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NICHOLAS MATHEW POLITICAL BEETHOVEN Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 pp. xvii + 273, isbn 978 1 107 00589 1
Reviews: Books
Nicholas Mathew's Political Beethoven presents a seeming contradiction. The lapidary title presages a book of great moment, yet the subject matter, Beethoven's patriotic works of 1813-1814, is unlikely to win over even the most sympathetic listener. While Mathew treats these ugly ducklings lovingly, his deeper interest lies with the insights they can provide into the composer's less overtly political music. Mathew's finely nuanced argument radiates backwards to the Third and Fifth Symphonies and forward to the Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis, and it ends with a bracing challenge to entrenched hermeneutic habits. The result is a persuasive and original book that will shape future writing on the political meanings and capital of Beethoven's music.
Mathew's first chapter ('Music Between Myth and History') rehabilitates the category of the occasional work. As he notes, occasional verse suffers no opprobrium in literary histories akin to the scorn heaped on Wellingtons Sieg or Der glorreiche Augenblick. (Critics do not sideline Victor Hugo's early odes as legitimist propaganda, for example, although he unabashedly glorified the Bourbons and even drew a royal salary.) Beethoven scholars have dismissed these works as disposable ephemera, yet, as Mathew argues, they served an opposite function: 'They make a historical moment permanent . . . the book of eternity lay open on the music desk' (30-31). Mathew's argument becomes most interesting when he points out the similarities between the heroic gestures and topics of the patriotic Gelegenheitsstücke and those of the Third or Fifth Symphonies. To safeguard the latter works for posterity, critics have had to read them 'under erasure', cleansing them of political context just as Beethoven rubbed out the Napoleonic dedication on the Eroica score: 'Musical autonomy is constituted by a gesture in which music is seen to reject the history with which it is otherwise complicit' (57).
Chapter Two ('Beethoven's Moments') offers a technical explanation for the occasional quality of the composer's patriotic works, a discussion that again opens onto the canonic mainstream. Mathew calls attention to the static, tableau-like moments throughout the Congress of Vienna works and Fidelio that...