Pilgrimages to Beethoven: Reminiscences by his contemporaries

Music and Letters

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 19-54

  Knittel, K M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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EID: 33747173172     PISSN: 00274224     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ml/84.1.19     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. O. G, Sormeck (ed.), Beethoven: Impressions by his Contemporaries (New York, 1967; first pub. 1926, repr. 1954) [hereafter Sonneck], 162-3;
2. Ilka Horowitz-Barnay, 'Im Hause Franz Liszt', Deutsche Revue 23 (1898), 76-84. See App. 1 for the original sources of all the pilgrimage stories.
3. Carl Dahlhaus, 'What Is a Fact of Music History?', in Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B, Robinson (Cambridge, 1983), 33-43.
4. For an examination of the problems involved in the Liszt Beethoven stories from the perspective of Liszt's biography, see Allan Keiler, 'Liszt and Beethoven: The Creation of a Personal Myth', 19th Century Music, 12 (1988-9), 116-31,
5. and his 'Liszt Research and Walker's Liszt', Musical Quarterly, 70 (1984), 374-403
6. in reference to Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, i: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847 (New York and London, 1983).
7. For another view of the Weihekuss, see Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire (Stanford, 1996), 61-79. Although Kopelson is concerned with the kiss as a sign of masculine desire, he nevertheless points out the frequency with which this motif appears in regard to student pianists and their teachers or mentors.
8. For a discussion of the kiss as ritual, see Jacques Le Goff, 'The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage', in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), 237-87.
9. He did, however, insist later to Ramann that he 'of course' received the famed kiss. Apparently this affirmation - 'Natürlich, habe ich ihn bekommen' (of course, I received it) - was in response to questions raised by Alfred Christlieb Kalischer, 'Der Knabe Franz Liszt und Beethoven', Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 87 (nos. 42 and 43, 21 and 28 Oct. 1891), 441-3 and 453-4;
10. response by Lina Ramann published in the same journal (no. 47, 25 Nov. 1891), 503.
11. Later, Liszt maintained to August Göllerich that while Beethoven had appeared at his concert in Vienna he had not played for the composer at his house - although he did say I was there twice. There was a piano there with strings torn out'; August Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin, 1908), 160;
12. cited in Keiler, 'Liszt Research', 393. The relevant Conversation Book entries cited in Keiler are all from Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, iii (Hefte 23-37), ed. Karl-Heinz Köhler and Dagmar Beck (Leipzig, 1983). This edition marks Schindler's later emendations with asterisks.
13. Alan Walker, review of Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Adrian Williams (Oxford, 1998), in Music & Letters, 81 (2000), 118-24.
14. Dahlhaus makes a similar point about the Teplitz incident, saying that 'it persists, in spite of the critical battering it has received, because it testifies to an aesthetic, if not historical, truth'; Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to his Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford, 1991), 1.
15. Keiler sorts out all the various versions of the Weihekuss story in his 'Liszt Research', 380-96. With regard to Schindler's various versions of the encounter between Liszt and Beethoven, Keiler believes Schindler was more likely than not motivated by historical hindsight of just the type that I am implying.
16. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 76; Dahlhaus is referring here specifically to the Beethoven myth, but I believe his statement could be applied more generally.
17. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973);
18. see also his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978),
19. and Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987).
20. See also the collections of essays W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative (Chicago, 1981)
21. and Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds.), The Writing of History; Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison, Wis., 1978)
22. (in particular Louis O. Mink, 'Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument').
23. The main sources are Die Erinnerungen an Beethoven, ed. Friedrich Kerst, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1913),
24. and Ludwig van Beethoven; Berichte der Zeitgenossen, Briefe und persönliche Aufzeichnungen, ed. Albert Leitzmann, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1921). See App. 1 for the relationship between Kerst and Sonneck.
25. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (2nd rev. edn., New York, 1998), p. xviii.
26. On the fabrications of Rochlitz and Schlösser, see also his 'Beethoven's Creative Process; A Two-Part Invention', in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 126-38.
27. In 'The Falling-out Between Haydn and Beethoven: The Evidence of the Sources', in Lewis Lockwood and Phyllis Benjamin (eds.) Beethoven Essays; Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 3-45, James Webster is similarly concerned with sorting out the truth value of anecdotes. His underlying points, however - namely their self-serving nature and the consistency of their texts and subtexts - are similar to my own.
