Beethoven Imagines India: Personal Calling and Social Duties, 1815–1816

Abstract

ABSTRACT Beethoven’s diary entries for 1815–16 reveal the composer’s strong interest in India. They also present puzzles: How much can the intellectual historian tease out of a handful of notes? What can they teach us about his inner life? And what do they teach about cultural transmission in an age of revolution in Europe and British colonial expansion? Scholars have thus far dismissed his interest as romantic fantasy. Closer examination, however, reveals Beethoven’s serious engagement with the Sanskrit play Sakuntala and the Bhagavat Gita. At a moment of personal crisis, he found in them the balance of personal calling and social duties that he sought in his own life. Beethoven’s cultural context was the admiration for Indian letters of Herder, Schiller, Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel, as mediated through a survey of Indian civilisation by an enlightened monarchist geography professor, E. A. W. Zimmermann. In an era of status anxiety for Germany’s cultural elite, India was portrayed as a utopia of rule by the educated; its ethos aided Beethoven’s quest to reconcile artistic calling and service to humankind. Insights from Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault further the article’s analysis of Beethoven’s search for a satisfactory way of life.