For a certain subset of eminent Beethoven scholars, the celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday in 2020 represented a challenge. In taking up the opportunity to communicate with a wider population of educated music lovers, the standard vehicle, a Beethoven biography, was off the table for them – because they had already written one.Footnote ¹ In the three books reviewed here, each author responds to this dilemma by focusing on themes in reception history. I will attempt to clarify their main points, comment on similarities and differences in their approaches, and evaluate how successful each one might be in in making recent Beethoven scholarship more accessible for the general reader. I will argue that all three of these books successfully target the more musically literate segment of lay readers, and that any weak points arise at the intersection between their academic content and the address to these members of their presumed readership.

In the introduction to his biography Beethoven: The Music and the Life (2003), Lewis Lockwood addressed the issue of writing for multiple audiences. Observing that ‘for no matter how faithfully painters work to present their subjects, they also present themselves’, he acknowledged that both his background and scholarly work directed him towards a biography whose chief focus was Beethoven's music.Footnote ² However, he also hoped to reach readers more interested in Beethoven's life or his cultural context. Lockwood recalls this metaphor of portrait painting in his new Beethoven's Lives: The Biographical Tradition, where he applies it not just to himself but to all the biographers he will consider (p. x). He also returns to the question of audience, highlighting the ambiguous place in musicology of biography. In contrast to musicology and music theory, which are generally conducted by specialists, music biography ‘tends inevitably towards the public sphere’ (p. xvii). For ‘lay readers’, their fascination with Beethoven may rest not only on love of his music but also on his status as a ‘cultural token’, his historical background and his personal struggles (pp. xiv–xv).

These reflections show that Beethoven's Lives is to some extent a meditation on the earlier book, aimed at a somewhat different audience. Lockwood is addressing his colleagues here, but also, by implication, the educated Beethoven lover with some exposure to historiography.Footnote ³ His masterful writing style may draw them in, but they will be challenged here by an intellectually complex argument. As background, Lockwood observes that musicologists are now operating in a context where ‘social and political issues tend to dominate the current horizon of scholarly interest’ (p. xvii). At the same time, many of Lockwood's potential non-academic readers are professional, amateur or student musicians ‘deeply interested in music as structure or expression’ who are impatient with this emphasis on matters they see as extraneous (p. 170). Beethoven's Lives presents biography as a focal point where political, social and cultural history, archival research, paleography, style studies, music analysis, music criticism and contemporary musical life all come together. This is simply because some of these disciplines are central to any kind of historical research, but even more fundamentally, because a composer's music provides the rationale for writing his or her biography at all.

This complex goal accounts for some heterogeneity in style. The second part of the book seems aimed at music scholars and contains more background for the issues I've outlined above, while the first part is more for Beethoven fans looking for an absorbing read. Like the Bernard Rose film Immortal Beloved (a comparison Lockwood would hate!), the historical survey of Beethoven's Lives begins at Beethoven's funeral, with a quote from Franz Grillparzer's funeral oration.Footnote ⁴ Lockwood's narrative of the first Beethoven biographies shows a good amount of novelistic talent, with its heroes, villains, scenarios and bit parts. Through this all, he shows a careful curation of the most important biographical sources and issues. He also sets up dramatic foreshadowings of later plot developments such as the unmasking of Anton Schindler's forgeries through source studies, and the specialization of musical scholarship into biography, criticism, historical musicology and music analysis.

Lockwood's next profile, of the Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer, stands out both in its extent and in its laudatory tone. Lockwood calls Thayer, an American lawyer and journalist, ‘the true founding father of modern Beethoven biography’, and fills out the context that allowed the German musical establishment to accept this rather improbable candidate as a leading expert on Beethoven (p. 31). Indeed, Lockwood's heading to this section, ‘Alexander Wheelock Thayer and the Pursuit of Truth’, pays tribute to Thayer's dogged determination to verify his statements about Beethoven's life and music to the greatest extent possible. Thayer's contributions to Beethoven research were undertaken completely on his own initiative and continued for many years, even in the face of other professional commitments and chronic health problems. Lockwood's praise of Thayer's biography might even inspire readers to purchase it – a confusing task as many versions are available! – so he also covers its complicated publication history after its completion was interrupted by Thayer's death in 1897 (pp. 69–73).Footnote ⁵

