Papers by John D . Wilson
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Bonner Beethoven-Studien, 2022
A rich source for the musical life of Bonn toward the end of the Electoral period, the exceptiona... more A rich source for the musical life of Bonn toward the end of the Electoral period, the exceptionally large and relatively well-preserved music library contains hundreds of thousands of pages of manuscript material. Offering a first systematic study of this corpus, this paper uses codicological evidence to put the various paper-types in chronological order. In the process, several of Beethoven's early works, which he dated himself, have turned out to be considerably later than he claimed them to be. Contains photographs of many watermarks of Swiss and Swabian music papers from the late 18th century.
When Beethoven revised Fidelio for a final time in 1814, he was in the midst of a fundamental ret... more When Beethoven revised Fidelio for a final time in 1814, he was in the midst of a fundamental rethinking of his relationship with audiences. “That one certainly writes more beautifully as soon as one writes for the audience is for certain,” he wrote in his Tagebuch in 1813, at the cusp of a series of works intended to speak directly to the broadest variety of listeners: Wellingtons Sieg, incidental music for patriotic plays, and the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick. Modern critics of this populist turn often draw a bright line between these works and Fidelio, viewing the former as uninspired ephemera and the latter as of universal value. Such criticism is frequently framed in moralistic terms: by casting the net wider than usual, Beethoven sold out his ethics for financial gain and political favor, effectively legitimizing the power of the sovereigns who gathered at the Congress of Vienna.
Just as historians have recently begun to take a more nuanced view of the dynamics between social classes during the Congress, some current re-evaluations of Beethoven’s political works have suggested greater continuity with the composer’s usual artistic and humanistic objectives than once recognized. Nicholas Cook has shown how Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick enacted community among a pan-European audience. Esteban Buch and Nicholas Mathew have drawn attention to the parallels between the political imagery of these and the late choral masterpieces. I have previously detailed the novel expressive and organizational strategies Beethoven employs in Der glorreiche Augenblick as a response to a changing conception of his audience.
In the current paper, I explore how Beethoven navigates the divide between the different factions of the audience in the 1814 revisions to Fidelio’s finale. An announcement in the Friedensblätter describes pointedly how both the “Friends of Art” and “Beethoven’s admirers” were in full agreement over the opera’s abilities to inspire popular success “without failing to fulfill the slightest demands of posterity.” By highlighting the popular features that Fidelio has in common with the more overtly political works of 1813-1815, drawing from sketch material that attests to a creative engagement with issues raised by writing vocal music in a “popular style,” as well as integrating current sociological perspectives into the Vienna Congress, I demonstrate how this announcement accurately summarizes Beethoven’s crystal-clear understanding of his 1814 listeners and their concerns.
The original conception for the Vienna-based research project “The Operatic Library of Maximilian... more The original conception for the Vienna-based research project “The Operatic Library of Maximilian Franz” (Austrian Science Fund, 1/2012–12/2015; project leader: Birgit Lodes) revolved around identification and interpretation of the known surviving musical sources for operatic productions in Bonn during Beethoven’s formative years in the court orchestra. Along the way, much additional information was gleaned from original archival research and a fresh appraisal of already-known primary sources about the institutions, region-wide transformations in musical taste, and networks of influence that affected the musical and social outlook of the young Beethoven and his contemporaries.
The published results of this project will encompass an online performance database, a printed catalogue raisonée of Bonn operatic sources preserved in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena along with an extensive introduction and appendices summarizing current knowledge on the Bonn theater as an institution and its sources, and a dissertation that contextualizes Elector Maximilian Franz within Vienna’s musical life before 1784. The current paper will highlight aspects that most directly impact Beethoven studies, and further, to concretize some of the many interesting questions raised by this work that require further study.
First, the online database will be demonstrated, which includes up-to-date information on the performances of opera at the Bonn court, as well as what musicians’ names appear in the performance materials. It has long been noted that Beethoven, as a member of the orchestra, absorbed this repertoire as a performer and must have learned a great deal from the experience. A second focus will be on the codicological studies of the sources themselves, sharpening to some degree our understanding of paper types used in Bonn as well as the copyists who worked for the court, for Simrock’s budding publishing venture, and for Beethoven directly. A final chapter involves the manifold connections and personal networks that the Elector had established already in Vienna. The bedrock of his collection, whose importance in Bonn’s musical life should not be underestimated, was laid in his youth at and around the imperial court. As the figure
who perhaps most influenced Beethoven’s early career, it is worth exploring Maximilian Franz’s cultural background, his understanding of music, the nature of his relationships with musicians, and his musical collection as a result of these.
The Bonn period still ranks as one of the most poorly understood phases of Beethoven’s career. The modest steps forward made by this research project, while not providing the last word on the subject, hopefully can offer the community of Beethoven scholars some concrete suggestions as to what future research might accomplish.
