Ludwig Van Beethoven: the Heard and the Unhearing. a Medical-Musical
Chapter 11 “The best productQ that we can boast of” – Beethoven in the USA Gregor Herzfeld Introduction In a somewhat exaggeratedly pithy form, the history of Eur- opean concert music (“western concert music”) since the first third of the 19th century could be described as a history of en- gagement with the music of Beethoven. Like every platitude, this is for sure too sweeping and in its scope does not reach every area equally; for some genres (symphonies, string quar- tets, piano music), it is more applicable, while for others (opera, operetta, church music) less so. Beethoven’s music had an effect, however, that reached far beyond its achievements in composi- tional technique, into the realms of how we perceive and assess music in general, so that Beethoven was able to become the benchmark of aesthetic attributions of meaning with a status verging on the iconic.1, 2 What holds true for Europe can also be observed on the other side of the Atlantic, to the extent that the USA began to build up, or at least expand, a music and con- cert scene based on the European model. By Europe becoming the model, Beethoven as an essential point of reference shifted to the center of musical attention, too. In the following, I would like to provide a short overview of the developments that the American relationship with Beet- hoven underwent from the 19th through to the 21st century. In this, I follow one narrative (among possible others) that de- scribes a process of making a hero out of Beethoven in the 19th century, which, with the gradual repudiation of the “European model” in the 20th century is turned into the opposite, so to speak, into a kind of “demonization” of the one-time hero, 162 “The best product that we can boast of” – Beethoven in the USA and is then guided towards a state of balance under the banner of postmodern cool-headedness.
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