Cannon-fever: Beethoven, Waterloo and the Noise of War

Philip Shaw

doi:10.3366/rom.2018.0385

Abstract

Originally written to commemorate the Duke of Wellington's victory over Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain on 21 June 1813, Wellington's Victory, or, the Battle of Vitoria (Wellington's Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria), Op. 91 became, in the months following the Battle of Waterloo, ‘a national stock-piece’ (Literary Gazette, 1817, 91). Based around a simple, not to say simplistic, opposition between French and English musical motifs – ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ for the British, and ‘Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre’ (a tune better known in English as ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow’) – the symphony moves towards a carefully notated clash of arms, involving rapid bursts of musketry and cannon fire from opposing orchestral ‘sides’, and rhythmic simulations of galloping cavalry. However, as contemporary accounts of performances of the symphony reveal, the excessive frequency of the loud cracks, bangs and crashes, often deployed by live artillery, made for uncomfortable listening, evoking Goethe's description of the disorientating effects of ‘cannon-fever’ (kanonenfieber). In its activation of the ‘noise’ of war, a mimetic dissonance at odds with the formal unities of the heroic style, Beethoven's symphony thus subverts its assumed status as a pièce d'occasion while also emphasising the sense in which the sounds of battle exceed the regulatory parameters of the Kantian sublime. This article argues that although the Wellington symphony was denounced by critics as a ‘minor’ piece, it highlights an emergent note of discontent in Beethoven's music with the appropriation of music for triumphalist ends.

Highlights

Studies of the representation of warfare in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have tended, on the whole, to focus on literary and visual culture whilst ignoring the significance of sound, music and performance.[1]
A related case can and should be made for the sermon, a mass medium reliant on the relations between rhetoric, oral performance and architectural space.[3]. Add to this the popularity of pantomimic, aquatic and equestrian entertainments, in which ideological attitudes to war were shaped and conditioned by carefully orchestrated combinations of verbal, visual and sonic effects,[4] and a picture begins to emerge of a nation focussed less on the solitary, silent and largely elitist practises of reading and viewing and more on those collective, populist forms that sought to evoke a sensation of conflict as collective, bustling and, above all, noisy
That war itself was an event informed by sonic extremities of one sort or another —from the whoops and choruses of massed infantrymen to the incessant beat of the military drum, and again from the whistles and roars of musket and artillery fire to the clash and clang of bayonet and sword— was well understood in the Romantic period

Summary

Introduction

Studies of the representation of warfare in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have tended, on the whole, to focus on literary and visual culture whilst ignoring the significance of sound, music and performance.[1].

Results

Conclusion