The goal of this paper is not so much to present a summa of a seemingly well-researched topic as ... more The goal of this paper is not so much to present a summa of a seemingly well-researched topic as it is to bring scholarly attention to a wealth of untapped sources that casts new light on that topic and some of the assumptions that surround it. Gustav Mahler’s 10 years as director of the Vienna Hofoper (1897-1907) are widely viewed as an unparalleled golden age for that institution, characterized equally by his distinctive musical vision as by his collaborative efforts with such legendary artistic personalities as Anna von Bahr Mildenburg and Alfred Roller. Similarly as with his well-known “Retuschen” to the scores of orchestral works by Beethoven and Schumann, whose sources have been thoroughly analyzed by David Pickett, Mahler seldom left the libretto or the music of the operas he produced untouched. This paper approaches two very different but complimentary cases from the year 1904, his productions of Weber’s Euryanthe and Beethoven’s Fidelio. The first is an example of the music director’s attempts to solve several generally acknowledged dramaturgical difficulties of an otherwise mold-breaking opera, and the second documents his efforts to renew and re-envision a beloved operatic staple. While Mahler’s biographers have discussed both as seen through the lens of contemporary journalistic criticism, the source material itself—full scores annotated and used by Mahler as well as parts used by the singers and orchestra—not only still exists in far greater completion than usually believed, but provides fascinating texture and some counterweight to received opinions about his practices and aesthetic judgments.
While more thorough research would be needed to be able to generalize the dramatic and musical values behind Mahler’s approach to operatic revision, a few commonalities between his alterations to Euryanthe and Fidelio already suggest a few directions for further inquiry:
1) Especially when working with Alfred Roller, he aimed for a high level of dramatic realism. This can be seen throughout the changes he made to the libretto of Euryanthe, as well as in the first scene of Fidelio, in which the setting is changed to inside Rocco’s house.
2) Both operas show an intense interest in giving the dramatic action an increased amount of psychological plausibility, achieved through revision of libretto as well as musical, scenic, and lighting effects.
3) Cuts and recomposed transitions in the third act of Euryanthe not only reinforce a more realistic psychological tableau, they also unify the tonal structure of the act to a greater degree. This provides another reason to his decision to place the Leonore 3 overture before the second-act finale of Fidelio.
Beethoven und der Wiener Kongress (1814/15) (Schriften zur Beethoven-Forschung 26), ed. Bernhard A. Appel, Joanna Cobb Biermann, William Kinderman, and Julia Ronge , Apr 2016
For the past 100 years, scholarly engagement with the monumental, politically oriented works that... more For the past 100 years, scholarly engagement with the monumental, politically oriented works that Beethoven composed during the Congress of Vienna has typically confined itself to the contentious
debate over their proper interpretation within his biography and artistic development. Biographers and critics have usually felt compelled to take one of two sides on the issue: either these works represent a debased form of Beethoven’s heroic style put to use for dubious political ends, or they are dated byproducts of a genuinely felt patriotism at a difficult period in European history. Neither view casts this phase of Beethoven's career in a particularly favorable light, forcing us to see him as either a willing producer of imperial propaganda or as a temporarily washed-up creative artist on the wrong side of history. Adherents of both views must grapple with a disquieting fact: the most monumental among these, Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick, immediately won their composer not only unprecedented popularity but also near-unanimous critical acclaim. Or to put it another way, contemporary listeners felt themselves in the presence of great musical art and expressed this awe in very similar terms as modern listeners tend to react to Beethoven’s most revered masterworks.
This heated debate over the canonicity of Beethoven’s political music, which has been thoughtfully summarized in recent years by Nicholas Cook and Nicholas Mathew, has overshadowed a singular achievement that these works embody. Beethoven, a self-professed composer for the connoisseur, this time aimed squarely for the crowd, and hit. As many contemporary composers who have tried their hand at film scoring or popular music can attest, the art of writing for a broader audience is extraordinarily difficult and only underestimated at the composer’s peril. It requires both a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of tastes and a sure sense of style that allows room for expressive authenticity, even at the height of rhetorical simplification.
With a close reading of "Der glorreiche Augenblick" as its centerpiece, this paper will explore the musical reasons for Beethoven’s unprecedented success. The popular style he employs in the cantata will be re-embedded in its stylistic context, seen especially through musical topoi, key characteristics, and their development in the late-Enlightenment opera and oratorio that audiences during the Vienna Congress were still familiar with. In parallel, Beethoven’s unique approach to text-setting in the Lieder of the 1810’s will provide an often-overlooked context. What is at stake is less an attempt at rehabilitating the political works into the canon, as it is at seizing the opportunity to hear what, stylistically, Beethoven and his largest audiences might have had in common, and what, when he later aimed for the "Millionen," he assumed they would be able to hear.
"I. Introduction
After 1750, philosophers and music theorists alike were fascinated with the sub... more "I. Introduction
After 1750, philosophers and music theorists alike were fascinated with the subject of the terrifying sublime. While the most influential late-18th-century contribution to the subject in German-speaking Europe was perhaps that of Immanuel Kant from his 1764 treatise Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, it was Edmund Burke’s discussion seven years earlier which had set the tone for all who followed him. Burke in fact located the origin of the sublime in terror, or “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” He also appears to be the first to suggest that instrumental music, with its ability to stir the passions without assigning them to a concrete object, could provide a fitting vessel for inspiring contemplation of the terrifying sublime.
As numerous contemporaries were quick to point out, it was Beethoven’s instrumental music which was most capable of eliciting terror and the sublime. Arguably, his two masterworks in D minor, the Piano Sonata Op. 31/2 (1802) and the Ninth Symphony Op. 125 (1823), as well as many other movements and passages in the same key, evoke this emotional state in a singular way. I would like to focus on Beethoven’s approach to this key, advancing the argument that many musical signifiers of the terrifying sublime which mark his practice in D minor were inherited from ombra and related operatic traditions he first became intimately aware of during his youthful tenure as a court musician in Bonn.