Proceeding chronologically, Lockwood next turns to three biographers active in the mid-nineteenth century: Wilhelm von Lenz, A.B. Marx and Ludwig Nohl. He briefly summarizes their contributions, and then focuses on a figure who, except in the rarefied world of Beethoven scholarship, is not usually regarded as a biographer: Gustav Nottebohm. He points out that Nottebohm himself regarded studies of Beethoven's sketches, manuscripts and counterpoint studies as biographical, at least in part.Footnote ⁶ In this way, Lockwood reinforces a dichotomy which he had suggested in his preface, between Beethoven's outer and inner life. He moves from Thayer, whose focus was on the external conditions of Beethoven's life and career, to Nottebohm, whose ‘pathbreaking research on Beethoven's creative life – the composer's inner world – secures him a major place in any study of the Beethoven literature and helps to broaden and deepen our concept of biography’ (p. 47).

It is hard for even such a skilled storyteller as Lockwood to bring the reclusive, eccentric Nottebohm to life as well he did with Thayer, who must have possessed great personal magnetism.Footnote ⁷ Another problem presents itself in communicating Nottebohm's importance to the non-specialist reader. The decision to exclude musical examples from Beethoven's Lives makes Nottebohm's work difficult to describe. In Lockwood's earlier Beethoven: The Music and the Life, the decision was made to keep ‘music examples within the book … to the barest minimum’ in order ‘to make the discussion of Beethoven's works as accessible as possible’, and the same rationale must have applied here.Footnote ⁸ I suspect that Lockwood's editors have a better picture of the average reader than did Johannes Brahms, who recommended Nottebohm's technical sketch studies ‘to artists, connoisseurs, and amateurs’ (!).Footnote ⁹ The professional scholar will have no trouble tracing the sources for Nottebohm's works through the notes, abbreviations and bibliography of Beethoven's Lives. But for the non-specialist reader, I would recommend referring back to Beethoven: The Music and the Life and following a link to the book's website, where additional music examples will be found, including a couple of sketch transcriptions and an excerpt from Nottebohm's Zweite Beethoveniana.Footnote ¹⁰ At that website, they will also find many more sketch transcriptions among the music examples for Lockwood's 2015 book Beethoven's Symphonies: An Artistic Vision, which focuses more on the compositional process of individual works.Footnote ¹¹ Both of these books clarify how useful sketch studies have been, both to the chronology and to the interpretation of Beethoven's music.

Nottebohm's friendship with Brahms provides a skilful transition to the next section, which also underlines the central position of Beethoven for nineteenth-century music. Richard Wagner was not a biographer but a significant contributor to the image of Beethoven; accordingly, his early involvement with a potential Beethoven biography is covered here. During Wagner's first stay in Paris (1839–1842), he and a librarian known as G.F. Anders planned to collaborate on a Beethoven biography. According to one of Wagner's letters, it would have ‘“contain[ed] an accurate and detailed account of both the great master's artistic and domestic life”’ and, at the same time, be ‘“more a great novel about an artist than a dry listing of data and anecdotes compiled in chronological order”’ (p. 55).Footnote ¹² Lockwood's source is clearly Klaus Kropfinger's Wagner and Beethoven, but he might be going farther than Kropfinger intended. Lockwood assumes that this somewhat ill-assorted duo would have at least attempted to meet ‘“the most thorough and meticulous historical scrutiny”’, again quoting Wagner's letter (p. 55). He also points out that Wagner clearly thought that a chronology of Beethoven's works, undoubtably to be prepared by Anders, would be valuable, thus implicitly recognizing the utility of the later chronologies by Thayer and Nottebohm. Kropfinger does not take this plan so seriously, concluding that it was just an early example of Wagner's aim ‘to process biographical data with a view to explaining Beethoven in the context of the drama of the future’.Footnote ¹³ While Lockwood's theory may be a bit of a stretch, it accords well with Nicholas Vazsonyi's Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand, which argues that Wagner's intense self-identification with Beethoven as a German artist grew out of his unsuccessful Paris experience during these years.Footnote ¹⁴ There is no way to write a history of Beethoven reception without including Wagner, and the story of this unrealized biography was surely the most pertinent vantage point in the context of Lockwood's book.

