The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds

Abstract

Describing and distancing supposedly obsolete versions of Beethoven is an old musicological impulse. Arnold Schmitz’s 1927 Das romantische Beethovenbild is its classic expression, but it goes back a good deal farther than this—to Wagner’s scattergun polemics, Hanslick’s formalist aesthetic theories, and arguably even Czerny’s revisionist performance guides. The practice continues to this day. Indeed, rejecting past Beethovens may look particularly urgent right now, when so many musicians and scholars seem to share a desire for Beethoven to be maximally superseded—whether as Philip Ewell’s downsized “above average composer,”1 the dark heart of a moribund “classical music” culture, or as a shrinking presence on revised university music curriculums across Europe and North America.Mark Evan Bonds’s The Beethoven Syndrome surely stands at the less polemical end of the Beethoven-distancing spectrum, but the book belongs on it nonetheless. Its Jason-Bourne-ish title—reminiscent also of Richard Dawkins’s New Atheist screed The God Delusion (2006)—even implies that Beethoven was a chronic illness, from which many have never recovered. The syndrome Bonds describes is the compulsion to hear music as an expression of an authorial self. Reconstructing past Beethovenian pathologies has long been among Bonds’s scholarly priorities, on display most prominently in his 1996 study of anxious nineteenth-century symphonists, After Beethoven (not coincidentally also the title of chapter 6 of The Beethoven Syndrome). Bonds has insisted more strenuously than any other scholar that a broadly Beethovenian outlook permeates elite Euro-American musical culture. This premise comes with its risks. As in Scott Burnham’s landmark 1995 meta-study Beethoven Hero, the mission to describe and so provincialize a dominant belief system at times threatens to overstate and sustain that system’s coherence and power. Indeed, meta-Beethoven discourse sometimes looks like a secondary symptom of the various Beethoven syndromes it diagnoses: the inability to move on. After all, even those who invoke Beethoven as a symbol of the moral failures of the Euro-American musical tradition reiterate a long-standing critical trope: Beethoven is an entire musical culture.With these risks in mind, it may be wise to ask whether the syndrome that Bonds diagnoses is truly a Beethoven syndrome. On this subject, Bonds is quick to add nuance: the historical change that this book charts, toward a kind of listening that treats music “as a subjective outpouring of the compositional self,” cannot be “ascribed to [Beethoven’s] works alone,” he writes (p. 2). Later, chapter 3—on fantasy, humor, and musical irony—traces the etiology of the Beethoven syndrome to genres and critical practices associated with the mid-eighteenth-century world of Emanuel Bach and his north German intellectual circles. Later still, Bonds maintains that Beethoven, for more or less his entire career, operated primarily according to the logic of what chapter 1 characterizes as “the framework of rhetoric”—the premise that a musical composition deploys a series of expressive devices to move listeners, which have no necessary relation to the feelings of its author or performer. The “framework of hermeneutics” that supposedly supplanted this, which is the subject of chapter 4, came to dominate music criticism, in Bonds’s view, in the decades after Beethoven’s death, and began to coalesce around Beethoven’s music only in the 1820s, typically around those compositions whose affect and design appeared to demand explication or justification. Still, whether all of this makes the author-focused listening that Bonds describes a mostly Beethoven syndrome or whether scholarly convention has again placed Beethoven’s name at the center of things remains up in the air.Even so, Bonds’s decision to make Beethoven his protagonist produces a focused and impactful book. I suspect it will be a useful teaching tool in conservatories, where, in my experience, the Beethoven syndrome is still endemic, and young performers could use a reminder that other ways of approaching the music they love are available. Few music scholars have Bonds’s talent for organizing quantities of knotty historical discourse into orderly and persuasive conceptual patterns. These days, when the most talked-about methodologies involve tracing networks and playing up entanglements—contexts in which musicologists almost always use the words “mess” and “messiness” approvingly—this book demonstrates the value of delineating tidier conceptual schemes, and honors the politically crucial fact that, like it or not, background structures frequently do determine people’s thoughts and