Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions...

Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic dilemmas and resolutions during the composer’s lifetime. By Robin Wallace. Pp. viii + 184. (Cambridge University Press.) 1986. £22.50.

Part of the object of this book is to refute the view that Beethoven was not well received by critics during his lifetime, and part of it is to survey the aesthetic philosophy of those critics, in comparison with those of today, and the degree and kind of understanding they had of Beethoven's music. In both these aims it is successful and serves a useful purpose. However, the writings of music critics past or present are usually far from being either elevating or enlightening, and their wrestling with both music and concepts beyond their understanding makes very dull reading. The author himself shares in the general confusion of thought, but he does bring out some pertinent points and, otherwise, takes a fairly impartial and non-partisan stand.

The "expressive", i.e. associative, view of music of the eighteenth century is contrasted with the "abstract" or "absolute" view of the nineteenth, with the emphasis on "formal analysis". Robin Wallace finds that the critics contemporary with Beethoven "all combine abstract, idealist views of Beethoven's works with sincere attempts to anchor these views in the everyday world of sense perception" and so bridge the gap between the two centuries. The former are supposed to derive from "'the German idealists', from Kant through Schopenhauer, who ultimately saw music as the key to the transcendental world of absolute ideas". While it is doubtful if this is what is meant nowadays by the word "abstract" as applied to music, it does not seem to be intended with any sort of conscious logic by the Romantic music critics either. E. T. A. Hoffmann is cited as referring to music as "a wonderful, infinite spirit kingdom", but emotions, such as awe, fear, pain and longing, are all that he seems to find there. The Romantic belief in "the soulfulness of music" amounts, in the critics quoted (Wendt, Hoffmann, Kanne, Berlioz), to seeing it as emotional and nothing else. This is contrasted with the "absolutist standpoint championed by modern writers"—which, presumably, sees music as not even emotional but altogether meaningless. In between, we have the wretched reductionist view, which sees monumental works of art as "portraying the psychological struggles" of their authors.
A very interesting passage is cited from the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: "The form of art in which the unity of existence is made directly into potency, into symbol, is music". "Schelling's view", writes Robin Wallace, "was essentially Platonic: the forms of music are the forms of the world itself; they spring from the rhythm and harmony of the visible universe". This is the Pythagorean view, not "German idealist", and is a very long way from the vague fumblings of the music critics in question. We are referred to Mattheson, a hundred years earlier, and to his view "that there was a 'secret affinity' whereby well-ordered sounds would impart their harmony to the sympathetic human soul"—which again is Pythagorean; but this seems to have little relation to either Wendt or Hoffmann, who get nowhere near to this level of thinking. If it is perfectly true that music is an expression of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", it is also true, as Debussy said, that "of all the arts music is closest to nature", i.e. the concrete, material world of sense-perception. None of our theorists seems able to understand that symbols and archetypes, "the transcendental world of absolute ideas", can be perceived only through their concrete manifestations and, conversely, that the world of nature can be understood only as an embodiment of "the transcendental world of absolute ideas".

Probably the most interesting and perceptive of the critics cited is A.B. Marx, the founder of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. For him, tone-painting was "one of the fundamental expressive devices of music", and there was "no distinction between art and reality". He saw Beethoven as the first composer to use Tonmalerei to give unity and coherence to an entire work—and he sees the unity in Beethoven's works, putting him in advance of most critics, even today; and sees that the four movements of the cycle belong together. In the Eroica Symphony he sees the idea of the Heldenweihe, the consecration of the hero, as the unifying motif—the Prometheus theme, central to Beethoven—and that the Funeral March "far transcended the death of any one man".

Hoffmann's "infinite spirit kingdom" and emotional view of music are not "an antithesis" to Marx's view, neither are they "abstractions"; they are just a different emphasis—a question of expression compared with the means to expression. The use of the formula "abstract" is one of the principal obstructions to clear thinking, particularly in music criticism, and none of these worshippers of abstraction seems to have taken the trouble to consider whether it means anything—and, if so, what. If "emotional" is meant, why use the word "abstract"? Emotions are extremely concrete, and so are their causes. Neither is Kanne's "depth of spirit" a contradiction. A "spiritual dimension in music" is, again, nothing to do with "abstract", which in the last analysis is meaningless as a word, and it is in the sense of meaninglessness that it is so popular in our time. To find meaning, all these dimensions have to be present together, the concrete (sensation), emotion, thinking (idea and intellectual grasp) and intuition (the spiritual dimension, or perception of inner truth), and this is exactly what art, especially music, realizes. It is not a matter of different theories of aesthetics but of different levels of confusion, culminating in total confusion (abstraction) or meaninglessness.

The tired cliché that what music expresses "cannot be conveyed in words" really refers to the inarticulateness of the critic or, still more, to the fact that he cannot understand the music, and this is a high-sounding excuse. If we were really to think about the consequences of this statement, we should have to abolish all forms of natural science, for a start, and philosophy, and we should end with nothing left in language but the grunts of hypothetical cave-men. Some of the remarks of the critics quoted here give a good assessment and insight into the music, such as Marx's "dreams and sensations that travel beyond the music, beyond the earth itself, on the Elegiac Song, op. 118. An interpretation like this is not intended to be definitive, but it has much more value than giving a list of the keys through which the music passes and assigning it to stereotyped forms such as A-B-A or X-Y-Z, which tells us nothing except that a blockhead is speaking. So we pass from an eagle's empyrean view, like that of Schelling and the Pythagoreans, to sea-gulls flapping about in an emotional fog and end up with birds that cannot even fly but waddle on the ground counting the number of key-changes, like picking up worms. This has to be "progressive", since it proceeds from past to present, but this is another cliché. When any individual cycle is reaching its end the symptoms of disintegration set in. Any change can be progressive or retrogressive—or both—and everything is change—but not necessarily "progress" in the linear sense. Comparing the change represented by Beethoven with contemporary changes is a simplistic false analogy, because the historical context, and the nature of the changes, are entirely different. Also, not all creators of changes are Beethoven’s, and to assume an equivalence is exceedingly naive. Thus one can "progress", in a sense, towards nothingness or regress, like Schelling, towards truth.

The over-all conclusion to which one must come after reading this book is that, while Beethoven was applauded and esteemed in his lifetime at least as much as he is today, he was, on the whole, understood as little then as he is now. We come upon an occasional perception that rings true—such as Hoffmann's view of the fifth Symphony: "all is part of an endless process of cataclysmic change". The reviews quoted of the ninth Symphony are uniformly boring and unconscious, while detractors of the late works generally complain of "lack of unity", unity being just their most significant and striking attribute; but this is still not perceived today. "Even in Vienna, the last quartets were not well understood"; but who understands them now?
M. McM.