From this point on, the discussions of individual biographers are less extensive, and rather than attempt to summarize them all, I shall highlight some important themes. One is the increasing contribution of music theory to the understanding of Beethoven's music. Heinrich Schenker did not write a biography, but his investigations of the relationship between counterpoint and common-practice music inspired much of twentieth-century theory. Schenker was a late, peripheral member of the Brahms circle and was influenced by Nottebohm's works; he used Beethoven's sketches in several of his major analyses.Footnote ¹⁵ Schenker does not have his own section in Beethoven's Lives, but two important early twentieth-century Beethoven biographers, Paul Bekker and Walter Riezler, are contrasted here in terms of their relationship to him. Another writer on music who made significant contributions to the biographer's toolkit was Donald Francis Tovey. Tovey's writings represent a middle way between technical music analysis and more public-facing music criticism, and they have exerted a profound influence on Anglo-American musicology. Tovey also exemplifies a second important theme, the expansion of Beethoven scholarship outside German-speaking countries. For England, Lockwood also profiles George Grove and J.W.N. Sullivan. Many French musicians, including Hector Berlioz, were admirers of Beethoven, and early twentieth-century France yielded important biographies by Romain Rolland and Vincent D'Indy, as well as Rolland's Beethoven-based novel Jean-Christophe.

On Beethoven and twentieth-century politics, Lockwood has enlarged upon his personal feelings about the appropriation of Beethoven by the Nazi regime elsewhere, and his treatment here is brief.Footnote ¹⁶ In a couple of spots, we sense some anger that Nazi sympathizers were allowed to maintain positions of authority in German and Austrian musicology after the war.Footnote ¹⁷ But in general, he directs the reader to major studies on music and politics in twentieth-century Germany by David B. Dennis, Pamela Potter and Elaine Kelly.Footnote ¹⁸ An interesting choice is his focus on post-war international musicological gatherings for the two Beethoven years 1970 and 1977. He contributed to at least one of these, and with that, he becomes a character in his own narrative.Footnote ¹⁹ However, the shift to his own persona does not fully explain the increased density of musicological reference here. While this content will be a barrier for some readers, I propose that Lockwood may have seen this topic as a story that he wanted to tell. The Beethoven conferences would have happened shortly after the 1960s, a decade that scholars such as Frank Trommler see as crucial for the opening up of political debate on the Nazi era within Germany.Footnote ²⁰ Lockwood's reminiscences point to the increased internationalization of Beethoven studies, especially in the 1977 conferences as compared to those in 1970. Moreover, projects like the reconstruction of the Beethoven sketchbooks required international cooperation.Footnote ²¹ Much has been written lately on émigré musicologists, but not as much on how the continuing shadow of the NS-Zeit was handled by the next generation of scholars.Footnote ²²

In bringing the narrative up through the rest of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, Lockwood naturally takes a different tone regarding scholars he knew and worked with. When a mention includes a death date, he offers a gracious encomium to a valued colleague: examples include musicologists Joseph Kerman and Klaus Kropfinger, as well as two important scholars who, like Thayer, were imports from other fields: Maynard Solomon and Alan Tyson. For a younger generation of musicologists, Kerman is best known for his idiosyncratic survey of musicology, Contemplating Music.Footnote ²³ Lockwood's tribute here is a reminder that he was also an important Beethoven scholar, although one with whom Lockwood has sometimes crossed swords.Footnote ²⁴ For Solomon and Tyson, one tantalizing question that Lockwood leaves unanswered is why the music recording producer (Solomon) wrote a psychoanalytically oriented biography, while the trained psychoanalyst (Tyson) turned to the more philological study of musical sources. One clue may be found in the British Academy's obituary for Tyson, who was a member. Tyson did not abandon faith in psychoanalysis, but rather found musicology more suited to his personality; also, he considered the psychoanalysis of no longer living persons to be impossible.Footnote ²⁵ Lockwood's citation of biographer, philosopher and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl near the end of Beethoven's Lives shows that he has more than a passing interest in whether psychology is useful for the biographer, and a follow-up discussion would be welcome.

