This article shows how discourse on Beethoven's late works has been underpinned by material fascination with the composer's body, most apparent in the cult veneration of his dying face, which was commodified in the form of his mask. From 1890 to 1920 in Germany and Austria, Beethoven's mask became a ubiquitous item of decor for the music room, a devotional object linked with the face of Christ in the popular imagination. This mislabeled “death” mask was cast during Beethoven's lifetime, a stoic visage that put a face to the legend: that is, to the legendary 1868 account by Anselm Hüttenbrenner that recounted Beethoven's death as a heroic battle with the storm clouds. Two conflicting physiognomies—the stubborn Napoleonic commander and the suffering Christ-like redeemer—led to a critical divide that saw late works as either transcendent of, or marred by, suffering. When we unmask a prehistory of late style, we see how modern discourse on lateness still orbits around this tension between the spiritual and material, between transcendence and decay, and how this critical tradition crystallized around Theodor W. Adorno's stark resistance to the transcendent deathbed that was epitomized by the writings of Ludwig Nohl. Lateness, then, has a hidden backbone in a popular fascination with the artist's body. This same fascination led many to imagine Beethoven's final compositions as almost tangible traces of his person, hearing his late Adagios as “grave-songs,” as the composer's dying voice.
also very successful commercially and popular with amateurs. Goodman speculates that collecting and playing galant repertoire, beyond its moral benefits as a conduit for sympathy, allowed genteel Americans to 'circumvent the problem of provincialism' by aligning themselves affectively and aesthetically with 'those across the ocean' (). The 'Epilogue' points to historical changes in the economies of musical amateurism and collecting in the antebellum era, among which was the expansion of possibilities for women to engage in paid musical work. Music albums themselves also diminished as an amateur accomplishment in the nineteenth century, removing one of the main bulwarks against hostility to women's leisurely artistic endeavours. Goodman's loving, careful documentation of an overlooked archive represents a stellar contribution to US women's music history, as well as to the broader history of eighteenth-century music. As Ruth Solie notes in her work with Victorian girls' diaries, informal, often highly personal sources like Goodman's invite us to 'look away from the professional discourse of musicians and toward other arenas in which ordinary "cultural scuttlebutt" is regularly going on' (Music In Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), ). The micro-histories that emerge in Goodman's analysis are valuable in themselves, and they emphasize the benefit of taking seriously even informal sources like these in prompting a fresh understanding of the past.
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