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Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803

University of California Press

In the autumn of 1792 Beethoven set out for Vienna, where he had been invited to study with Haydn. The son and grandson of court musicians, Beethoven had, over the previous ten years, achieved a degree of distinction within the relatively homogeneous, court-oriented Bonn music world. After some preliminary (and rather severe) study with his father, he spent the years after 1780 as a pupil of Christian Gottlieb Neefe, who helped secure for Beethoven the position of deputy court organist in 1782. Throughout his time in Bonn, Beethoven continued to work at the court in several capacities. He also gained repute, through the Breuning family's private concerts, as a talented improvisational pianist. By 1792 he had produced about three dozen compositions, among them the two ambitious cantatas on the death of Joseph II (WoO 87) and the elevation of Leopold II (WoO 88), both commissioned by the Bonn Lesegesell-schaft, one of the several groups to which he was informally linked.

These early distinctions, in addition to his age (he was not quite twenty-two), made the idea of travel to Vienna and a final apprenticeship with Haydn seem like a logical next step. In fact, Beethoven had already visited Vienna in 1787, but his stay was curtailed when he was called back to the bedside of his dying mother in Bonn. The object of this second trip was to enrich his artistry through study with Haydn and, perhaps more important, to gain the imprimatur of the celebrated composer; then he would return to Bonn to assume a key position in court music affairs. His Bonn circle had no reason to believe his leave was permanent, and it was the elector himself who paid for Beethoven's travel

and living expenses.1

Beethoven's early letters from Vienna to members of his Bonn circle also attest to this. See, for example, Anderson 1961, vol. 1, no. 12, in which Beethoven refers, ostensibly, to his eventual return. This was in 1794. There is no reason to doubt, however, that Beethoven was simultaneously attempting to establish himself on a more permanent basis in Vienna, especially because, after the military victories of the neighboring French in 1794 and the dissolution of the electorate, Beethoven's salary was discontinued. It seems plausible that Beethoven began to explore the possibility of a more permanent career in Vienna around this time, if not before.

Considering Beethoven's accomplishments up to December 1792, one could easily envision his continued success—a career not unlike that enjoyed by his teacher Neefe, his grandfather Ludwig, or any other of the many successful but now forgotten musicians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One could also imagine that, in the later words of his teacher Haydn, Beethoven might eventually "fill the position of one of Europe's greatest composers" (Landon 1959, 141). What was not so clearly foreseeable was the unique way Beethoven came to be identified during the subsequent decade and a half as the author of unconventional, often "difficult," and sometimes unprecedentedly lengthy works such as the sonatas "quasi una fantasia" of 1801, the "Waldstein" and "Appasionata" sonatas of 1803, the "Eroica" Symphony of 1805, and the "Razumovsky" quartets of 1806. Despite Beethoven's apparent attempts to emulate and extend compositional practices of his predecessors (in particular, Haydn and Mozart), his contemporary supporters and opponents alike perceived his works as unusual and even bizarre. The history of Beethoven's reception is punctuated by resistance to what were viewed as the composer's musical idiosyncrasies.

Beethoven is often regarded as a "revolutionary" composer, a pivotal force in the development of music. The term revolutionary is strong but imprecise as an indicator of Beethoven's place in music history; moreover, it explains almost nothing. For a more comprehensive understanding of Beethoven's success among his contemporaries we need to view Beethoven's impact in the context of the changes that characterized high cultural musical life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the years Beethoven lived and worked in Vienna, between 1792 and 1827, interest in "eternal" standards of excellence in music were articulated and disseminated, and concert repertories increasingly featured the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as a musical trinity of master composers. Music historians have often referred to this period as the "prehistory" of the musical canon—the formative years in which

new models for the fundamental transformation in the assumptions of taste were initially articulated (Weber 1986).

During the 1980s, other scholars have outlined the contours of this trend toward musical "classics"2

In particular, see work by the historian William Weber (1986) and the sociologist Paul DiMaggio (1982).

A specific look at Beethoven's career can further illuminate this important reorientation in the early period of Viennese canon formation. As William Weber (1986) and Mary Sue Morrow (1989) have observed, Beethoven's special position in the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven trinity was reflected in contemporary music programming practices. Later in the nineteenth century, it was with Beethoven's symphonies that the traditional eighteenth-century practice of programming a wide and, from the modern viewpoint, frequently incongruous mix of opera arias, sonatas, improvisations, overtures, and symphonies began to give way to the more formalized practice of programming only symphonic music (Weber 1986, 366). Moreover, Beethoven was the only composer whose works were celebrated regardless of their genre.3

Even Mozart was celebrated during the early part of the nineteenth century primarily as an opera composer, whereas Beethoven's name alone provided the binding force for disparate genres (Morrow 1989).

Beethoven was not the first musician to write difficult or "connoisseur's" music. The gap between Kenner (expert) and Liebhaber (amateur) existed well before Beethoven arrived in Vienna. Rather, the late eighteenth century witnessed a shift toward a more highly articulated, self-conscious ideology of artistic greatness, as applied to secular music. Within this mindset of serious music, the composer-as-genius was reconceived as a figure who could...