II. Furies, Storms, and Divine Retribution: representations of the terrifying sublime in music-dramatic works of the late 18th century
What musicologists have termed the “ombra” scene in 18th-century opera evokes the trembling of man in the face of overwhelming supernatural forces. For modern audiences, one of the most vivid examples of this would have to be the terrifying final scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), in which the Commendatore rises from the dead to drag Giovanni to hell for his crimes. This work was indeed part of Beethoven’s musical experiences in the Bonn opera orchestra, but was actually a latecomer to the tradition of ombra. In fact Mozart can be said to have written a summation of an almost century-long tradition developed by composers such as Hasse, Jomelli, Traetta, and Gluck. Clive McClelland (“Ombra Music in the Eighteenth Century,” diss. Leeds 2001) has drawn up a taxonomy of musical characteristics that ombra scenes share, including sudden accents, tremolando, the use of wind instruments (especially trombone), and unusual harmonies. The sum of these is an affect of constant suspense, leaving the listener both overpowered and unsure as to what is coming next.
Ombra scenes were in fact considered old-fashioned by the 1780s and often parodied, but they were complemented in Parisian and German operas and melodramas by more secular manifestations of the terrifying sublime. One of these was the storm scene, which in those days was almost always set in D minor. Several musical storms which Beethoven would have learned in his youth were found in extremely popular works such as Hiller’s Die Jagd (1770) and Grétry’s Zémire et Azor (1771). Storms and ombra-like invocation of the furies, in combination with the key of D minor, often collided in operatic depictions of rage against one’s fate and desire for supernatural vengeance, especially in Benda’s influential melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and in numerous “vengeance” arias by Mozart.
III. Beethoven’s D minor and the Ombra legacy
It is interesting to note how often Shakespeare’s tragedies have become associated with Beethoven’s D-minor instrumental works and movements. Besides the so-called Tempest/Sturm Sonata, whose nickname was said by Czerny to stem from the composer, the second movements of the String Quartet Op. 18/2 (1798) and the Piano Trio Op. 70/1 (1808, known as the “Geistertrio”) are both tied by evidence in Beethoven’s sketchbooks to other works by the Bard, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth respectively. Looking at these instrumental works in the context of Beethoven’s practice in vocal music, a theme emerges of existential tragedy, very often accompanied by imagery of deathly slumber and the grave. (“Joseph” Cantata WoO 87 [1790] No. 5, and Missa solemnis Op. 123 [ 1822] Crucifixus)
Beethoven’s early slow movements in this key, for example in the String Quartet Op. 18/1 and the very similar Largo e mesto of the Piano Sonata Op. 10/3, do not so much deal with the terrifying sublime. They do indeed culminate in climaxes marked by unmistakable Ombra references. It might even be said that the Beethoven’s road to writing entire works in D minor first had to pass through these intense essays in “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” In any case, the same musical qualities which were present in Ombra music were the ones which brought these early movements to new expressive heights, and which Beethoven would grasp later when writing Op. 31/2 and Op. 125.
"
Journal of Musicological Research, Jun 2013
"""Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each ... more """Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each major or minor key was appropriate for the expression of a distinct affect or character, a sentiment that Beethoven appears to have concurred with. Just how this belief impressed itself on compositional practices, in specifically musical ways, is a more difficult question to answer. This is because the choice of key for a composition in Beethoven’s era entailed several intertwining factors, both instrumental/acoustic and symbolic/traditional in nature. The analysis of musical topics (or topoi) provides a promising framework with which to study this issue, as particular topoi were frequently employed in vocal music in combination with certain keys. That these combinations of topos and key also frequently appeared in instrumental music shows that even without a text, composers held the same aesthetic attitude toward keys.
The key of E-flat major offers an interesting example of this complex interplay of instrumental and symbolic associations which were determinative of key character. As the principal tonality he chose for such epoch-making compositions as the Eroica symphony and the fifth piano concerto, E-flat (along with its relative C minor) is frequently mentioned in connection with Beethoven’s “heroic” style. The association of heroism and Tugend with this key however neither began with Beethoven, nor was it purely invented by 19th-century audiences of his music. Rather it had its roots in the musical culture of German-speaking Europe in the late 18th century, clearly evident in opera and oratorio known to audiences throughout the area. Part of this tradition originated in hunting music and the natural horn whose sonority became metonymous with the hunt, an area of research which has recently been given authoritative treatment by Joseph Pöschl and Raymond Monelle. Yet this does not explain why E-flat major became the key of choice for heroic sentiments: contrary to received wisdom, Austro-German hunting horns were typically not pitched in this key until the very late 18th century, and orchestral horns had long been capable of playing in multiple keys. Through the lens of musical topoi, this paper takes a fresh look at the musical sources, including music-dramatic works known to Beethoven in his youth in Bonn, and traces their heroic symbolism into the realm of instrumental music."""
Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each maj... more Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each major or minor key was appropriate for the expression of a distinct affect or character, a sentiment that Beethoven appears to have concurred with. While acoustic and instrumental considerations presumably helped composers and their contemporary audiences distinguish one key from another, learned or symbolic key associations also seem to have influenced composers’ practice to a large degree. However, this aspect is usually explored in musicological literature chiefly through the problematic heuristic of lists of key characteristics by authors such as Schubart, Kellner, or Galeazzi. These lists are interesting aesthetic artefacts in their own right, but just how far their subjective descriptions represent general beliefs held by composers must remain speculative, unless one understands what specific musical trends motivated them.
