Beethoven Engelsmann Analysis

285 The four ages of Beethoven
metaphor into line with the age of modern warfare, Engelsmann closes
his article with the following formulation, laying down the law of his title
with stentorian capitals:
He who is capable of understanding all [Beethoven's] remaining works as
having grown in the same sense, will be able -with me - to form this law:
EVERY SONATA OF BEETHOVEN IS DEVELOPED, IN ALL ITS PH RASES, SECTIONS,
AND THEMES, FROM A SINGLE MAIN THEME OR MAIN MOTIVE.42
If Engelsmann's words articulate a directive that was to keep motive
hunters happily motivated for decades to come, the inception and rise of
Schenkerian depth analysis was to enjoy a more widespread credibility
and respect, at least among Anglo-American scholars. For with

its deeply
submerged Ursatz and the various middleground stages lying between the
Ursatz and the sounding foreground of the composition, Schenker's
theory appeared capable of exploring and charting those trackless interior
spaces that Wagner and others could only shadow forth. In the 1920s,
Schenker promoted and developed his new analytical methodology in a
series of analyses published in a journal entirely devoted to his own work
and tellingly titled Der Tonwille. The metaphorical implication is clear:
music has a will of its own, is a natural world unto itself. Schenker's elaborate
subtitle includes the phrase "in witness of unchanging laws of
musical art." Again the concept of natural law is invoked - music is a
natural force, subject to its own laws. And Beethoven's music would, for
Schenker, be a primary witness of these laws. For Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony was the subject of Schenker's flagship analysis in Der Tonwille,
and, indeed, each important stage of Schenker's thought is marked with
an imposing analysis of a work by Beethoven.43
Both motivic analysis and Schenkerian depth analysis purport to
objectify the intuitively perceived suasions of temporality, process, and
unity in the music of Beethoven. This was the nascent age of structuralism,
after all, an age of enhanced confidence in the ability of the human
mind to plumb its own depths, to descry the very forms and structures of
its thought. The emphasis on musical form - especially so-called inner
form - in the writings of critics and analysts such as Halm and Schenker
may well serve as the transitional link in completing the shift from nineteenth-
to twentieth-century views. With the rise of psychology and
notions of latency, a science of the unconscious continued to develop,
whereii'-i the inward is joined with the profound, and the two are shown to
be subject to laws as immutable as those which govern the transactions of
the natural world. This agenda reveals the kinship between these two ages,
for all their cries to the contrary. Analysts of the twentieth century sought
to objectify the still prevailing assumption about the profundity and
286 Scott Burnham
interiority of Beethoven's music; continuing a trend begun so earnestly by
Hugo Riemann, they sought to enunciate the invisible laws underlying
the musical surface. The compelling quality of Beethoven's music is thus
associated with the compulsions of natural law- anything so compelling
must be law- as the process of objectification continues.
Related to the idea that Beethoven's music is best understood as an
expression of natural musical law is the emergent view, in the discourse
surrounding Beethoven in 1927, that his music expresses healthy normality
and moral wellbeing. Here too, the values of form and balance are generally
invoked-Classical values, to be sure. For example, even while railing
against the "a priori fancies" of German music theorists, the great English
critic Donald Francis Tovey advocated a similar emphasis on form.44 The
difference was in his approach: whereas Riemann went to great systematic
lengths to develop his notion of the prototypical eight-bar period, Tovey
concentrated on the proportions and details of individual musical forms
as they moved through time; he insisted that such close study of foreground
detail was a sine qua non for an understanding of form. 45
Tovey was interested above all in demonstrating the temporal logic of
Beethoven's forms. In a well-known essay written in 1927, Tovey undertakes
to show the "fundamental normality" of the same piece celebrated
so portentously in Wagner's 1870 monograph: the late Quartet in C#
minor op. 131, a work that was generally considered to be Beethoven's
most original and idiosyncratic. The burden of Tovey's analysis is a demonstration
of how the various movements draw on the sonata-form
ethos, by now the prevailing mark of musical normality. By the end of his
analysis, Tovey's watchword is unity: motivic and harmonic links between
the finale and the first movement prompt him to declare that" [ t] he wheel
has come full circle. The whole quartet is a perfect unity, governed by the
results of the initial event of the first movement ... "46 With the detection
of this unity, Tovey seems to consider his case clinched: op. 131 is, after all,
a strict and reasonable conception.
In a compelling and sympathetic account of Tovey's achievement as a
critic, Joseph Kerman emphasizes his Victorian sensibility.47 It is this sensibility
that prompts Tovey to characterize the values of form, balance,
and unity (and even drama, the mainspring of the Classical style in his
view) as healthy, normal values, values that evince a strongly positive
moral force. And Tovey is not alone in understanding Beethoven primarily
as a model of ethical wellbeing. In two other essays stemmi~g from
1927, the renowned German musicologists Guido Adler and Hermann
Abert independently arrived at the same conclusion: the combination of
urgency, form and balance in Beethoven's music lends that music a moral
force that is thoroughly Classical.
Both Abert and Adler talk about the music as holding great opposing
287 The four ages of Beethoven
forces in balance. According to Adler, in Beethoven's music "the demonic
[Diimonie] ... binds itself with crystalline reason and clear understanding.
Each holds the balance over and against the other."48 Above all, form
is to be ranked over !dee as the determining factor in his music.49 For
Abert, Beethoven balances the heroic with the contemplative. He notes,
for instance, that works with a fully developed scherzo always contain a
big Adagio (which represents the urge to sink into the All, as opposed to
the scherzo, which strives to maintain one's own self in the face of the All).
This dichotomy of Self and All is initially presented in the first movement
as a primal conflict ( Urkonflikt), a powerful play of opposites, which are
then separated in the middle movements and ultimately synthesized in
the finale. 50 Again the values of balance and synthesis, Classical values,
come to the fore.
Finally, both men find ethical force at the foundation of Beethoven's
art. Implicit here is an admission that there is dangerous energy at large in
this music - remember Adler's Diimonie - energy that is somehow contained
and/or balanced by an act of will. Indeed, Abert talks about
Beethoven's "powerful ethical will,"51 Adler about his "urge for truth."52
Beethoven confronts the entire range of human experience with
unflinching honesty. Adler defines Beethoven's fundamental essence as
straightforwardness ( Gradlinigkeit) and true ethos ( wahres Ethos). 53 And
Abert, who studied Classics in Berlin and wrote a dissertation on the
ethos of Greek music, culminates his essay by associating Beethoven with
a beloved Classical ideal, that of beautiful nobility and goodness (kalokagathia).
54
Beethoven's music became for this generation the unsurpassable
model of a redeeming, Classical art. For Tovey, his music sounds as the
epitome of Victorian normality and health; for Abert and Adler it is a
viable moral force, a force for truth and goodness. Such things seemed in
short supply in the wake of the Great War: the Beethoven of 1927 stands as
a fitting representative for all that this battered age feared had been lost in
the madness. Now his music no longer fights for a fabled future, as it was
heard to do one hundred years earlier, but for a stable and reassuring past,
increasingly capable of being objectified; there is now less of "the starry
skies above" and more of "the moral law within."
1970 Beethoven as cultural force and cultural product
Between Beethoven then and Beethoven now stands the history of Beethoven
reception. (Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht)
Thus begins Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's 1970 monograph entitled
Zur Geschichte der Beethoven-Rezeption.55 It would be hard to situate the288 Scott Burnham
subject of his study, the history of Beethoven reception, more immediately
and dramatically; beyond this, Eggebrecht's words broach an arresting
predicament: there is now no longer any such thing as direct,
unmediated access to Beethoven. Schmitz's landmark book of 1927
already served to make one aware of Beethoven reception. But Eggebrecht
goes further. If Schmitz's prevailing agenda was to get at the real
Beethoven by cleansing his image of the intervening reception tradition,
Eggebrecht argues that there is no "real Beethoven" waiting beneath the
accretions of history; rather, Beethoven is fully and irrevocably a construction
of that history. Eggebrecht's monograph articulates a broad
shift from the study of an essential Beethoven to the study of the ways we
construct him. As such, his work underwrites the last stage in our own trajectory:
for the rise of reception studies signals the birth of our awareness
of the constructed hero, now more fully an object, a product of cultural
and ideological forces.

