Ludwig von Beethoven belongs among those men whom not only Vienna and Germany, but Europe and our entire age revere. With Mozart and Haydn he makes up the unequalled triumvirate of more recent music. The ingenious depth, the constant originality, the ideal in his compositions that flows from a great soul assure him… of the recognition of every true admirer of the divine Polyhymnia.
Originality, nobility, greatness, genius – when it comes to Beethoven, we all know the score. It was a beatification that happened early, as this paean from Germany’s deliciously titled Morning Paper for the Educated Classes reminds us.
Published in 1823, a few years before Beethoven’s death, it starts the process of polishing up a living man into a musical god, ready for his eternal altar. Whether conscious or unconscious, that subtle substitution of the aristocratic German ‘von’ for the workaday Dutch ‘van’ in Beethoven’s name is revealing — part of the glossing and gilding, the retouching that, over the centuries, has become indistinguishable from the man beneath.
Gently but firmly, Tunbridge tugs Beethoven down from his pedestal to look him squarely in the eye
Beethoven was one of the earliest figures to be commemorated by a statue — supported by no lesser champions than Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin. But having started her book at the foot of this towering bronze figure that still stands in Bonn’s Munsterplatz, Laura Tunbridge spends the rest of it dismantling it, gently but firmly tugging Beethoven down until we’re no longer gazing up at that stern, glowering face, but looking it square in the eye.
Tunbridge is less interested in the cult of Beethoven and its many myths than by the process of myth-making itself and its stakeholders.
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