Beethoven's Emergence from Crisis: The Cello Sonatas of Op. 102 (1815)

Abstract

Years ago, reviewing Maynard Solomon's Beethoven, I quoted pessimistic comment by Tovey on musical biography in his last book, his unfinished Beethoven. Tovey wrote, study the lives of great artists is often positive hindrance to the understanding of their works; for it is usually the study of what they have not mastered; and thus it undermines their authority in the things which they have mastered., Tovey's dictum raises seemingly insurmountable barrier between two modes of knowledge: one focused on the composer's life, in all its complex ramifications; the other, on the characteristic means of expression and organization that we perceive in his works-as if the two belonged to two entirely different persons. More recently, Carl Dahlhaus advanced typically more nuanced and dialectical but similarly pessimistic view, in speaking of a biographical narrative that runs along beside the interpretation of the work without making any important intervention in it.2 Certainly it is no use pretending that biographical facts of any kind whatever can yield insight of the kind we strive for in serious contemporary music criticism and analysis. But there remains sense that our understanding of the works is bound to suffer limitations and distortions if we are unable to bring it into any connection to the shape and development of the life that produced them. The problem is perennial, the answers are hard to find and to justify-yet