28. While my methodology bears some resemblance to the work of others who have attempted to classify and analyse fairy tales and myths, the components here are my own; see for example Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (2nd edn., rev. and ed. Louis A. Wagner, Austin, Tex., 1968);
29. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends (rev. and enlarged edn., 6 vols., Bloomington, Ind., 1955-8);
30. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', in Structural Anthropology:, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York, 1963), i. 206-31. I have not ruled out the possibility of an underlying Ur-myth for the plots; however, it seems clear that it does not originate from fairy tales, which usually involve a villain and/or magic.
31. The methodology of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, 1979), is similar to my own. The authors discuss recurring thematic anecdotes in relation to the biographies of visual artists. They are not claiming, however, that these biographies share similar plots or structures, but only that certain themes (such as the ability deceptively to imitate nature) recur in the lives of many different artists.
32. Their overall point, however - that this similarity reflects a deep-seated need on the part of all cultures and peoples to mystify the process of image-making - does resonate with my own belief that the similarity of these pilgrimage stories suggests an agreement about issues larger than Beethoven. Webster's discussion of periodization (in 'The Concept of Beethoven's "Early" Period in the Context of Periodization in General', Beethoven Forum, 3 (1994), 1-28) suggests that any kind of historical division implies a plot of some type. He also identifies and interprets a similar quest plot in 'Sandberger's Tale', in Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and the Idea of the Classical Style (Cambridge, 1991), 341-7. It is interesting that Sandberger is emplotting Haydn's own (compositional) quest rather than the quests of others who seek to meet or understand him.
33. The distinction I am making between the elements of the plot and their subsequent place within the story recalls the distinction made by the Russian Formalists between fabula and sjužet. Peter Brooks explains fabula as 'the order of events referred to by the narrative', and sjužet as 'the order of events presented in the narrative discourse'. French structuralists use the terms histoire and récit for fabula and sjužet respectively. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 3-36. While I am not claiming a Russian Formalist reading of these stones, I find the distinction between events and plot useful none the less: although each author's ordering of the events into a story is slightly different, as can be seen from Table 3,I believe that the underlying events are the same.
34. Rossini's story as translated in Edmond Michotte, Richard Wagner's Visit to Rossini and an Evening at Rossini's in Beau-Séjour, trans. Herbert Weinstock (Chicago, 1968); the visit to Beethoven is described on pp. 38-54.
35. Letter by an English lady as published in Anton Schindler, The Life of Beethoven, trans, of 1st edn. by Ignace Moscheles (London, 1841), i. 295-8 (Supplement);
36. orig. pub. in The Harmonicon, 3/36 (Dec. 1825), 222-3.
37. She is identified as Sarah Burney Payne; Thayer's Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes, 2 vols. (2nd rev. edn., Princeton, 1967), 956-7;
38. see also Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York, 1987), 100.
39. In Bettina's letter to Goethe, the desire to meet Beethoven is also vague, although in her other two letters on the subject (to Bihler and Pückler-Muskau) the statement is stronger. The letter from Pückler-Muskau is as translated in German Essays on Music, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael Gilbert (The German Library, 43; New York, 1994), 77-80.
40. The publishing history of the Bettina letters is complicated. The earliest letter to be published was the one to Goethe, which appeared in her Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kind, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1835), purported to be the correspondence between herself and Goethe. Bettina's letters to Goethe were returned to her following the poet's death in 1832 and it appears that she then significantly rewrote not only her side of the correspondence, but his as well. The letter to Anton Bihler was published after his death ('Beethoven und das Kind', Gartenlaube: Illustrirtes Familienblatt (1870), 314-15)
41. and Pückler-Muskau's was published with his own correspondence in 1873 (Briefwechsel und Tagebücher des Fürsten Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, ed. Ludmilla Assing, 9 vols. (Berne, 1971; repr. from the orig. edn., Hamburg, 1873 and Berlin, 1874-6), i. 90-4).
42. On Bettina's reworking of the letters into novel form, see Edith Waldstein, Bettine son Arnim and the Polities of Romantic Conversation (Columbia, SG, 1988).
43. Bettina also published the three letters that she claimed to have received from Beethoven: first in the Athenäum für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben (1839) and then again in her Ilius Pamphilius und die Ambrosia, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1857).
