The Beethoven Syndrome

Abstract

The “Beethoven syndrome” is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer’s inner self. Beethoven’s music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general—not just Beethoven—in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric, in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. Expression was thought of as an objective construct with a purpose. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the framework of rhetoric gave way to a framework of hermeneutics. Under the paradigm of expressive subjectivity, concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. The aesthetics of “New Objectivity” around 1920 marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high-modernist aesthetic that dominated the century’s middle decades. Perceptions of compositional subjectivity have nevertheless endured in surprising ways, and we find ourselves today in an era of dual and often conflicting paradigms.

‘The Vibrant, Passionate Human Soul He Was’: Robert Haven Schauffler’s The Unknown Brahms (1933) and the American Middlebrow

“…62 By the 1920s, with the decline of so-called 'Wagner-mania,' 63 Beethoven, to hear music as subjective rather than objective expression. 67 The thrust of Bonds's argument is as follows. Prior to 1830, music was primarily considered an objective construct that conformed to 'a framework of rhetoric'.…”

“…Musical expression, like language, was thought to be a type of persuasion, and it was the composer's responsibility to move their listeners through a successful application of rhetorical techniques. 68 Beginning with Beethoven, however, the eighteenth-century framework of rhetoric was replaced by a Romantic 'framework of hermeneutics'. Music-particularly instrumental music, with its lack of verbal signifiersbegan to be heard by critics and audiences as a projection of the composer's inner self, and it was now the task of listeners to interpret and understand the composer's subjective voice.…”

“…Music-particularly instrumental music, with its lack of verbal signifiersbegan to be heard by critics and audiences as a projection of the composer's inner self, and it was now the task of listeners to interpret and understand the composer's subjective voice. 69 The Beethoven syndrome, Bonds argues, remained the dominant form of listening until 1920, when the rise of high modernism revived the eighteenth-century idea of objective expression, particularly through the 'New Objectivity' movement. 70 While he acknowledges that expressive subjectivity was never fully replaced by objectivity in the twentieth century, Bonds does not address how the middlebrow was a major context in which the Beethoven syndrome persisted.…”

“…69 The Beethoven syndrome, Bonds argues, remained the dominant form of listening until 1920, when the rise of high modernism revived the eighteenth-century idea of objective expression, particularly through the 'New Objectivity' movement. 70 While he acknowledges that expressive subjectivity was never fully replaced by objectivity in the twentieth century, Bonds does not address how the middlebrow was a major context in which the Beethoven syndrome persisted. To this end, I argue that hearing music as autobiography had not just an expressive function in the middlebrow, but a didactic one, because it was a way of bringing high art to the musical non-specialist.…”