J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

could anyone have expected that Beethoven was about to turn away from this style,
successful and widely admired as it was?
‘The present-day chaos of Mr B. has again convinced me that this good man must have fallen into a
state of mental disturbance, or at least must be suffering from an attack of high fever when he
composes. There is such confusion in his ideas that it is just as impossible to derive a healthy total
concept from them as from the confused speech of someone sick with delirium. 71
Critics began to express their disquiet at this new turn of events. No longer
proffering advice to a gifted upstart, the tone was almost always one of sepulchral
respect (the quotation above came from an exceptionally critical article). Some
publications may have sidestepped the issue: the Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung did
not review any of Beethoven’s major publications between 1820 and his death.
Clearly this was not the whole story. Publishers were paying for—indeed,
competing for—his music. The quartets and the ninth symphony received
performances, and some listeners responded powerfully to the music; whether or not
they felt they understood it. A change was taking place in the way people listened to
music: a new element of trust, of submission, entered into the relationship between
composer and listener.
The oratorios of Handel, the symphonies of Haydn, and the operas of Mozart
had achieved classical status almost by accident: people enjoyed listening to them,
sought to repeat the experience (not something to be taken for granted in eighteenth-
century concert life), and so, de facto, they became institutions. With Beethoven by
contrast, (especially late Beethoven) repeated hearings were necessary in order to
understand the music at all. The idea of a music that did not interpret itself, that did
not meet the listener halfway as Mattheson insisted, was quite a new one.
71 Minerva als Beilage zum Allgemeinen musickalischen Anzeiger, Allgemeiner musikalischer
Anzeiger (Frankfurt) 1 (24 January 1827), 240; Senner et al, Critical reception, p.97.
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