Focusing on C minor and C major in Beethoven’s oeuvre, this paper offers an alternative approach to the question. It departs from the belief that understanding of tonal symbolism in late-18th-century Europe was conditioned to a large degree by the contemporary operatic repertoire, whose sophisticated musico-dramatic conventions played a significant role in codifying meaning through musical topics or topoi. Grounded in a survey of the operatic works Beethoven performed in Bonn (1789-92), once widely-known throughout Europe, it is shown how the topoi conventionally associated with these two keys, namely ones expressing mourning and sublime purity, acted both as a reference point for his audiences as well as a springboard for his own path-breaking compositions.
Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each ma... more Numerous writers on music in the 18th and 19th centuries elaborated upon the belief that each major or minor key was appropriate for the expression of a distinct affect or character, a sentiment that Beethoven appears to have concurred with. While acoustic and technical considerations appear to have played a significant role in determining each key's "meaning," the element of traditional or symbolic key associations is no less crucial but is usually explored in musicological literature chiefly through the problematic heuristic of lists of key characteristics. The question of just how far these lists by authors such as Schubart, Galeazzi, and Grétry agree with composers' views and practice is a difficult one to delineate, as the evidence is often subjective in nature. The theory of musical topics (or topoi) provides however a promising framework with which to study this issue, as such topoi were frequently employed in vocal music in combination with certain keys.
This paper approaches the problem through the example of C major, a key which for various reasons was widely believed in Beethoven's time to symbolize freedom. Just as the concept of "freedom" in this politically turbulent age was subject to a great deal of transformation and upheaval, its musical representation took on radically different forms, at turns being associated with the innocence of childhood or militaristically colored imagery of the sublime. Grounded partially in a survey of operas Beethoven played in Bonn from 1789-92 and the topoi associated therein with the key of C, this study explores how Beethoven frequently used this key, with all its various expressive connotations inherited from previous traditions, throughout his work to express the idea of freedom, one that also changed throughout his compositional career in a manner reflective of his well-documented changes in personal philosophy, from the Enlightenment-era idealism of his youth to the resignation of his old age.
Books by John D . Wilson
Die Residenzstadt Bonn verfügte unter den letzten beiden Kurfürsten über ein reiches Theater- und... more Die Residenzstadt Bonn verfügte unter den letzten beiden Kurfürsten über ein reiches Theater- und Opernleben, das im ersten Teil dieses Bandes umfassend aufgearbeitet und in den Kontext der kulturellen Entwicklungen der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts gestellt wird. Dabei wird das Opernrepertoire ebenso rekonstruiert wie eine Übersicht über die Hofmusik gegeben. Im zweiten Teil wird die Opernsammlung des Habsburger Kurfürsten Maximilian Franz in ihrer Entstehung und Zusammensetzung beschrieben und detailliert katalogisiert. Damit stellt der Band ein unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel für weitere Forschungen – nicht nur in Bezug auf die Bonner Musikgeschichte – dar.
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Papers by John D . Wilson
Just as historians have recently begun to take a more nuanced view of the dynamics between social classes during the Congress, some current re-evaluations of Beethoven’s political works have suggested greater continuity with the composer’s usual artistic and humanistic objectives than once recognized. Nicholas Cook has shown how Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick enacted community among a pan-European audience. Esteban Buch and Nicholas Mathew have drawn attention to the parallels between the political imagery of these and the late choral masterpieces. I have previously detailed the novel expressive and organizational strategies Beethoven employs in Der glorreiche Augenblick as a response to a changing conception of his audience.
In the current paper, I explore how Beethoven navigates the divide between the different factions of the audience in the 1814 revisions to Fidelio’s finale. An announcement in the Friedensblätter describes pointedly how both the “Friends of Art” and “Beethoven’s admirers” were in full agreement over the opera’s abilities to inspire popular success “without failing to fulfill the slightest demands of posterity.” By highlighting the popular features that Fidelio has in common with the more overtly political works of 1813-1815, drawing from sketch material that attests to a creative engagement with issues raised by writing vocal music in a “popular style,” as well as integrating current sociological perspectives into the Vienna Congress, I demonstrate how this announcement accurately summarizes Beethoven’s crystal-clear understanding of his 1814 listeners and their concerns.
The published results of this project will encompass an online performance database, a printed catalogue raisonée of Bonn operatic sources preserved in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena along with an extensive introduction and appendices summarizing current knowledge on the Bonn theater as an institution and its sources, and a dissertation that contextualizes Elector Maximilian Franz within Vienna’s musical life before 1784. The current paper will highlight aspects that most directly impact Beethoven studies, and further, to concretize some of the many interesting questions raised by this work that require further study.
First, the online database will be demonstrated, which includes up-to-date information on the performances of opera at the Bonn court, as well as what musicians’ names appear in the performance materials. It has long been noted that Beethoven, as a member of the orchestra, absorbed this repertoire as a performer and must have learned a great deal from the experience. A second focus will be on the codicological studies of the sources themselves, sharpening to some degree our understanding of paper types used in Bonn as well as the copyists who worked for the court, for Simrock’s budding publishing venture, and for Beethoven directly. A final chapter involves the manifold connections and personal networks that the Elector had established already in Vienna. The bedrock of his collection, whose importance in Bonn’s musical life should not be underestimated, was laid in his youth at and around the imperial court. As the figure
who perhaps most influenced Beethoven’s early career, it is worth exploring Maximilian Franz’s cultural background, his understanding of music, the nature of his relationships with musicians, and his musical collection as a result of these.
The Bonn period still ranks as one of the most poorly understood phases of Beethoven’s career. The modest steps forward made by this research project, while not providing the last word on the subject, hopefully can offer the community of Beethoven scholars some concrete suggestions as to what future research might accomplish.
