The Newly Enlarged Context for Beethoven Biography

THE BEETHOVEN CENTENARY IN 1870 brought a flood of commentaries, much of it criticism, some of it biography. By then, forty-odd years after his death, his image had been raised to the point of veneration, thanks to continued admiration by composers, performers, conductors, critics, concert audiences, and the general public. The major works of his middle years were by now established classics, while the more rarefied late works, especially the last quartets, were still awaiting broad acceptance. Beethoven the man was seen as the embodiment of the resolute and powerful individual who was resolved to overcome his deafness, and his overcoming now began to dominate the biographical narratives even more than before. “I will seize Fate by the throat,” he had written in a famous letter, and those words sank into the minds of those who were now seeking to portray him to the world at large.

In Germany and Europe, this year, 1870, was a major turning point, as the German states came together to form a nation – the German Empire, with Bismarck as its Reichskanzler, its imperial chancellor. The new political unity solidified national pride in German cultural achievements, most of all its musical traditions. Certainly German literature, philosophy, and art – Goethe, Kant, Dürer – were greatly admired by the German literate public, but German music – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven – was of world-wide importance. The increasing numbers of performing institutions – above all, symphony orchestras who could perform the Beethoven symphonies in their concert halls – made his image even larger than before.

Among devotees of new music between 1870 and about 1920, his influence was becoming intermingled with that of composers of the mid- and late Romantic periods in Germany and France. By the turn of the century basic principles of musical style and expression were changing more sharply than ever before, as these decades witnessed the erosion and, in some quarters, the rejection of romanticism and the rise of new modes of expression. These included French impressionism, with Debussy and Ravel; the monumental orchestral works of Mahler and Richard Strauss; the intensified verismo of Italian opera in Puccini, and much more.