The general outlines of Vaughan Williams’s politics are encapsulated in a remark to Rutland Boughton: ‘Ever since I had a vote I have voted either Radical or Labour’. He was born into considerable financial security, in a family broadly of religiously Nonconformist and politically liberal bent. Despite living as rentier capitalists (with a private income produced from a landed estate, and in the composer’s own case, later, from music royalties), the family and Vaughan Williams himself felt that sensitivity to class difference, and to a harmonious coming together of the classes, were the bedrock of a progressive politics. Hence his musical style, which blends ‘low’ and ‘high’ aesthetics, and ‘folk’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ styles. And hence, too, his professional work with amateurs, both as a composer and conductor, and also as an advocate for the highest quality of musical production (which he felt to be to the benefit of all), both in broadcasting and in competitions he helped to adjudicate. At the national level his was also an important voice on the panels of both the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain (as well as its predecessor, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts).

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

MUSIC HISTORY SINCE 1789 is a series of footnotes to Beethoven, and in some respects this book simply adds to their number. The chapters that follow offer a new theory of music historiography, one that builds on antagonistic interpretations of Beethoven, and then instantiate this critically and analytically grounded historical theory in a sequence of essays on Beethoven.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by concertgoers and listeners at home that Beethoven's music was a significant event in the history of human art, comparable to the work of Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. It may surprise such people, whose views must be taken to be overwhelmingly the majority, democratic view on classical music, that many musicologists would consider their Ludwigolatry ‘problematic’, ‘Eurocentric’, ‘tediously canonical’, and ‘elitist’. As a member of the band of elite consumers of classical music, there is a considerable irony, as well as an abundant lack of humility, in the fact that so much as one musicologist could hold such jaundiced views of the general population, but this is the world we inhabit. The author of a recent study, Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary, who has (from one musicological perspective) the brazen gall to argue for a political as well as a musical revolutionary quality – i.e. an anti-elitist, progressive quality – to Beethoven's music writes apologetically, ‘as must surely be evident by now, I am not a musicologist’, and while ‘I hope this study will be of interest to music professionals, I have presented my perspective on Beethoven so as to be accessible to lay readers’ (Clubbe 2019, xviii). Such is the anxiety this discipline of musicology causes among the scholarly population.

I am utterly at ease with calling artists like Beethoven ‘geniuses’, and enjoying with the rest of classical-music-loving humanity the ‘transcendent’ experience that his and other composers’ music can bring. Such reprobate behaviour befits my station as a low-born scion of a family in which only three men (I am the third) who have lived since the premiere of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony were not coal or tin miners.

SHORTLY BEFORE THE RECAPITULATION in the first movement of Beethoven's Violin Sonata in A major, op. 47, the so-called ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, the pianist plays a pp chord of G– (see Example 6.1).

This chord (bb. 324–5) barely merits a mention in two recent analyses of the movement, one that appears in a broader study of musical ‘becoming’ by Janet Schmalfeldt (Schmalfeldt 2011, chapter 4) and one by David Damschroder which is written in conscious dialogue with hers (Damschroder 2016, chapter 10). Both are worth examining in detail. Although she explains what it leads to, Schmalfeldt says nothing about the pp G– chord itself:

Schmalfeldt is so keen to describe the gesture which establishes a false recapitulation, and its conversion to a true recapitulation, that she fails to mention the G– chord which is strangely interposed between the dominant she highlights and the tonic that it indicates. Her point is well made that D– is the ‘right key … for a false recapitulation in this movement’, because the exposition's P theme starts on that chord, which (as she has already noted earlier in her analysis) is prepared at length in the preceding slow introduction.

IT IS THE ‘ENDLESS sameness’ of merely empirical data to which Constructionist, reactive music historians, such as Mathew and Rumph, wish to direct us: the bland facticity of the period of the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15 which overlap with the heroic style as commonly understood. Beethoven's heroic style, in words such as ‘Kreutzer’ and ‘Eroica’, has a subjective alignment, as part of the body which forms the faithful subject, with the Jacobins whom it postdates by a decade, but the links are not fundamentally empirical in nature. Some empirical connexions certainly do exist, as for instance the melodic gestures Beethoven inherited in a direct line from Revolutionary musicians. But it is not those gestures which constitute the revolution in this music, and it is for that reason that the foregoing analysis has said so little about them. Not in their empirical ‘sound’ (the saleable object that exercises such interest to neoliberal ‘sound studies’) but in its processes of argumentative generation – or to put it another way, in the content rather than in the form – do we find the ‘meaning’ of these works. These works attempt to establish in music a new possibility that is characterized not by something newly fixed – such as an abandonment of Tonic–Dominant polarity and its replacement by something else (or nothing) as the prime ordering principle of tonality – but by a determinate negation of the restrictive ideological laws of really existing musical forms. Their composer, their genre, their high aesthetic register, and the country in which they were written, are among the long list of empirical irrelevancies to an evental history. The exigent questions for evental history is never ‘Who wrote this?’, or ‘What genre is it in?’, but always ‘What is the subject of this music?’, and ‘What role does this music play in producing a present in a past moment?’

The pseudo-Beethoven of the Reconstructionist school, the composer whose reactive ‘Eroica’ means what Wellingtons Sieg outwardly shows, fits revolutionary propositions to conservative custom, in a reactive subjective response on the model of the Thermidoreans. Such Beethovenian music could and does exist, and Wellingtons Sieg may be an example of it.

Genres of Historical Writing

CONSCIOUSLY WRITING IN THE shadow of Hayden White's pioneering work (White 1973, 1990), contemporary theorists of history, principal among whom are F. R. Ankersmit (Ankersmit 1994, 2001, 2012), Keith Jenkins (Jenkins 1991, 2003), and Alun Munslow (Munslow 2006, 2010), advocate a theoretically sophisticated model of history-writing which can treat what they diagnose as a crisis of epistemology for the writing of history in the post-war West. Broadly postmodern–deconstructionist, and for that reason explicitly anti-empiricist, the theory of history which has taken shape in their writings is one that requires traditional historical scholarship to respond to the ‘devastating’ challenge represented by an assortment of intellectual repositionings which are familiar across the humanities – ‘the linguistic turn, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, postmodernism, etc.’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 1). The crucial doctrine of this postmodern historiography is that history-writing is fictive, i.e. that as a form of writing above all else, it is an act of imagination which recasts the past in narrative form. This does not mean, though, that history is fictional, ‘for in fiction the imagined goes “all the way down”’, but it is rather ‘fictive in the sense of fictio; that is to say, made up, fashioned, created, fabricated, figured’ (Jenkins and Munslow 2004, 3).

In consequence of this contention they advance an interesting critique of what might seem like a historical commonplace, namely an epistemological commitment to what philosophers call ‘the correspondence theory of truth’. Simply expressed, the theory holds that ‘x is true if and only if x corresponds to some fact’ and therefore ‘x is false if and only if x does not correspond to some fact’. Philosophers between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant were largely content with this theory, but it has come under general fire since. Although arguments have taken various forms, the closest to that of the postmodern theorists of history is one which echoes the ‘immaterialist’ dictum of George Berkeley that ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’ – though the theorists’ more proximate source may be Jacques Lacan's claim that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’,