While more thorough research would be needed to be able to generalize the dramatic and musical values behind Mahler’s approach to operatic revision, a few commonalities between his alterations to Euryanthe and Fidelio already suggest a few directions for further inquiry:
1) Especially when working with Alfred Roller, he aimed for a high level of dramatic realism. This can be seen throughout the changes he made to the libretto of Euryanthe, as well as in the first scene of Fidelio, in which the setting is changed to inside Rocco’s house.
2) Both operas show an intense interest in giving the dramatic action an increased amount of psychological plausibility, achieved through revision of libretto as well as musical, scenic, and lighting effects.
3) Cuts and recomposed transitions in the third act of Euryanthe not only reinforce a more realistic psychological tableau, they also unify the tonal structure of the act to a greater degree. This provides another reason to his decision to place the Leonore 3 overture before the second-act finale of Fidelio.
debate over their proper interpretation within his biography and artistic development. Biographers and critics have usually felt compelled to take one of two sides on the issue: either these works represent a debased form of Beethoven’s heroic style put to use for dubious political ends, or they are dated byproducts of a genuinely felt patriotism at a difficult period in European history. Neither view casts this phase of Beethoven's career in a particularly favorable light, forcing us to see him as either a willing producer of imperial propaganda or as a temporarily washed-up creative artist on the wrong side of history. Adherents of both views must grapple with a disquieting fact: the most monumental among these, Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick, immediately won their composer not only unprecedented popularity but also near-unanimous critical acclaim. Or to put it another way, contemporary listeners felt themselves in the presence of great musical art and expressed this awe in very similar terms as modern listeners tend to react to Beethoven’s most revered masterworks.
This heated debate over the canonicity of Beethoven’s political music, which has been thoughtfully summarized in recent years by Nicholas Cook and Nicholas Mathew, has overshadowed a singular achievement that these works embody. Beethoven, a self-professed composer for the connoisseur, this time aimed squarely for the crowd, and hit. As many contemporary composers who have tried their hand at film scoring or popular music can attest, the art of writing for a broader audience is extraordinarily difficult and only underestimated at the composer’s peril. It requires both a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of tastes and a sure sense of style that allows room for expressive authenticity, even at the height of rhetorical simplification.
With a close reading of "Der glorreiche Augenblick" as its centerpiece, this paper will explore the musical reasons for Beethoven’s unprecedented success. The popular style he employs in the cantata will be re-embedded in its stylistic context, seen especially through musical topoi, key characteristics, and their development in the late-Enlightenment opera and oratorio that audiences during the Vienna Congress were still familiar with. In parallel, Beethoven’s unique approach to text-setting in the Lieder of the 1810’s will provide an often-overlooked context. What is at stake is less an attempt at rehabilitating the political works into the canon, as it is at seizing the opportunity to hear what, stylistically, Beethoven and his largest audiences might have had in common, and what, when he later aimed for the "Millionen," he assumed they would be able to hear.
After 1750, philosophers and music theorists alike were fascinated with the subject of the terrifying sublime. While the most influential late-18th-century contribution to the subject in German-speaking Europe was perhaps that of Immanuel Kant from his 1764 treatise Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, it was Edmund Burke’s discussion seven years earlier which had set the tone for all who followed him. Burke in fact located the origin of the sublime in terror, or “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” He also appears to be the first to suggest that instrumental music, with its ability to stir the passions without assigning them to a concrete object, could provide a fitting vessel for inspiring contemplation of the terrifying sublime.
As numerous contemporaries were quick to point out, it was Beethoven’s instrumental music which was most capable of eliciting terror and the sublime. Arguably, his two masterworks in D minor, the Piano Sonata Op. 31/2 (1802) and the Ninth Symphony Op. 125 (1823), as well as many other movements and passages in the same key, evoke this emotional state in a singular way. I would like to focus on Beethoven’s approach to this key, advancing the argument that many musical signifiers of the terrifying sublime which mark his practice in D minor were inherited from ombra and related operatic traditions he first became intimately aware of during his youthful tenure as a court musician in Bonn.
II. Furies, Storms, and Divine Retribution: representations of the terrifying sublime in music-dramatic works of the late 18th century
What musicologists have termed the “ombra” scene in 18th-century opera evokes the trembling of man in the face of overwhelming supernatural forces. For modern audiences, one of the most vivid examples of this would have to be the terrifying final scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), in which the Commendatore rises from the dead to drag Giovanni to hell for his crimes. This work was indeed part of Beethoven’s musical experiences in the Bonn opera orchestra, but was actually a latecomer to the tradition of ombra. In fact Mozart can be said to have written a summation of an almost century-long tradition developed by composers such as Hasse, Jomelli, Traetta, and Gluck. Clive McClelland (“Ombra Music in the Eighteenth Century,” diss. Leeds 2001) has drawn up a taxonomy of musical characteristics that ombra scenes share, including sudden accents, tremolando, the use of wind instruments (especially trombone), and unusual harmonies. The sum of these is an affect of constant suspense, leaving the listener both overpowered and unsure as to what is coming next.
Ombra scenes were in fact considered old-fashioned by the 1780s and often parodied, but they were complemented in Parisian and German operas and melodramas by more secular manifestations of the terrifying sublime. One of these was the storm scene, which in those days was almost always set in D minor. Several musical storms which Beethoven would have learned in his youth were found in extremely popular works such as Hiller’s Die Jagd (1770) and Grétry’s Zémire et Azor (1771). Storms and ombra-like invocation of the furies, in combination with the key of D minor, often collided in operatic depictions of rage against one’s fate and desire for supernatural vengeance, especially in Benda’s influential melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and in numerous “vengeance” arias by Mozart.
