Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the late works.

摘要

This dissertation offers a new reading of the political content of Beethoven's late works, based upon a comparison with the political thought of German Romanticism. It will be argued that Beethoven, along with most of his generation, underwent a reaction against liberalism during the Napoleonic Wars.;Chapter 1 offers a reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous review of the Fifth Symphony as a document of "political Romanticism." a movement which lent a political dimension to the aesthetic revolt against France and Enlightenment. Hoffmann's review provides musical categories for political Romanticism, which seem to point beyond the Fifth Symphony to Beethoven's later style.;Chapter 2 seeks to establish a point of departure for the change of outlook in the late works by way of the Third Symphony. A comparison with the literary form of the "Universalgeschichte" shows Beethoven's sympathies with the liberal, cosmopolitan thought of early Idealism.;Through an examination of the late piano sonatas and string quartets, Chapter 3 demonstrates how Beethoven used counterpoint to moderate the utopian dynamism of his earlier style. By using themes drawn from Baroque polyphony, he complicated the sonata forms of his late works, balancing dialectical drive with more static processes.;Chapter 4 show how sublime and beautiful symbolism further dilute the progressivism of Beethoven's earlier style. This aesthetic duality, a Romantic trope for the balance of power between conservatism and liberalism, appears with definite political overtones in the Missa solemnis and Ninth Symphony.;Chapter 5 explores the new sense of authorial presence in the late works, especially the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Improvisatory passages from the tradition of the concerto cadenza introduce a controlling voice above the linear form, suggesting the authoritarian models of Romantic thought.;A survey of Beethoven's twentieth-century critics in Chapter 6 shows a widespread anxiety to demonstrate the rational structure and integrity of the late works. This concern with control and mastery, while part of the modernist agenda, reveals an affinity with conservative tendencies in the music of the aging Beethoven, that may help to explain the appeal of the late works to this century.