I suspect that general readers will skim over the increased attention to professional musicologists at the end of Lockwood's chronology. Perhaps he sensed this when he chose to add two more chapters to Beethoven's Lives. In the penultimate chapter, he shifts gears from reception to biography in action. Here, he experiments with a technique he had not used in his previous biography, focusing on selected years in Beethoven's life. The years 1787, 1809 and 1826 were chosen to ‘furnish insights that can be applied to his longer artistic career and its context’ (p. 145). His picture of the talented 16-year-old Beethoven and his first trip to Vienna is based upon some recent advances in Beethoven scholarship, Dieter Haberl's discovery of new travel records and John D. Wilson's redating of some early works.Footnote ²⁶ For the year 1809, Beethoven is portrayed as an adroit manager of his career. He had just premiered his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and received a job offer from Jerome Bonaparte that he parlayed into a lifetime annuity paid by Viennese aristocrats. For 1826, the last full year of Beethoven's life, filled as it was with illness and personal difficulties, Lockwood admits that even the most careful biographer must sometimes resort to speculation. Here he suggests that the composition of ‘two works as deep, complex, and different from each other as his string quartets Opus 131 and Opus 135 … feels as if his removal of his creative persona to a place of safety from the disorder of his outer life must have been even more decisive than in the past’ (p. 163).

Lockwood concludes Beethoven's Lives with an eloquent final chapter where he summarizes his personal involvement with Beethoven and repeats his conviction that for him, writing Beethoven's life was not possible without an intimate understanding of his music. He gently takes issue with Young-Bruehl, contending that great artists confound her view of biography in one respect: they are ‘primarily conditioned by the riveting obsession to produce the works they feel to be the raison-d’être of their being in the world’ (p. 177). His vivid portrayal of the trials and rewards of biographical research is highly recommended, both for lovers of Beethoven as well as for potential biographers and music scholars.

Mark Evan Bonds has produced an impressive body of work centred on German music and its intellectual context from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. To feel at all qualified to review The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, I felt compelled to read not only Bonds's four scholarly books, but over 200 other books and articles. Moreover, the Beethoven Syndrome is one of two Beethoven books that Bonds published in 2020, in a veritable flurry of Beethoven Year activity. The other one, Beethoven: Variations on a Life, is directed at the general reader, and is itself evidence of his commitment to reaching a wide audience. However, it is dependent upon arguments developed in The Beethoven Syndrome, and it cannot be treated properly in a scholarly review without reference to them. Therefore, this review of The Beethoven Syndrome will focus upon these arguments, how they relate to Bonds's previous work, and the revisions he has proposed to the traditional history of music since Beethoven.

The first popular element in The Beethoven Syndrome is its address to the listener and the defence of all modes of listening. This is not primarily a book about Beethoven biography, or even reception history, unless taken in the broadest sense; in fact, Beethoven himself exits the scene at the end of Act I. The principal thesis that Bonds sets forth is this: that a common assumption for current listeners – that music expresses the thoughts and feelings of its composer – is in fact a product of the first half of the nineteenth century. For Bonds, Beethoven is at once the catalyst and the major recipient of this belief. He describes the development of this concept almost like a scientific discovery, with shifts encompassing three distinct paradigms.Footnote ²⁷ To move on from the first paradigm (‘Part One: The Paradigm of Objective Expression: 1770–1830’), three components must be in place. First, a belief in the power of music to express moods (Chapter 1, ‘The Framework of Rhetoric’); second, an emphasis on human subjectivity and the artist's inner creative potential (Chapter 2, ‘Toward the Perception of Subjective Expression’); third, the application of this subject-centred concept of ‘genius’ to composers, something that Beethoven helped set in motion through his cultivation of the fantasia genre (Chapter 3, ‘Hearing Composers in Their Work’).