III. Beethoven’s D minor and the Ombra legacy
It is interesting to note how often Shakespeare’s tragedies have become associated with Beethoven’s D-minor instrumental works and movements. Besides the so-called Tempest/Sturm Sonata, whose nickname was said by Czerny to stem from the composer, the second movements of the String Quartet Op. 18/2 (1798) and the Piano Trio Op. 70/1 (1808, known as the “Geistertrio”) are both tied by evidence in Beethoven’s sketchbooks to other works by the Bard, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth respectively. Looking at these instrumental works in the context of Beethoven’s practice in vocal music, a theme emerges of existential tragedy, very often accompanied by imagery of deathly slumber and the grave. (“Joseph” Cantata WoO 87 [1790] No. 5, and Missa solemnis Op. 123 [ 1822] Crucifixus)
Beethoven’s early slow movements in this key, for example in the String Quartet Op. 18/1 and the very similar Largo e mesto of the Piano Sonata Op. 10/3, do not so much deal with the terrifying sublime. They do indeed culminate in climaxes marked by unmistakable Ombra references. It might even be said that the Beethoven’s road to writing entire works in D minor first had to pass through these intense essays in “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” In any case, the same musical qualities which were present in Ombra music were the ones which brought these early movements to new expressive heights, and which Beethoven would grasp later when writing Op. 31/2 and Op. 125.
"
The key of E-flat major offers an interesting example of this complex interplay of instrumental and symbolic associations which were determinative of key character. As the principal tonality he chose for such epoch-making compositions as the Eroica symphony and the fifth piano concerto, E-flat (along with its relative C minor) is frequently mentioned in connection with Beethoven’s “heroic” style. The association of heroism and Tugend with this key however neither began with Beethoven, nor was it purely invented by 19th-century audiences of his music. Rather it had its roots in the musical culture of German-speaking Europe in the late 18th century, clearly evident in opera and oratorio known to audiences throughout the area. Part of this tradition originated in hunting music and the natural horn whose sonority became metonymous with the hunt, an area of research which has recently been given authoritative treatment by Joseph Pöschl and Raymond Monelle. Yet this does not explain why E-flat major became the key of choice for heroic sentiments: contrary to received wisdom, Austro-German hunting horns were typically not pitched in this key until the very late 18th century, and orchestral horns had long been capable of playing in multiple keys. Through the lens of musical topoi, this paper takes a fresh look at the musical sources, including music-dramatic works known to Beethoven in his youth in Bonn, and traces their heroic symbolism into the realm of instrumental music."""
Focusing on C minor and C major in Beethoven’s oeuvre, this paper offers an alternative approach to the question. It departs from the belief that understanding of tonal symbolism in late-18th-century Europe was conditioned to a large degree by the contemporary operatic repertoire, whose sophisticated musico-dramatic conventions played a significant role in codifying meaning through musical topics or topoi. Grounded in a survey of the operatic works Beethoven performed in Bonn (1789-92), once widely-known throughout Europe, it is shown how the topoi conventionally associated with these two keys, namely ones expressing mourning and sublime purity, acted both as a reference point for his audiences as well as a springboard for his own path-breaking compositions.
This paper approaches the problem through the example of C major, a key which for various reasons was widely believed in Beethoven's time to symbolize freedom. Just as the concept of "freedom" in this politically turbulent age was subject to a great deal of transformation and upheaval, its musical representation took on radically different forms, at turns being associated with the innocence of childhood or militaristically colored imagery of the sublime. Grounded partially in a survey of operas Beethoven played in Bonn from 1789-92 and the topoi associated therein with the key of C, this study explores how Beethoven frequently used this key, with all its various expressive connotations inherited from previous traditions, throughout his work to express the idea of freedom, one that also changed throughout his compositional career in a manner reflective of his well-documented changes in personal philosophy, from the Enlightenment-era idealism of his youth to the resignation of his old age.
Books by John D . Wilson
Just as historians have recently begun to take a more nuanced view of the dynamics between social classes during the Congress, some current re-evaluations of Beethoven’s political works have suggested greater continuity with the composer’s usual artistic and humanistic objectives than once recognized. Nicholas Cook has shown how Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick enacted community among a pan-European audience. Esteban Buch and Nicholas Mathew have drawn attention to the parallels between the political imagery of these and the late choral masterpieces. I have previously detailed the novel expressive and organizational strategies Beethoven employs in Der glorreiche Augenblick as a response to a changing conception of his audience.
In the current paper, I explore how Beethoven navigates the divide between the different factions of the audience in the 1814 revisions to Fidelio’s finale. An announcement in the Friedensblätter describes pointedly how both the “Friends of Art” and “Beethoven’s admirers” were in full agreement over the opera’s abilities to inspire popular success “without failing to fulfill the slightest demands of posterity.” By highlighting the popular features that Fidelio has in common with the more overtly political works of 1813-1815, drawing from sketch material that attests to a creative engagement with issues raised by writing vocal music in a “popular style,” as well as integrating current sociological perspectives into the Vienna Congress, I demonstrate how this announcement accurately summarizes Beethoven’s crystal-clear understanding of his 1814 listeners and their concerns.
