(III) Political reception.

Although it has been argued that the reception of art is always political and ideological at some level, the history of Beethoven reception offers case after case of explicit political appropriation of his music and ideological monumentalization of his figure as a spiritual hero. Among the steady production of monuments erected to honour Beethoven throughout the 19th century, the most strikingly grandiose is the nude statue by Klinger (fig. 17), unveiled in Vienna in 1900. A more lasting and influential monument has been the continuing presence of Beethoven's music in Western political arenas, for such instances may well constitute the most overt and far-reaching effect of his music. Of course, Beethoven himself wrote occasional music for expressly political purposes: the ‘Battle Symphony’ and Der glorreiche Augenblick are only the best known of these ventures, both performed as part of the celebrations surrounding the Congress of Vienna in 1814. These pieces are routinely denigrated as hack-work, their politics all too obvious. Yet, Beethoven's symphonies — his most universally revered, public statements — have been readily and repeatedly appropriated for far more sweeping and insidious political ends.

The symphonies have consistently been heard to occupy a moral high ground. In particular, the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies came to represent the monumental and sublime as opposed to the ‘merely’ lyrical and beautiful, and consequently they were frequently conscripted in German denunciations of the music of France and Italy. In the 1820s, at a time when the Prussian nation sought to consolidate and maintain something like an aesthetic and civic character, Beethoven's symphonies formed an important bulwark in the burgeoning ideology of German spiritual nationhood. From then on, Beethoven and his music have never been far from the most momentous scenes of modern Germany's political history.

In 1870, German victory in the Franco-Prussian War coincided with the centenary of Beethoven's birth. The connection was seized upon by the organizers of numerous musical and political festivals, and by Wagner, whose 1870 monograph on Beethoven explicitly equated the sublimity of Beethoven's art with that of the German spirit, as a triumph of the ideal inner world over the French world of appearances. Bismarck himself was said to revere Beethoven; legend has it that he ordered a performance of the Fifth Symphony just before mobilizing his army.

The merger of Beethoven and German politics continued apace in the 20th century. During World War I, Beethoven's music was played relentlessly in German concert halls, and there are many accounts of soldiers invoking Beethoven as an inspirational model of German heroism. Later, the Third Reich aggressively exploited the power of his music in its propaganda and even turned to Beethoven during its demise: Hitler's death was announced on German radio to the strains of the Funeral March from the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Ironically, the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony, due to its rhythmic similarity to the Morse Code letter V, became associated with Allied victory, and Beethoven's music in general was immensely popular in wartime Britain. Almost half a century later, the Ninth Symphony was heard at a concert commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Leonard Bernstein conducted, famously substituting the word ‘Freiheit’ for ‘Freude’ in the choral finale.

Thus Beethoven's music has served throughout the last two centuries as a kind of potent and free floating moral force that can be harnessed for any number of political enterprises, from racial purity to human rights, fascistic subjugation to world brotherhood, without suffering the stigma of the collaborator. His music has survived these multifarious appropriations, just as Beethoven's status as a cultural hero has survived concerted attempts to dismantle the Beethoven myth. One cannot but accord to this music and this composer an unexampled cultural and historical force in the modern West. His music has fought wars and celebrated victories, consoled and scorned, empowered and overmastered. It is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a time when Beethoven's music will not continue to exercise its paradoxically confounding and foundational force. Perhaps when that happens, the Western world will truly have passed into another age.

Beethoven, Ludwig van