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

turns out to be none other than ourselves.
The ‘Beethoven myth’ is a standard trope of nineteenth- (and twentieth-)
century musical historiography, and has received a good deal of sceptical attention in
recent years. 119 However, there is, I think, a tendency to conflate two different sense of
the word ‘myth’. To be sure, many Beethoven anecdotes and assumptions are
mythical in the sense of being false, or unsubstantiated, or indeed faked. But the
mythic power of his presence as creator and cultural exemplar, whether baleful or
benign (Burnham is ambivalent on this question) remains largely unimpaired. One of
the most impressive things about Burnham’s book is the way in which he continually
seeks—with considerable success—to ground this ‘mythic’ quality in the works
themselves, rather than just reception history and cultural politics. Is it possible to
imagine a musical world in which the musical style of Clementi (or Dussek, or
Hummel), rather than Beethoven, had achieved the same cultural resonance and
authority? A thesis on fugue is not, unfortunately, the place for an extensive
comparison between the sonata style of Beethoven and those of his contemporaries. 120
We can, however, compare their exploitation of contrapuntal procedures.
119 K. M. Knittel, ‘Pilgrimages to Beethoven: reminiscences by his contemporaries’, Music & Letters
84/1 (Feb 2003), 19-54; Knittel, ‘The construction of Beethoven’, in The Cambridge history of
nineteenth-century music, ed. J. Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.118-
150; E. Pichler, Beethoven: Mythos und Wirklichkeit: Dokumente, Chronologie, Register (Vienna:
Amalthea, 1994); E. E. Bauer, Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam: Die Entstehung eines
musikalischen Mythos (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); W. S. Newman, ‘The Beethoven mystique in
Romantic art, literature, and music’, Musical Quarterly 69/3 (Summer 1983), 354-87.
120 A. B. Marx, for example, made this sort of comparison between J. L. Dussek’s Sonata in E flat op.75
and Beethoven’s Op.2/3; see Musical form in the age of Beethoven: selected writings on theory and
method, ed. and tr. S. Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.105-7, 110,
124-27, and 129.
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