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

late works presuppose a specially cultivated taste, the relatively few ardent enthusiasts
who have been trying all along to win greater interest in his music are still far from
getting a universal response.’ 115
Despite the many forward-looking elements in his music, Clementi’s attitude
remained essentially that of the eighteenth century: craftsman and entrepreneur, rather
than visionary Tondichter. It is instead with his great contemporary we associate that
indissoluble nexus of biography, creative achievement, critical, analytical, and
performing traditions, and institutional practices which Lydia Goehr has called ‘the
Beethoven paradigm’. 116 One thing it meant was a new kind of relation between the
self and the art-work:
Beethoven was the first man who used music with absolute integrity as the expression of his own
emotional life. Others had shown how it could be done—had done it themselves as a curiosity of
their art in rare, self-indulgent, unprofessional moments—but Beethoven made this, and nothing
else, his business....In thus fearlessly expressing himself, he has, by his common humanity, expressed
us as well, and shown us how beautifully, how strongly, how trustworthily we can build with our own
real selves. 117
It is not just that Beethoven found a way of expressing himself; the point is that
we also are implicated in this mode of expression: ‘The phenomenon of listener
engagement entails...a marked sense of identification with the music’ because ‘the
music is ultimately about us, but not in the banal sense of of a portrayal: rather, it is
about our susceptibility to, and understanding of, processes that model the merger of
individual and universal.’ 118 In a sense, the hero of Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero
115 The sonata in the Classic era (New York: Norton, 1983), p.757.
116 The imaginary museum of musical works: an essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), title of chapter 8.
117 G. B. Shaw, ‘George Grove and Beethoven’, in Pleasures of music, ed. J. Barzun, (London: Michael
Joseph, 1952), p.249.
118 S. Burnham, Beethoven hero, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp.29, 31.
377