Once all three of these prerequisites are met, a new paradigm takes over, outlined in the three chapters of ‘Part Two: The Paradigm of Subjective Expression, 1830–1920’. In the first, ‘The Framework of Hermeneutics’. he describes two important assumptions it requires. The first is the belief that a composer's ‘message’ was conveyed sincerely – that it represented the composer's own thoughts or feelings – and the second is the principle of ‘oracularity’: that it was the job of the listener to decipher this message. The next chapter, ‘First-Person Beethoven’, is the only one to deal specifically with Beethoven reception. Bonds walks us through a sample of nineteenth-century Beethoven biographies and music criticism to illustrate ‘the perception of his works as an outpouring of his inner self’ (p.120).Footnote ²⁸ At this point, it becomes apparent why Bonds has chosen the term ‘Beethoven syndrome’, which he defines in his title as ‘hearing music as autobiography’ and in his text as ‘the inclination of listeners to hear composers in their music’ (p. 1). The ‘syndrome’ is ‘a pattern of symptoms, in this case behaviors that point to an underlying condition’, and in the third chapter of the ‘The Paradigm of Subjective Expression’, entitled ‘After Beethoven’, Bonds shows the syndrome spreading to the reception of other composers (p. 2).

The chief historiographical innovation by Bonds is his ‘Part Three: Dual Paradigms: Since 1920’. Instead of introducing a new paradigm with the advent of musical modernism, he argues that the two previous paradigms remain active throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This section provides a second reason to consider The Beethoven Syndrome appropriate for the general reader, with an engagement with popular music genres absent from previous books by Bonds. He connects the ideal of objectivity, related to a more craftsman-like compositional aesthetic, with the modernist music of composers like Stravinsky and Hindemith (pp. 172–174). However, he observes that ‘the idea of music as a revelation of the compositional self’ is still prevalent for most classical music listeners and many contemporary composers (p. 169, 186–191). The ‘Objective Expression’ (rhetorical) paradigm prevails in jazz and in ‘covers’ of popular songs, where emphasis is on the performer and his/her delivery. The ‘Subjective Expression’ paradigm is operative when songwriter and performer are the same person(s) (pp. 194–196). This more fluid historiographical landscape for music after 1900, also encompassing a broader stylistic and geographic range, may well be closer to the lived experience of lay listeners.Footnote ²⁹

The third feature that might make The Beethoven Syndrome appropriate for the educated listener or music student is the one I find most problematic. This is because, for all its claims to represent a new way of looking at musical experience, it reproduces a standard chronology that the average classical music listener would have picked up through programme notes, general reading or an introductory course in music history. This chronology, with breaks at 1830 and 1920, recalls the controversial definitions of Classic and Romantic music that Hans Lenneberg has called ‘the common modern usage, the Music 101 usage’.Footnote ³⁰ By defining the transition of Beethoven reception from ‘current’ to ‘posthumous’ as a major turning point, Bonds avoids an issue he was not quite able to explain away in his earlier work. That is his desire to define nineteenth-century music aesthetics, even Hanslick's, as ‘Romantic’.Footnote ³¹ The persistence of genres such as the symphony also makes ‘Romanticism’ as a basis for nineteenth-century music attractive to Bonds, whose After Beethoven treats music from Berlioz to Mahler.Footnote ³²