The published results of this project will encompass an online performance database, a printed catalogue raisonée of Bonn operatic sources preserved in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena along with an extensive introduction and appendices summarizing current knowledge on the Bonn theater as an institution and its sources, and a dissertation that contextualizes Elector Maximilian Franz within Vienna’s musical life before 1784. The current paper will highlight aspects that most directly impact Beethoven studies, and further, to concretize some of the many interesting questions raised by this work that require further study.
First, the online database will be demonstrated, which includes up-to-date information on the performances of opera at the Bonn court, as well as what musicians’ names appear in the performance materials. It has long been noted that Beethoven, as a member of the orchestra, absorbed this repertoire as a performer and must have learned a great deal from the experience. A second focus will be on the codicological studies of the sources themselves, sharpening to some degree our understanding of paper types used in Bonn as well as the copyists who worked for the court, for Simrock’s budding publishing venture, and for Beethoven directly. A final chapter involves the manifold connections and personal networks that the Elector had established already in Vienna. The bedrock of his collection, whose importance in Bonn’s musical life should not be underestimated, was laid in his youth at and around the imperial court. As the figure
who perhaps most influenced Beethoven’s early career, it is worth exploring Maximilian Franz’s cultural background, his understanding of music, the nature of his relationships with musicians, and his musical collection as a result of these.
The Bonn period still ranks as one of the most poorly understood phases of Beethoven’s career. The modest steps forward made by this research project, while not providing the last word on the subject, hopefully can offer the community of Beethoven scholars some concrete suggestions as to what future research might accomplish.
While more thorough research would be needed to be able to generalize the dramatic and musical values behind Mahler’s approach to operatic revision, a few commonalities between his alterations to Euryanthe and Fidelio already suggest a few directions for further inquiry:
1) Especially when working with Alfred Roller, he aimed for a high level of dramatic realism. This can be seen throughout the changes he made to the libretto of Euryanthe, as well as in the first scene of Fidelio, in which the setting is changed to inside Rocco’s house.
2) Both operas show an intense interest in giving the dramatic action an increased amount of psychological plausibility, achieved through revision of libretto as well as musical, scenic, and lighting effects.
3) Cuts and recomposed transitions in the third act of Euryanthe not only reinforce a more realistic psychological tableau, they also unify the tonal structure of the act to a greater degree. This provides another reason to his decision to place the Leonore 3 overture before the second-act finale of Fidelio.
debate over their proper interpretation within his biography and artistic development. Biographers and critics have usually felt compelled to take one of two sides on the issue: either these works represent a debased form of Beethoven’s heroic style put to use for dubious political ends, or they are dated byproducts of a genuinely felt patriotism at a difficult period in European history. Neither view casts this phase of Beethoven's career in a particularly favorable light, forcing us to see him as either a willing producer of imperial propaganda or as a temporarily washed-up creative artist on the wrong side of history. Adherents of both views must grapple with a disquieting fact: the most monumental among these, Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick, immediately won their composer not only unprecedented popularity but also near-unanimous critical acclaim. Or to put it another way, contemporary listeners felt themselves in the presence of great musical art and expressed this awe in very similar terms as modern listeners tend to react to Beethoven’s most revered masterworks.
This heated debate over the canonicity of Beethoven’s political music, which has been thoughtfully summarized in recent years by Nicholas Cook and Nicholas Mathew, has overshadowed a singular achievement that these works embody. Beethoven, a self-professed composer for the connoisseur, this time aimed squarely for the crowd, and hit. As many contemporary composers who have tried their hand at film scoring or popular music can attest, the art of writing for a broader audience is extraordinarily difficult and only underestimated at the composer’s peril. It requires both a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of tastes and a sure sense of style that allows room for expressive authenticity, even at the height of rhetorical simplification.
With a close reading of "Der glorreiche Augenblick" as its centerpiece, this paper will explore the musical reasons for Beethoven’s unprecedented success. The popular style he employs in the cantata will be re-embedded in its stylistic context, seen especially through musical topoi, key characteristics, and their development in the late-Enlightenment opera and oratorio that audiences during the Vienna Congress were still familiar with. In parallel, Beethoven’s unique approach to text-setting in the Lieder of the 1810’s will provide an often-overlooked context. What is at stake is less an attempt at rehabilitating the political works into the canon, as it is at seizing the opportunity to hear what, stylistically, Beethoven and his largest audiences might have had in common, and what, when he later aimed for the "Millionen," he assumed they would be able to hear.
After 1750, philosophers and music theorists alike were fascinated with the subject of the terrifying sublime. While the most influential late-18th-century contribution to the subject in German-speaking Europe was perhaps that of Immanuel Kant from his 1764 treatise Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, it was Edmund Burke’s discussion seven years earlier which had set the tone for all who followed him. Burke in fact located the origin of the sublime in terror, or “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” He also appears to be the first to suggest that instrumental music, with its ability to stir the passions without assigning them to a concrete object, could provide a fitting vessel for inspiring contemplation of the terrifying sublime.
As numerous contemporaries were quick to point out, it was Beethoven’s instrumental music which was most capable of eliciting terror and the sublime. Arguably, his two masterworks in D minor, the Piano Sonata Op. 31/2 (1802) and the Ninth Symphony Op. 125 (1823), as well as many other movements and passages in the same key, evoke this emotional state in a singular way. I would like to focus on Beethoven’s approach to this key, advancing the argument that many musical signifiers of the terrifying sublime which mark his practice in D minor were inherited from ombra and related operatic traditions he first became intimately aware of during his youthful tenure as a court musician in Bonn.
