to profound changes in the field of music theory.