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

hear it more often. Well, once more... 72
I have quoted this article in extenso because, as a stream-of-consciousness
account of what might be called synthetic listening it could hardly be bettered. The
unknown author describes how the subconscious mind assembles a clear and coherent
impression of the piece between and during repeated hearings. Nature plays a different
role here than in Mattheson’s theory. For most eighteenth-century writers on music,
nature was essentially a sociable concept: the natural was that which was acceptable to
the taste of the listening community as a whole.
For this nineteenth-century Berliner, listening is almost a solipsistic process.
The work in question appears to be one of the late string quartets: he must have been at
a performance, or maybe participated in a play-through (the article is ambiguous as to
whether he has been listening to or playing the music), but there is no mention of these
other people—the musical experience takes place entirely within his own head. The
clue to the music’s meaning comes, extraordinarily enough, from ‘the highest branches
of the beech trees … swaying so gregariously and friendly in the evening breeze.’
Beethoven’s habit of drawing his inspiration from walks in the countryside
surrounding Vienna was well known; if one wanted to understand his difficult and
strange music, then, why not go directly to its source? The music is presented as an
elemental force: one drops everything to hear a new work of Beethoven’s, ‘to hear
whether the wind, which is to propel the willing ship of the soul and its sails, our
feelings, is going to blow northeast or southwest.’ This is a telling metaphor,
indicating the complete submission of the listener in relation to the composer,
72 ‘An opinion on a piece of music by Beethoven from no.4, 1827 of the Berliner musikalische Zeitung,
which deserves greater dissemination’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung zur Beförderung der theoretischen
und praktischen Tonkunst, für Musiker und Freunde der Musik überhaupt 1 (8 August 1827), 101-
02; in The critical reception of Beethoven’s compositions by his German contemporaries, ed. W. M.
Senner, R. Wallace, and W. Meredith (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp.111-
12. The trajectory delineated here was replicated almost exactly in the Allgemeine musicalische
Zeitung’s Beethoven reviews between 1798 and 1810 (Thayer-Forbes, Beethoven, pp.276-279).
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