II. Furies, Storms, and Divine Retribution: representations of the terrifying sublime in music-dramatic works of the late 18th century
What musicologists have termed the “ombra” scene in 18th-century opera evokes the trembling of man in the face of overwhelming supernatural forces. For modern audiences, one of the most vivid examples of this would have to be the terrifying final scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), in which the Commendatore rises from the dead to drag Giovanni to hell for his crimes. This work was indeed part of Beethoven’s musical experiences in the Bonn opera orchestra, but was actually a latecomer to the tradition of ombra. In fact Mozart can be said to have written a summation of an almost century-long tradition developed by composers such as Hasse, Jomelli, Traetta, and Gluck. Clive McClelland (“Ombra Music in the Eighteenth Century,” diss. Leeds 2001) has drawn up a taxonomy of musical characteristics that ombra scenes share, including sudden accents, tremolando, the use of wind instruments (especially trombone), and unusual harmonies. The sum of these is an affect of constant suspense, leaving the listener both overpowered and unsure as to what is coming next.
Ombra scenes were in fact considered old-fashioned by the 1780s and often parodied, but they were complemented in Parisian and German operas and melodramas by more secular manifestations of the terrifying sublime. One of these was the storm scene, which in those days was almost always set in D minor. Several musical storms which Beethoven would have learned in his youth were found in extremely popular works such as Hiller’s Die Jagd (1770) and Grétry’s Zémire et Azor (1771). Storms and ombra-like invocation of the furies, in combination with the key of D minor, often collided in operatic depictions of rage against one’s fate and desire for supernatural vengeance, especially in Benda’s influential melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) and in numerous “vengeance” arias by Mozart.
III. Beethoven’s D minor and the Ombra legacy
It is interesting to note how often Shakespeare’s tragedies have become associated with Beethoven’s D-minor instrumental works and movements. Besides the so-called Tempest/Sturm Sonata, whose nickname was said by Czerny to stem from the composer, the second movements of the String Quartet Op. 18/2 (1798) and the Piano Trio Op. 70/1 (1808, known as the “Geistertrio”) are both tied by evidence in Beethoven’s sketchbooks to other works by the Bard, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth respectively. Looking at these instrumental works in the context of Beethoven’s practice in vocal music, a theme emerges of existential tragedy, very often accompanied by imagery of deathly slumber and the grave. (“Joseph” Cantata WoO 87 [1790] No. 5, and Missa solemnis Op. 123 [ 1822] Crucifixus)
Beethoven’s early slow movements in this key, for example in the String Quartet Op. 18/1 and the very similar Largo e mesto of the Piano Sonata Op. 10/3, do not so much deal with the terrifying sublime. They do indeed culminate in climaxes marked by unmistakable Ombra references. It might even be said that the Beethoven’s road to writing entire works in D minor first had to pass through these intense essays in “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” In any case, the same musical qualities which were present in Ombra music were the ones which brought these early movements to new expressive heights, and which Beethoven would grasp later when writing Op. 31/2 and Op. 125.
"
The key of E-flat major offers an interesting example of this complex interplay of instrumental and symbolic associations which were determinative of key character. As the principal tonality he chose for such epoch-making compositions as the Eroica symphony and the fifth piano concerto, E-flat (along with its relative C minor) is frequently mentioned in connection with Beethoven’s “heroic” style. The association of heroism and Tugend with this key however neither began with Beethoven, nor was it purely invented by 19th-century audiences of his music. Rather it had its roots in the musical culture of German-speaking Europe in the late 18th century, clearly evident in opera and oratorio known to audiences throughout the area. Part of this tradition originated in hunting music and the natural horn whose sonority became metonymous with the hunt, an area of research which has recently been given authoritative treatment by Joseph Pöschl and Raymond Monelle. Yet this does not explain why E-flat major became the key of choice for heroic sentiments: contrary to received wisdom, Austro-German hunting horns were typically not pitched in this key until the very late 18th century, and orchestral horns had long been capable of playing in multiple keys. Through the lens of musical topoi, this paper takes a fresh look at the musical sources, including music-dramatic works known to Beethoven in his youth in Bonn, and traces their heroic symbolism into the realm of instrumental music."""
Focusing on C minor and C major in Beethoven’s oeuvre, this paper offers an alternative approach to the question. It departs from the belief that understanding of tonal symbolism in late-18th-century Europe was conditioned to a large degree by the contemporary operatic repertoire, whose sophisticated musico-dramatic conventions played a significant role in codifying meaning through musical topics or topoi. Grounded in a survey of the operatic works Beethoven performed in Bonn (1789-92), once widely-known throughout Europe, it is shown how the topoi conventionally associated with these two keys, namely ones expressing mourning and sublime purity, acted both as a reference point for his audiences as well as a springboard for his own path-breaking compositions.
This paper approaches the problem through the example of C major, a key which for various reasons was widely believed in Beethoven's time to symbolize freedom. Just as the concept of "freedom" in this politically turbulent age was subject to a great deal of transformation and upheaval, its musical representation took on radically different forms, at turns being associated with the innocence of childhood or militaristically colored imagery of the sublime. Grounded partially in a survey of operas Beethoven played in Bonn from 1789-92 and the topoi associated therein with the key of C, this study explores how Beethoven frequently used this key, with all its various expressive connotations inherited from previous traditions, throughout his work to express the idea of freedom, one that also changed throughout his compositional career in a manner reflective of his well-documented changes in personal philosophy, from the Enlightenment-era idealism of his youth to the resignation of his old age.