actions. Bonds’s method is to create a succession of Kuhnian paradigms—on the largest scale of his book, “objective expression,” “subjective expression,” and a twentieth-century duality of both—that, he claims, undergirded historical regimes of critical discourse as well as wider listening practices. He linearizes these regimes into historical narrative rather as Raymond Williams once theorized cultural forms as “emergent,” “dominant,” and “residual”: Bonds usually acknowledges contradictory voices within his paradigms on the one hand by reminding the reader that “not everyone” felt a certain way (pp. 109, 118)—that old attitudes persisted long after they ceased to be paradigmatic—and on the other by showing how coteries of musicians and thinkers (the Hamburg Bach circle, say) portended listening practices that entered the mainstream only later.The clarity of this method comes at a price. Bonds almost always cites his heterogeneous bundles of discursive materials—ranging from literary criticism and concert reports to critical philosophy and art theory—as manifestations of more essential systems of thought. The book’s witnesses thus tend to either converge or diverge, and the utterances of individual writers tend to illustrate patterns rather than complicate matters. He frequently tells the reader that the texts he cites bear the “hallmark” (p. 56) of this or that habit of thought, are “consistent with” (p. 14) an existing conceptual structure, or are “in keeping with” (p. 81) general philosophical tendencies. Hidden continuity, contradiction, nonlinear historical connection, and conceptual hybridity are, in this context, less discernible: one bounded epistemic structure cedes to the next, and, as a result, otherwise important concepts or musicians that stand in a more complex relation to these structures feature minimally or not at all. (Pergolesi is not mentioned, for instance, even though he was one of the earliest subjects of published music biography and, especially in Paris, biographical listening practices.)Bonds’s method of constructing discursive regimes produces secure connections between historically adjacent textual excerpts, but also smooths over potentially consequential distinctions between media technologies, artistic genres, and social practices. He discovers the “hallmarks” of an underlying conceptual paradigm in a philosophical text by one of the Schlegels, a published concert report, a review of a piano transcription, the increasing silence of concertgoers, and a letter written by Beethoven—and discerns the same listening premises in relation to string quartets, symphonies, and piano sonatas. The problem here, it seems to me, is that complex social worlds become gatherings of paratexts—paratexts whose methodological function is to bear out the “assumptions” (pp. 61, 72, 98) or “preconceptions” (p. 197) of “listeners” (or, almost as frequently, “the listener”). During the largely Emanuel Bach–oriented chapter 3 in particular, I kept comparing Bonds’s argument to a much older one: Carl Dahlhaus’s brief account of Bach’s and Beethoven’s outwardly comparable aesthetics of individual expression. Dahlhaus highlighted something that the discursive constructs of The Beethoven Syndrome frequently elide: the main distinction between these two musicians had less to do with aesthetic outlooks or listening paradigms than with the media ecologies within which each musician thrived. Bach’s professional life, Dahlhaus observed, was partly arranged around the physical copresence of select groups of people in small rooms, and the attendant desire to please or be pleased in real time; Beethoven, by contrast, reached professional maturity in a milieu saturated by print, and by formats such as the music magazine and genres such as the review.2 Few musicians and music lovers of Beethoven’s time even thought to question, as several people did in Bach’s day, whether a publication could successfully surmount physical distance while retaining a composer’s expressive intent or musical persona. And Beethoven’s media environment promoted new relationships between people and pieces of music on the basis of an accelerated capacity to extract, disseminate, and revisit musical excerpts—activities whose connection to real-time sonic experience was (and remains) less than straightforward. To write as if Bach and Beethoven each addressed an equivalent musical constituency called “listeners” is, from this perspective, to obscure a crucial dimension of their histories.The Beethoven Syndrome is a sophisticated and detailed study, but, in this respect, it occasionally appears to be predicated on a simplistic view of reception history—namely, as the changing qualia of listening encounters as they transpired within a sequence of