Harvey Sachs is well known for his books on Arturo Toscanini, Artur Rubinstein, and music in Fascist Italy, among other subjects.Footnote 1 In a wistful aside early in this book he writes:

In a postlude he remembers being transfixed in childhood by recordings and that ‘Beethoven seemed to speak to me more clearly, more directly, than anyone else’ (p. 196). And in a highly personal confession he writes:

This passage, though retrospective, sets the stage. His dual subjects are the Ninth Symphony as a reflection of Beethoven's political beliefs, and 1824 as the year of its first performance. With that year as a focal point he envisages a group of far-flung contemporary writers and artists whose works Sachs regards as, equally, messages of liberation and reflections of ‘Romanticism's rear-guard action against repression’ (p. 110). These other artists are Byron, Pushkin, Delacroix and Heine, each briefly surveyed. It turns out, not surprisingly, that Sachs’ claims of connection between the Ninth Symphony and works by these contemporaries are based simply on the general proposition that all of them believed in ‘freedom of the mind and spirit’ (p. 95). He readily admits that ‘to a hypothetical observer who, in 1824, had heard of Beethoven … and the other major figures … the points of contact among them would have seemed tenuous, perhaps even nonexistent. But from a twenty-first century perspective, the connection seems almost too obvious’ (p. 95). Most of the book moves on this broad all-encompassing level, and as such it may be a useful primer for general readers steeped in neither music nor history. But with all possible sympathy for the author's enthusiasm, I have to say that as a contribution to the Beethoven literature it has little or nothing to offer beyond personal reflections.

Since the ‘Ode to Joy’ became an international anthem suitable for ceremonies and commemorations, its cultural status has evoked a river of commentary. At least one can say for Sachs’ book, in comparison to Esteban Buch's Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History,Footnote 2 that Sachs makes some attempt to talk about the whole symphony, all four movements, while in Buch's survey of its reception the earlier movements are simply missing. Sachs set up his book in four parts: 1) a section on Beethoven in Vienna and the premiere of the Ninth; 2) ‘1824, or How Artists Internalize Revolution’ (this means Byron, Pushkin, etc.); 3) ‘Imagining the Ninth’, in which he gives a highly personal tour of all four movements; 4) a final section entitled ‘To Begin Anew’ which reports on the reception of the Ninth Symphony by Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner. He explains in a note (p. 169) that his list of successors would have been longer (for example, would have included Brahms and Bruckner) had he not limited it to those born before 1824.

Sachs has combed the secondary literature, and he makes mention of work by current Beethovenians, including Maynard Solomon, Charles Rosen, Elaine Sisman, David Levy, Barry Cooper and myself. Equally, he is conversant with the works of the Romantic writers cited above and the critical literature around them, as well as moderns including Saul Bellow, Elsa Morante, Joseph Brodsky and Margaret Drabble. But entirely missing in text and notes – there is no bibliography – are the basic contributions to our understanding of the Ninth Symphony by Gustav Nottebohm, Heinrich Schenker, Donald Francis Tovey, Otto Baensch, Carl Dahlhaus, Nicholas Cook, Leo Treitler, William Kinderman and James Webster.Footnote 3 That Schenker's great monograph of 1912 on the Ninth is missing is especially telling, the more so since it was translated into English some years ago by John Rothgeb (1992). And on Romanticism – that perennial flag that waves high over the earlier nineteenth century – I sorely miss any reference to the seminal work of the late John Daverio, whose nuanced views on how Romanticism influenced music could have helped to give some substance.Footnote 4

Here and there the impulse to really come to grips with the subject does emerge, as when Sachs offers a modified translation of a Beethoven letter or his own translation of much of the Heiligenstadt Testament (pp. 43–5). But many quotations and references are from secondary sources, at times quite remote ones, not from originals or basic studies of original sources. This is not just true of the musical side but also of the historical one, where we find no reference to studies of Europe in the Restoration after Napoleon by recent historians, though there are more than a few that would have been relevant. I missed any reference to even so broad and general a volume as Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830,Footnote 5 a closely-packed survey in which all the major characters in Sachs’ book also appear.

All in all, I find myself wishing that Harvey Sachs had followed his musical interests as ‘a day-dreamer, appreciator, and curiosity addict’, and written a purely impressionistic essay on the Ninth, perhaps with an emphasis on comparing recorded performances, rather than this effort to combine history and analysis, which does justice to neither discipline. Perhaps the largest issue that this book raises is the relationship of current musicology to journalism. This is not scholarship, as the author himself says, but it is intended to be high journalism, an overview aimed at the general reader and listener, the concert-goer and Beethoven enthusiast. This is a perfectly laudable aim, but it calls for at least some observations.

In the current phase of expansion of musical commentary in the digital age, increasing popularization is probably inevitable and, depending on how it is done, appropriate. For reasons too complicated to go into here but broadly visible to any experienced observer, high-level traditional historical musicology is now under siege from various forces, some within its own ranks, some outside them. One noticeable tendency has been the questioning, and in some circles the weakening or abandonment of traditional analytical, historical or philological studies of what have long been accepted as important works in Western music history, in favour of approaches that tend to collapse such works almost entirely into their cultural contexts and to stand aloof from the sources that document their origins and thus reveal important aspects of the processes by which they were created. This is a complex issue, and I can only allude to it here, but a simple example from one of my own fields of interest might suffice. In our time, access to basic sources of Western music, let's say, Beethoven's sketches and autographs, is easier than could ever have been imagined in the past, but only a fraction of their vast and mysterious contents have yet been published. As a result, only very partial insights are available into the inner world of a musical creator of the highest importance.

Now, I am far from imagining that every scholar who wants to contribute to public understanding of a work like the Ninth Symphony should first attempt to transcribe sketches or delve deeply into the many revisions in the autograph score, which, by the way, has been brought out in full facsimile for the third time by Bärenreiter-Verlag.Footnote 6 But I do believe it is the historian's and commentator's task to ask hard questions, whatever his approach, to help the intelligent lay reader understand what such questions are and what provisional answers are circulating in the field; in short, to enlarge understanding of works on this level beyond broad approximations that float like clouds over the landscape. That is why, in reading the work of a historian or other serious commentator, it is legitimate to look to see what his range of knowledge is, what his claims are, and on what foundations these claims are based.

At the same time, I am not undervaluing musicological writings designed for this same intelligent general reader that can be highly personal, largely subjective and highly imaginative commentaries on an individual musical work, since it is with the experience of individuality and the sense of the work as a singular aesthetic entity, that all perception begins. As Leo Treitler put it in a thoughtful essay:

Certainly Beethoven's Ninth has a strong presence in the consciousness of the writer of this book, as anyone can see. For that reason alone a more intensely personal account of the work by Sachs, who clearly knows a great deal about performance, would probably have been more convincing. Sachs’ discussion of particulars in the four movements contains a number of handsome turns of phrase and moments of perception that carry personal conviction, and his emotional attachment to musical experience is manifest. Extended and developed, they might have brought a better outcome.