Now, there are varying definitions of Romanticism, but when Bonds refers to it in his other books, he tends to mean either the philosophical movement of German Idealism, with the key figures of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; or the literary movement including Tieck, Wackenroder, Schleiermacher, Novalis and Friedrich, Dorothea, Caroline and A.W. Schlegel, or perhaps Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Hoffmann and Eichendorff.Footnote ³³ Bonds has not always been consistent in how he situates these figures in relation to music.Footnote ³⁴ In The Beethoven Syndrome, he includes a brief discussion of ‘Romantic poets and critics’ and their ‘new aesthetics of self-expression’ in the chapter ‘Toward the Perception of Subjective Expression’ within the ‘Objective Expression’ paradigm (pp. 39–40). While this doesn't quite make sense (assuming subjective and objective are antonyms) it at least matches the most active years of literary Romanticism in Germany. However, there is little evidence that Beethoven himself engaged in any meaningful way with the thought of these Romantic contemporaries.Footnote ³⁵ Bonds also does not explain why Herder, Schiller, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel appear in Chapter 4 within the ‘Paradigm of Subjective Expression, 1830–1920’ when they were writing ‘around the turn of the nineteenth century’ (p. 110). A similar unexplained temporal gap requires Bonds to jump rather awkwardly from E.T.A. Hoffmann's reviews of Beethoven (1810–13) to the beginning of the ‘Subjective Expression’ paradigm in 1830, using the publication of the Heiligenstadt Testament in 1827 as a convenient plot device (pp. 128–131).Footnote ³⁶

By asserting that ‘Beethoven spent his entire professional career working in a musical culture that functioned within a framework of rhetoric’, and ‘It was not until the early 1830s … that critics in general came to accept the essentially subjective nature of expression as the new norm for both composing and listening’, Bonds allows himself to introduce ‘subjectivity’ as a stand-in for musical ‘Romanticism’, re-establishing the traditional music-historical time span beginning around 1820–1830 and covering the rest of the ‘long’ nineteenth century (p. 72). This argument also helps him explain the troubled reception of Beethoven's late works among contemporary listeners, which Bonds attributes to a clash of old and new paradigms (pp. 107–108). But in order to apply the concept ‘Romanticism’ in this way, we have to accept all the qualifications proposed by Carl Dahlhaus, or simply conclude with Gerhard Schulz that ‘the broad use of “romantic” and “Romanticism” in music, extending over more than a century, thus disconnects these terms from their usage in literary and art history, so that they can no longer be employed as historical concepts in the same sense’.Footnote ³⁷

For instance, I found it jarring to see Julian Schmidt, a chief critic at the mid-nineteenth-century journal Die Grenzboten, cited by Bonds as an example of the ‘Subjective Expression’ paradigm when the general programme of that journal was anti-Romantic (p. 10).Footnote ³⁸ Bonds does not reveal that Schmidt brought up the example of Beethoven here to illustrate an artistic period that was ‘predestined to bloom just briefly’ because ‘[art] therefore buries itself more and more in a dream land’.Footnote ³⁹ Bonds also refers to music critic Franz Brendel's 1845 article on Mendelssohn and Schumann to make the point that Schumann's early piano music was perceived as autobiographical (p. 151).Footnote ⁴⁰ However, he does not add that Brendel saw both Schumann and Mendelssohn as incapable of real musical progress. Jürgen Thym calls Brendel's attitude towards Mendelssohn and Schumann ‘ambivalent’, and states that ‘he doubted that either composer would have any lasting significance for the future development of music in Germany’.Footnote ⁴¹ In Schumann's case, according to Brendel, part of the problem was his over-dependence upon late Beethoven's outmoded musical premises. Brendel paints a picture of the ‘predominantly subjective’ Beethoven who ‘withdrew more and more into the realm of the purely spiritual’; here ‘content rules over form; his working-out is of a more fantastic kind, and its progress is determined by the idea to be represented’.Footnote ⁴² Brendel characterized Schumann explicitly as a ‘Romantic’ whose sensibility resembled that of Romantic poets like Eichendorff.Footnote ⁴³ Brendel saw both him and Mendelssohn as lacking ‘sympathy with the course of history, and familiarity with the new content that has moved the world since 1830’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In short, Bonds muddles his argument by citing the anti-romantic critique of Brendel and Schmidt as evidence in favour of a romantic aesthetic of subjectivity. To posit the ‘Beethoven syndrome’ as an unavoidable imperative for later nineteenth-century listeners and composers is also misleading. For instance, Chaikovsky is used as a chief example of a composer whose self-presentation as a composer was highly subjective (p. 157). However, Richard Taruskin emphatically denies that Chaikovsky matched that ‘stereotype of the nineteenth-century artist’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bonds's demarcation of 1920 as the beginning of ‘Dual Paradigms’, marked by ‘The Return of Objectivity’, is also belied by his own sources (p. 169–171). He cites Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Wilde as literary influences when their death dates are 1898, 1896, 1891 and 1900, respectively (p. 171). It is possible that Bonds's twentieth-century ‘Dual Paradigm’ model actually works better for the nineteenth century than his ‘Paradigm of Subjective Expression’ hypothesis. Note that a leading composer in nineteenth-century France, Camille Saint-Saëns, also rejected the aesthetic of subjectivity. Saint-Saëns described the addition of potentially emotional content to music, through words, as completely a matter of choice; a composer could create a satisfying work with ‘line, modeling, and color (this last through instrumentation)’ and also, particular to music, ‘movement’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even with Wagner and Brahms, the two German composers most often mentioned as Beethoven followers, the situation is not clear. In the performance of a Wagner opera, it not always easy to isolate a specific Wagner ‘voice’ among his traditional textual sources, his own poetic adaptations, his music, the stage action, and the agency of individual performers.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Brahms, there is reliable documentation that he associated his personal feelings with certain compositions, but we do not know how far that can be extended to other works, or whether he intended to convey these specific emotions to his audience.Footnote ⁴⁸

