Beethoven after Napoleon

Rumph, Stephen

doi:10.1525/9780520930124

Cited by 2 publications

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“…After all, the aesthetic experimentation that Beethoven pursued later in his life has more often been traced to a withdrawal from the world (because its esotericism rules out unambiguous political communication of any nature) or to conservative politics (aligned with the medievalism and mysticism of German Romantics such as Schlegel, Müller, et cetera). 17 The parallel-between Romantic aesthetic experimentation and political liberation-has more obvious contemporary salience in a nineteenth-century French context, and this is partly because those rigid artistic rules that Romantics were so keen to transcend-classicism-were more deeply embedded in the 'establishment' in France, and more associated with the official culture of the Bourbon monarchy; there was, in other words, a direct link between political control and aesthetic restrictions. Napoleon's regime (1799-1815) reinforced this association, propagating neo-classicism both as a way of legitimating his rule by referencing the aesthetic of the prerevolutionary ancien régime and as a way of distancing Napoleonic society and art from Revolutionary chaos and experimentation.…”

Section: Romanticism and Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Romanticism, and Politics

Hambridge¹

2021

The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism

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Call to mind the most familiar tendencies of Romantic aesthetics-the breaking of aesthetic conventions, nostalgia for the past, the highlighting of individual subjectivity, idolisation of wild nature-and you would be hard-pressed to extrapolate from them a characteristically Romantic political position. The pursuit of the ineffable, or the prizing of the unconscious, meanwhile, seems to shortcut this possibility altogether by suggesting a deliberate disavowal of the political world-and that is before you add music into the equation. Drawing parallels between aesthetics and politics is always a risky business, and with music and Romanticism particularly tricky. The themes of this chapter are thus best teased out by questioning their possible intersections. How did the political beliefs of Romantic musicians affect their creative endeavours? Can we speak of styles having political tendencies-and if so, what is/was the politics of 'Romantic' music? Which political tendencies contributed to Romanticism in music? Which Romantic political positions influenced musical life? Which Romantic elements of musical life influenced political life? What are the political implications of Romantic theories about music?

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Section: Romanticism and Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Romanticism, and Politics

Hambridge¹

2021

The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism

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Irony and Incomprehensibility: Beethoven's “Serioso” String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, and the Path to the Late Style

Bonds¹

2017

Journal of the American Musicological Society

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Beethoven acknowledged the radical nature of his “Quartetto serioso” (1810) when he noted that it had been written for “a small circle of connoisseurs” and was “never to be performed in public.” The coda to the quartet's finale, with its sudden reversal of tone, has proven especially problematic, eliciting responses that include incomprehension (Marx) and outright dismissal (d'Indy). More recent accounts have pointed to irony as a strategy of negation, but Beethoven's contemporaries were inclined to embrace it as a constructive, liberating device. The Schlegel brothers, among others, championed it as the primary instrument of an epistemological framework that promoted the accommodation of multiple perspectives. The antifoundationalist nature of irony encourages a mode of understanding that precludes the possibility of any one “correct” perspective. Beethoven's use of “serioso” here and elsewhere, moreover, evokes a sense of the word that conveys pathos bordering on bathos. The “Quartetto serioso” is Beethoven's most extreme essay in irony, a device that would permeate his later works in more subtle but no less far-reaching ways. Opus 95 also reflects the growing prestige of artistic incomprehensibility, part of a broader shift from an aesthetics based on the principles of rhetoric, in which the artist bears the burden of intelligibility, to an aesthetics based on the principles of hermeneutics, in which the audience assumes responsibility for comprehending a given text. Beethoven's “late” works, often regarded as products of self-critique or turning inward, can thus be heard as part of a wider effort to engage audiences as active participants in a community dedicated to a dialectic of critique.

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Beethoven after Napoleon

Cited by 2 publications

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Music, Romanticism, and Politics

Music, Romanticism, and Politics

Irony and Incomprehensibility: Beethoven's “Serioso” String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, and the Path to the Late Style

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