Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell': Theories of Unity and Disunity in Late Beethoven (original) (raw)

Evidently disenchanted with the vein of criticism that typically greeted his music, Beethoven wrote to the music publisher Adolf Martin Schlesinger in July 1825 congratulating him on his choice of Adolph Bernhard Marx as editor-inchief of the recently-founded Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In so doing he voiced the hope that Marx would 'continue to reveal more and more what is noble and true in the sphere of art', a process the composer of the recently-completed Ninth Symphony saw as involving infinitely more than 'the mere counting of syllables'. 1 Fifteen years earlier, as Bettina Brentano wrote to Goethe, the composer expressed a similar viewpoint when he reportedly said that 'Music, verily, is the mediator between the life of the mind and the senses', the 'one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge … the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels'. 2 After an extended hiatus during which questions of musical meaning were viewed with scepticism if not out-and-out disdain, the position ostensibly endorsed by Beethoven is again enjoying favour. Indeed, the last two decades or so have brought with them an incredible transformation of what it means to engage in musical reflection. With the seeming force of continental plates colliding head-on, modes of understanding have shifted to the point where-in a great many quarters at least-it is no longer deemed sufficient to treat music as if it were a science whose substance is to be laid bare beneath a microscope, an isolated phenomenon where meaning is be ascertained solely within the notes. Nowadays, cultural context, gender, genre, hermeneutics and narrativity are among the near-myriad number of interdisciplinary perspectives which have found their way into a field formerly predicated on the empirically objective. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik put it almost a decade ago, 'emotion and meaning are coming out of the musicological closet'. 3 Looking back on all of these dazzling, sometimes dizzying developments, it is worth noting that Beethoven studies have almost always led the way in explorations of new critical methods; indeed, just about every analytical system from the nineteenth century to the present day has been inspired in some way by this composer. Focusing particularly on the composer's 'middle period', critics as diverse as Hoffmann, Schumann, Hanslick, Wagner, Riemann, Schenker and