While The Beethoven Syndrome is a provocative contribution to the Beethoven literature, the richness of its material may have caused Bonds to oversimplify a complex process in intellectual history. Yet its new picture of Beethoven and his importance for musical listening will give both amateur music lovers and professional scholars food for thought.

In Beethoven's Lives, Lewis Lockwood singled out William Kinderman's scholarly Beethoven biography from 2009 for its blend of ‘aesthetic aspects of the music’, incorporation of new research, and ‘cogent discussions of many works’ informed by Kinderman's professional training as a concert pianist.Footnote ⁴⁹ It combined up-to-date scholarly information about Beethoven's life with detailed musical analyses of his works, not just the well-known masterpieces but others that music students and skilled amateurs are more likely to play. So Kinderman was well set up to write a book for Beethoven Year that was different, more popular, and devoted to what he saw as the essence of Beethoven.

In Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times, Kinderman fills out this picture over eight chapters covering Beethoven's life, from his adolescence in the relatively liberal university town of Bonn through his life during the turbulent years of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and finally the repressive Viennese regime that followed. Along the way, he introduces little-known facts about Beethoven's associates, and highlights works that illuminate his political beliefs. For instance, several members of Beethoven's circle in Bonn, as well as his teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, belonged to a liberal reading society; such connections, manifesting themselves in minor works, can provide clues to later masterpieces such as the Fifth Symphony (pp. 22–24). The revolutionary Bonn professor Eulogius Schneider, translator of the Marseillaise and eventually a victim of the Terror, plays a much larger role here than in Kinderman's earlier Beethoven. Kinderman refers to him as ‘a crucial yet underestimated figure in Beethoven's formative education’ (p. 12).Footnote ⁵⁰ A possible connection with Schneider of Beethoven's Cantata on the Death of the Emperor Joseph II had already been noticed by Thayer, and Kinderman supplements this with evidence of Beethoven's subscription to the publication of Schneider's poems (1790).Footnote ⁵¹ Compared to the longer Beethoven, the music discussions here are shorter and less technical. However, some of the music examples are essential to Kinderman's argument, as they represent possible allusions to the Marseillaise and other revolutionary songs in Beethoven's music (pp. 123–124, 152–153).