Eggebrecht's words, above all, emphasize our sense of distance from
Beethoven. They signal a loss of faith in an immediate connection to
Beethoven, a recognition that what we have been clinging to all these years
is a myth, a construction. What happens when this connection is lost? We
might be tempted to answer that it is no longer Beethoven himself who is
the subject of our collective scholarly archeology but the Beethoven
myth. If we can no longer hope to reach the master himself with our
efforts, we can at least console ourselves with the fascinations of two
hundred rich years of reception history. Following Eggebrecht, authors as
diversely motivated and trained as Ulrich Schmitt, Martin Geck, David B.
Dennis, Tia DeNora, and myself have traced this history, with its often
nefarious appropriations and constructions of Beethoven. 56
And yet there is much work that continues to flourish in the study of
Beethoven's sketches, the clarification and interpretation of biographical
issues, as well as interpretative studies that purport to get closer to
Beethoven's actual compositional intentions. Thus it is not simply the
case that we have collectively forgone the study of Beethoven

himself;
instead, what now characterizes all these studies is the urge to get behind
and beyond the myth, to understand the phenomenon Beethoven not as
something messianic and by definition larger than life but as the human
object of various forces - be they cultural, ideological, economic, political,
or psychological.
One manifestation of this effort is the work being done to assign
Beethoven a meaningful place in a broader cultural history (or ideological
history), to reinsert him into the flow of human time, above which his
music has always been heard to rise, as a timelessly valid aesthetic force,
whether Romantic, Classical, or natural.

Beethoven is now often studied
289 The four ages of Beethoven
as a cogent element of history-bound cultural practice: William
Kinderman, Thomas Sipe, and Maynard Solomon, for example, have
argued that Beethoven's music projects certain Schillerian aesthetic
values;57 the work of Adorno - who came to light for Anglo-American
musicology in the late 1970s, thanks to the brave efforts of Rose
Rosengard Subotnik - linked Beethoven with Hegel;58 and some of my
own work has situated Beethoven within the value system of the
Goethezeit as a whole. All of these authors attempt to find Beethoven
within the image of his culture, to bring his music back into the arena of
,cultural practice after years of formalist exemption from the perceived
contamination of history.
Another symptom of our age is the way in which we attempt to reconstruct
an image of Beethoven in the fashion of a mosaic, as we collectively
fill in the picture of Beethoven's personal and compositional paraphernalia,
the contents of his pockets, the types of paper he wrote on,

the
specifics of the concert and patronage scene, the hard data of his popularity
and his presence, what he was worth, etc. Our once highly touted spiritual
bond with the composer is bracketed off as the insidious sign of
ideological prepossession, or, at the least, as something irrelevant, personal,
and anecdotal. Taking its place is a perhaps sublimating mania for
knowing everything external that we can about him. In this sense, we have
traded invisible bond for visible surfeit. Thus we are busy reconstructing
something like a Beethoven for the digital age, a Beethoven of ever finer
resolution, each square of the mosaic requiring its own team of specialists,
each square becoming itself a mosaic, in a kind of fractal proliferation.