Classicism and Romanticism are frequently used as a shorthand to designate the stylistic and aesthetic shifts that occurred as the eighteenth gave way to the nineteenth century. However, this neat picture blurs as one delves into the subject. Not only did Romantic musicians learn the foundations of harmony, phrasing, and texture from their predecessors, but many of the styles of innocent naïveté or exuberant striving beloved by Romantics emerged from specific eighteenth-century genre contexts, including opera, the fantasy, folk song, and church music. Change did happen, of course. Not only did the ethical concerns of the eighteenth century turn towards metaphysical ones in the nineteenth, but the social and institutional divides that had long separated musicians and writers began to lessen. As a result, musicians and writers learned to admire and emulate what each believed the other excelled at.

E. T. A. Hoffmann famously lauded Beethoven’s ability to separate his ego from the world of tones, an image of autonomy that resonated with Idealist celebrations of human will. This essay challenges the underlying principle of sovereignty so central to Beethoven reception by examining the composer’s attitudes towards nature, both the natural world around him and his own physical nature. By examining contemporaneous notions of hypochondria, it links the interrelationship between physiology and psychology to Beethoven and his contemporaries’ artistic aspirations and works. If Idealists celebrated the power of spirit and the sovereignty of the will, they often did so in response to powerful experiences of their own physical nature.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, German intellectuals, including musicians and writers on music, gradually reconsidered the terms of neoclassical criticism, in particular sublimity and simplicity. At first, following French neoclassical poetics, they tended to seek sublimity in religious or ethical messages, presented as simply as possible. Thus, Gellert recommended that the poems in his Geistliche Oden und Lieder (1757) be sung to the accompaniment of well-known chorale tunes. He offered some mild criticism of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s moderately elaborate settings of his collection of religious poetry. By the end of the century, drawing increasingly on British models, Germans increasingly sought sublimity in large-scale, elaborate works, such as Bach’s Heilig. However, they did not let go of the neoclassical ideal or language of simplicity. Simplicity was seen to lie in the singular and striking effect, that is, in the mere fact of transport. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, critics such as Christian Friedrich Michaelis would take the idea that complex works could seem simple in their effects and use it to ground the new work aesthetic.