historical contexts. Bonds commonsensically explains that, while historians can describe the “outward behaviors of audiences in the concert hall,” the “inward responses” of these listeners “vary widely according to place, time, and the work at hand” (p. 197). But he rarely recognizes how institutions such as the concert hall might have helped to produce the idea that listening equates to a person’s “inward responses” to a musical work, rather than, say, a complex blend of “outward behaviors,” media forms, and hard-won cultural techniques. These days—no less than in the nineteenth century—the concert hall experience is an exceptional one in any case, and surely represents no self-evident phenomenological ground from which to generalize about how people hear music. It is not obvious that the Beethoven syndrome is best conceived as a condition that troubles individual listening subjects in the course of real-time exposure to Beethoven’s music, rather than as a dispersed web of practices perpetuated by institutions. Yet Bonds usually prioritizes the pathological over the political.There is no doubt that Bonds’s discursive schemes have a sweeping explanatory power. Chapter 8 describes the “endurance of subjectivity”—that is, the persistence of a belief in music as an expression of self—and boldly articulates broad continuities between the reception of cultural formations as apparently dissimilar as late Goethe and middle-period Taylor Swift. As the chapter draws to a close, Bonds’s purview expands further still: “Followers of rock and rap music have been particularly prone to hear their respective repertoires as inherently confessional,” he observes, a little fustily (p. 195). But these enjoyable connections, spanning history and genre, also expose lacunas produced by Bonds’s methods. An adequate account of the culture of biographical speculation among Swifties requires a deeper understanding of the accelerated interactivity, public intimacy, and vernacular hermeneutic practices of Web 2.0. It should be plain, I think, that, in this respect, Taylor Swift’s musical reception is constituted by a good deal more than constituencies of “listeners” prone to hearing things in certain ways. And the same could be said of Beethoven. As scholars such as Abigail Fine and Fabio Morabito have shown, even the most apotheosizing forms of nineteenth-century musical author-worship were sustained by surprisingly quotidian, ephemeral, and often (to us) alienating materials and social practices, not merely by interlocking paratexts that have since become almost as canonical as the music they routinely serve to contextualize.3The two closing chapters argue that twentieth-century musical reception after 1920 was split between a residual biographical orientation and a revived “objectivity” inspired by musicians such as Debussy and Stravinsky. This is a plausible account of a divided modern musical world. But here, as in most of the book, one notices that Bonds is more interested in whether people hear self-expression in music than in the specific conceptions of the self that music has historically helped to produce. Perhaps because of its fundamental importance to the argument, the self frequently shows up in the text as somehow self-evident or ready-made. Yet Burnham’s Beethoven Hero was not about any old self—it was about a potent musical construction of the oppositional, authentic, exhortative, and freely self-generating subject of the so-called Goethezeit, as well as the intense forms of listener identification it inspired. And for many music scholars these days, the most urgent political question is not whether people should be listening out for selves but, as writers such as Sylvia Wynter have long urged, how we might relativize the spuriously universal selves celebrated in modern Euro-American art and philosophy. With this question in mind, it is at once thrilling and disconcerting to read, in Maureen Mahon’s rollicking new book on African American women in rock, about a musician such as Betty Davis: a “creative maverick” on a “quest for a form of expression that would allow her to present feelings and experiences … that resonated with her”—a form of self-expression audible in the pushing of artistic limits, the dangerous challenges to orthodoxy, and the rawness of style.4 More important, to my mind, than the (disputably Beethovenian) premise that music is self-expression is the precise kind of expressive self that academic music studies continues to endorse as the apparent condition of political agency or liberation in music—one grounded in unmistakably Beethovenian historical tropes: self-generation, innovation and originality, authenticity, and resistance. In this respect, the Beethoven syndrome is undoubtedly still with us.