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Beethoven's Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration Author(s): Nicholas Mathew Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 110-150 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.110 . Accessed: 26/08/2013 09:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th- Century Music. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 146.232.93.77 on Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:38:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH CENTURY MUSIC Beethoven’s Political Music, the Handelian Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Prostration NICHOLAS MATHEW Viennese Handel and the Power of Music Handel’s music even as he lay dying: music historians have long cherished the image of Johann Reinhold Schultz, reporting on a dinner Beethoven on his deathbed, leafing through all in 1823 at which Beethoven had been present, forty volumes of Handel’s works, sent as a gift recorded that Beethoven had declared Handel from London. The beginnings of myth-making “the greatest composer that ever lived”: “I can- are apparent even in the letter of thanks that not describe to you with what pathos, and I am Johann Baptist Streicher wrote on the dying inclined to say, with what sublimity of lan- composer’s behalf, in which Streicher claims guage, he spoke of the Messiah of this immor- that Beethoven “pointed with his finger to tal genius,” wrote Schultz. “Every one of us Handel’s works, and said, with feeling and em- was moved when he said, ‘I would uncover my phasis: ‘Das ist das Wahre’ [this is the Real head, and kneel down at his tomb!’ H. and I Thing]!”2 tried repeatedly to turn the conversation to Beethoven, being in the business of myth- Mozart, but without effect. I only heard him making himself, was given to portentous decla- say, ‘In a monarchy we know who is first’; rations of this sort. By the 1820s, his endorse- which might or might not apply to the sub- ject.”1 Throughout his life, Beethoven professed to admire Handel—and, by all accounts, praised 2Letter of 5 January 1827, Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, ed. and trans. Theodore Albrecht, vol. III (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), no. 453; Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel, Gesamtausgabe, ed. 1Johann Reinhold Schultz, “A Day with Beethoven,” Sieghard Brandenburg, vol. VI (Munich: Henle, 1996), no. Harmonicon (Jan. 1824), 11. 2247a (henceforth Briefwechsel I–VI). 110 19th-Century Music, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 110–150. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2009.33.2.110. This content downloaded from 146.232.93.77 on Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:38:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ments of Handel appear to signal the rise of the choral writing of the Missa solemnis.5 But NICHOLAS MATHEW sort of Germanizing historiography that would Handel has also been mentioned in connection Beethoven’s dominate the next century and a half of music with Beethoven’s most notorious political com- Political Music scholarship. Yet there has never been a consen- positions, particularly those composed toward sus among music historians about exactly what the end of the Napoleonic Wars and during the Beethoven admired or sought to emulate in Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815—among Handel. Beethoven arrived in Vienna too late them several choruses in praise of Kaiser Franz to feature prominently in the oft-repeated mu- and the allied monarchs, such as “Ihr weisen sicological story whereby Mozart encounters Gründer glücklicher Staaten” (You Wise Handel, Bach, and other old masters in the Founders of Happy States); Wellingtons Sieg, home of Baron van Swieten in the 1780s. This with its closing Siegessinfonie and fugato based tale—appealing to some musicologists partly on “God Save the King”; and the Congress can- because it suggests an auspicious transhistorical tata Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious meeting of German minds—traditionally cul- Moment), a collaboration with Beethoven fa- minates with Mozart and Haydn enriching the natic and ardent patriot Aloys Weissenbach.6 midcentury musical galant with counterpoint, Handel was bound to have been among and thus creating the Viennese Classical style.3 Beethoven’s aesthetic models when composing In any case, Haydn experienced Handel in an political compositions like these. By the turn English context only months before Beethoven of the century, Handel’s music, as Haydn wit- arrived in Vienna. Haydn’s attendance at the nessed firsthand in the 1790s, had come to 1791 Handel Commemoration in Westminster define a particular sort of grand state music in Abbey, and his subsequent absorption of England. As Esteban Buch has explored, the London’s historically aware choral culture— English conjunction of Handelian grandeur and the foremost product of which was the Cre- the implicitly collectivist ethic of the chorus— ation—were key moments in the Viennese re- a combination also exploited to some extent in ception of Handel.4 contemporary performances of “God Save the In Beethoven’s case, however, the composi- King”—provided one of the most influential tions that have tended to elicit the adjective models for music in modern statecraft; grand “Handelian” are those that present-day critics choruses eloquently represented an idealized have often regarded as marginal or problematic vision of community spirit and collective ac- in some way—supposedly atypical choral com- positions; works that adopt self-conscious or conventional archaism; “occasional pieces” and celebratory works. Handel’s name sometimes 5See, for example, William Kinderman, Beethoven (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 252: “Parts of crops up in conjunction with later composi- the Missa solemnis, and especially the Gloria, reflect his tions—with the festive counterpoint of Die professed admiration of Handel in their choral textures Weihe des Hauses overture and the antique and rhetoric, but no other work displays this influence more clearly than Die Weihe des Hauses, in its lucid coun- terpoint, formal breadth, and festive solemnity.” 6Weissenbach wrote several patriotic verses during the Con- gress of Vienna and published an account of his experi- ences at the Congress, including his encounters with Beethoven, as Meine Reise zum Congress: Wahrheit und 3For examples of this tale, see Ludwig Finscher, “Bach and Dichtung (Vienna, 1816). See also Peter Clive, Beethoven the Viennese Classics,” Miscellanea Musicologica 10 and His World: A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford: Ox- (1979), 47–58; and Robert Marshall, “Bach and Mozart’s ford University Press, 2001), pp. 394–95. The most sus- Artistic Maturity,” Bach Perspectives 3 (1998), 47–79. For tained treatments of Beethoven’s Congress-era poli- a sustained critique of this idea with respect to Haydn, see tical compositions, including his collaboration with James Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and the Weissenbach, are Nicholas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14,” this Integration in His Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cam- journal 27 (2003), 3–24; Ingrid Fuchs, “The Glorious Mo- bridge University Press, 1991), pp. 335–66. ment: Beethoven and the Congress of Vienna,” in Den- 4For references to source material relating to Haydn’s ex- mark and the Dancing Congress of Vienna: Playing for perience of Handel in England, see H. C. Robbins Landon, Denmark’s Future (Exhibition Catalog: Christiansborg Pal- Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. III (Bloomington: Indi- ace, Copenhagen, 2002), pp. 182–97; and Kinderman, ana University Press, 1976), pp. 83–84. Beethoven, chap. 7. 111 This content downloaded from 146.232.93.77 on Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:38:49 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH tion.7 Pared down to a small group of odes, torical persuasion suitable to important themes CENTURY MUSIC oratorios, and grand choral excerpts, particu- and grand occasions. After Edmund Burke’s larly those with prominent trumpets and drums, midcentury treatise, however, accounts of the Handel’s music in particular—where possible sublime increasingly aestheticized power itself, in the beefed-up, modernized arrangements by even of the most oppressive sort.11 Burke him- Mozart—adorned major state occasions in self describes how sublime experience can be Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars and their instigated by the tempestuous forces of nature, aftermath. Musical high points of the Congress the might of the Old Testament God, and even of Vienna, for example, included performances by the domination of what he calls “despotic of Samson and Messiah in the hall of the Impe- governments.”12 Further, and crucially, Burke rial Riding School, with forces for Samson num- often ascribes analogous powers to art, as if bering seven hundred.8 This version of Handel displacing into the aesthetic realm the power is nowadays fading from memory, given the of God, nature, or government. Citing the de- renewed interest in his Italian operas and the scription of Satan from the second book of prevalence of performances informed by an Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example—“He above early-eighteenth-century aesthetic.

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