44. Of the three letters, only Anderson no. 296 (10 Feb. 1811) appears to be genuine; the other two (which do not exist in Beethoven's hand) are dated 11 Aug. 1810 and Aug. 1812;
45. see The Letters of Beethoven, collected, ed. and trans. Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (London and New York, 1961), i. 312-13 and iii. 1355-9,
46. e siècle (title on p. 1: 'Alexandre Boucher et son temps') (Paris, 1890), 186-9 (my translation): 'Beethoven mettait consciencieusement au panier toutes les lettres que sa domestique lui donnait de la part de M. Boucher, et qui étaient signées de ducs, de princes, de marchands de musique ou de financiers, tous gens qui pour lui avaient la m̂me valeur. Mais à peine a-t-il parcouru la seizième lettre, qu'il saisit son chapeau et part comme un fou à la recherche de Boucher.
47. Elle était écrite et signée de la main de son cher ami Goethe. Le protégé de Goethe ne passait plus à ses yeux pour un importun. Ce devait être un grand artiste.' The story is also found in Kerst, Erinnerungen, i. 279-81.
48. Cramolini as translated in Beethoven: A Documentary Study, comp. and ed. H. C. Robbins Landon (abridged edn., London, 1975), 192-4.
49. Cramolini's reminiscences were first published after his death by Hermann Knispel in the Frankfurter Zeitung (29 Sept. 1907, Erstes Morgenblatt), 1-2.
50. Sonneck translates the original 'Der Großherzoglich hessische Gesandte' as 'The ambassador of the Grand-Duke of Hessia' on p. 135.
51. Schlösser received the letter from Baron Anton von Türckheim, who was the ambassador of the Grand Duke; see Anderson no. 1134, Beethoven's letter to Grand Duke Ludvvig I of Hesse-Darmstadt dated 5 Feb. 1823.
52. The reply from the Grand Duke was dated 26 Feb. 1823; see Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, trans, and ed. Theodore Albrecht, 3 vols. (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1996), ii. 995.
53. Rellstab's experiences take place over several meetings, and although only the first is in quest form, no. 9 is drawn out over the first two visits. Rellstab leaves the poems with Beethoven, saying 'I shall give you samples in order to win your confidence!' (Rellstab claimed to be interested in collaborating on an opera with Beethoven.) Beethoven's response to this: 'a gleam of joy crossed his face'. Only on the second visit, however, does Beethoven agree to set the poems and the above exchange take place. The exchange over Rellstab's opinion of Op. 127, of which he had heard the premiere, is similarly structured, but slightly marred because Rellstab's answer is less than truthful: 'How was I to explain to him the impression the work had made on me? To this day I have my own scruples anent expressing my conviction that in this last, enigmatic work by Beethoven are to be found only the ruins of the erstwhile youthful and virile exaltation of his genius; that it often is buried beneath the most disordered rubble and wreckage. Yet I still have my compunctions, and often doubts overtake me as to whether, perhaps, it is not my own lack of comprehension which calls forth my impression.' Here is the basic conversation as reported by Rellstab - B: 'How did you like it?' R: 'I was devoutly and profoundly moved to the depths of my soul!' B was 'unmistakably touched'. This is basically his opinion as expressed in a review of Op. 127 (with Opp. 132 and 130) that he wrote for the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 2 (1825), 165-6.
54. This passage as translated in Sonneck, 119.
55. For background on Schlesinger's paper, see Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicals de Paris, 1834-80 (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 48-53.
56. See also Jules Janin, 'Le Dîner de Beethoven: conte fantastique', Gazette musicale de Paris, 1 (5 Jan. 1834), 1-3 and 2 (12 Jan. 1834), 9-11;
57. repr. in Les Catacombes, 3 vols. (Brussls, 1839), iii. 90-104.
58. Janin's story presents a fictionalized version of Schlesinger's account, originally published in Schlesinger's own magazine; on this story see also Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, Nebr., 1995), 153-63.
59. see Czerny, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, ed. Walter Kolneder (Strasburg, 1968), 15.
60. Czerny, Erinnerungen, 13-15, including explanatory notes by Kolneder.
61. Compare the following (although obviously not exhaustive) list taken from Goethe: Conversations and Encounters, ed. and trans. David Luke and Robert Pick (London, 1966), with accounts of meeting Beethoven: for accounts similar to visits to Beethoven, see nos. 180 (but no obstacles), 190 (but visit a failure?), 197 (but comes away with a negative impression), 221 (perhaps most similar to Beethoven stories), and 309 (also very similar to Beethoven visits). The following are strikingly unlike accounts of visiting Beethoven: nos. 38, 85, 135, 137 (no obstacles), 174 (visitor refused), and 264.
62. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2nd edn., Princeton, 1968), 35.
63. White, Metahistory, 8-9;
64. He is following the framework presented in Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957).
65. White, 'Historical Text as Literary Artifact', in Tropics of Discourseq, 81-100 at 85.
66. Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', in The Content of the Form, 1-25 at 20.
67. Lévi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', 229.
68. Richard Wagner, 'A Pilgrimage to Beethoven', trans. William Ashton Ellis in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, 8 vols. (London, 1892-9, repr. New York, 1966), vii. 21-45.
69. Sanna Pederson, 'A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity', 19th Century Music, 18 (1994-5), 87-107;
70. see also K. M. Knittel, 'The Construction of Beethoven', in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2001), 118-50, esp. 142-50.
71. Wagner, Prose Works, i. 303-4.
72. for an analysis of Wagner's other anti-Semitic writings, see Weiner, Richard Wagner.
73. See Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 158-62;
74. David Grarnit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 21.
75. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, 1989), 154 (emphasis original).
76. Jürgen Habemias, 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project', in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983), 3-15 at 9.
77. Habermas discusses Max Weber's ideas more fully in The Theory of Communicative Action, i: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1984;
78. orig. Theorie des kommunikatwen Handelns, i: Handlungsrationalität undgesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, Frankfurt am Main, 1981).
79. The literature on the topic of modernism is vast; but for discussions relevant to the issues raised here, see e.g. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), esp. regarding Odysseus and the Sirens, 32-42;
80. Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999);
81. and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990).
82. Habermas, 'Modernity', 9.
83. Gramit, Cultivating Music, 20.
84. Carl Czerny, Die Kunst des Vortrags, Supplement (oder 4th Theil) zur grossen Pianoforte-Schule, Op. 500 (Vienna, [1844?]), 33.
85. Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, Ludwig van Beethovens Studien im Generalbasse, Contrapunkte und in der Compositions-Lehre (Vienna, 1832),
86. cited in Thayer's Life of Beethoven, rev. and ed. Forbes, 207.
87. The Critical Reception of Beethoven's Compositions by his German Contemporaries, ed. Wayne M. Senner, Robin Wallace, and William Meredith (Lincoln, Nebr., 1999), i. 99
88. (orig. in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 29 (1827), cols. 227-8).
89. Senner et al. (eds.), Critical Reception, 138
90. (orig. Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 4 (13 June 1827), 186-7).
91. E. T. A. Hoffmann, '[Review of the Fifth Symphony]', in Beethoven; Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, ed. Elliot Forbes (Norton Critical Score; New York, 1971), 153.
92. Johann Aloys Schlosser, Beethoven: The First Biography, ed. Barry Cooper, trans. Reinhard G. Pauly (Portland, Ore., 1996), 152-3; translation emended.
93. Pederson, 'A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life', 98.
94. Hoffmann, in Norton Score, 163.
95. Wagner, Prose Works, ii. 71
96. and My Life, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1983), 503.
97. K. M. Knittel, 'Imitation, Individuality, Illness: Behind Beethoven's Three Styles', Beethoven Forum, 4 (1995), 17-36.
98. Robin Wallace argues that Beethoven's reception during his own lifetime was nowhere near as bleak as we might like to think: Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer's Lifetime (Cambridge, 1986).
99. On the idea of universality in Beethoven's late music, see Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995).
100. It is interesting to note that the traditional story regarding the elevation of the late style is similar to a quest plot: the works, written before their time, demanded extensive study before they were revealed to be works of genius; see my 'Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven's Late Style', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51 (1998), 49-82.
101. See Keiler, 'Liszt Research' and 'Liszt and Beethoven'.
102. Wagner, Prose Works, viii, 46-65.
103. John Deathridge, 'How Did Beethoven Get onto his Pedestal?', part of the 'Beethoven's Influence' session at the International Conference on 19th Century Music, Royal Holloway, 29 June-2 July 2000; typescript; I should like to thank Professor Deathridge for providing me with a copy and for his helpful comments and suggestions.
104. On Wagner's 'relationship' to Beethoven, see Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's Reception of Beethoven, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, 1991)
105. and Thomas S. Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge, 1995), 51-129.
106. White, Tropics of Discourse, 84;
107. Content of the Form, pp. ix and xi.