As in his earlier book, Kinderman interprets the Eroica Symphony by focusing on the Creatures of Prometheus ballet and its alterations to the original myth. He argues that even the simple contredance theme in the finale had political significance by implying a mixing of social orders. His discussion of Fidelio shows how several of Beethoven's most important instrumental works were influenced by the opera's political tilt, and he makes the convincing case for increased attention to the influence of French opera on Beethoven, where good groundwork has been laid by Michael Fend.Footnote ⁵²

Why did Kinderman see the need for another book on Beethoven's politics, a theme that certainly, for both specialists and the general public, has no lack of representation? Part of the answer is a new tone from Kinderman on current events. He is much more outspoken about connections between Beethoven's time and our own. He compares the excitement and disillusionment that Beethoven's generation felt about the French Revolution with the premature celebration of the crumbling of the Soviet empire in 1989 (p. 4). He takes a stance that was also apparent in the official German Beethoven-Jahr celebration, where Beethoven's love of nature is seen as a prefiguration of the environmental movement (pp. 149–150).Footnote ⁵³ As Lockwood had emphasized in Beethoven's Lives, biographers write from their own standpoints, and especially in a biography dealing with politics, current events can affect these perspectives.

Another motivation was to address the controversial claims made in three recent books by Nicholas Mathew, Stephen Rumph and Daniel K.L. Chua.Footnote ⁵⁴ Because Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times uses the unnumbered-endnote format of a trade book, it is possible to read through the entire text without discovering the identity of three ‘recent commentators’ who are Kinderman's targets: one who ‘rehabilitat[es] the composer's most propagandistic pieces’; one who ‘associates the evolution of Beethoven's later musical style with the reactionary trend in Austrian politics’; and a third who ‘doubts the value of freedom itself, purporting to unmask autonomy as void or as disguised authority’ (p. 9).

Understandably, Kinderman might not want to burden his reader with the inner workings of musicological disputes. However, the targeted books are themselves very different, making refuting them without clearly identifying them confusing. Chua's idiosyncratic Beethoven and Freedom begins with a rather postmodernist presentation full of photos and graphs, settles into a more playful presentation of Adorno (as if being less playful were possible), filters this through Emmanuel Lévinas and somehow ends up with a Christian conclusion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rumph's Beethoven After Napoleon explores the possibility that Beethoven's politics changed after 1815 due to the influence of Romantic conservatism. It is a rather dense scholarly book that was reviewed as such, not always favourably, by Kinderman, Barry Cooper, and Peter Höyng.Footnote ⁵⁶ As for Mathew's Political Beethoven, although it includes much criticism of previous methodologies, it seems to work through the premise that all ‘political’ works of a composer must be taken in exactly the same sense. Mathew appears to argue that Beethoven's early cantata for Joseph II, his Wellington's Victory, his Der glorreiche Augenblick for the Congress of Vienna, and his Ninth Symphony all have to be regarded as equally sincere expressions of his beliefs. Taken together, these books convey a general dissatisfaction with how the subject of Beethoven and politics has been treated in the past, and in response Kinderman may have felt the need to defend traditional liberal political engagement against proposals for a more fashionable, but yet unrealized synthesis. For the non-specialist, however, objections to these three different, unnamed opponents obscure Kinderman's intentions.

At a time when citizen involvement in politics is crucial, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times presents a broader, more socially relevant vision of political activity. Both professionals and laypersons can appreciate Kinderman's convincing demonstration that Beethoven's politics involved not just heroes, fanfares and funeral marches, but also his ideals, performance practice, social relations, and even wit and humour.

One of the lessons of historiography is that the history of music is always being written from new vantage points. Each new generation of Beethoven scholars has found different ways to explain how a composer who lived under hereditary monarchies could have written music that's relevant to today's listeners. The books of Lockwood, Bonds and Kinderman will nourish new Beethoven enthusiasts, as well as prove to younger scholars that Beethoven research is alive and well. There is still much new to discover, and new insights to gain from the work of this monumental composer whose story still inspires us. Where they have sown, may others reap. Onward to 2027!