"Den Grossen Meister nach allen Seiten": Saxon Reception of Beethoven and the German Cultural Nation at the Dawn of Unification
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
When the German Kaiserreich was declared on January 18th, 1871, the audience of Leipzig-based music newspaper Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) read nothing that even hinted at the epoch-making political reorganization Prussia had realized. This apparent silence stands in stark contrast to the triumphalism that characterized contemporaneous music criticism. Although a seemingly unlikely place to find nationalist sentiments, classical music periodicals actively participated in the development of German nationalism throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the classical canon and the figures of great composers became the basis for what scholars have since come to call the German “cultural nation”—the culturally cohering ideal around which Germans sought to construct a politically unified nation. Scholarship about German music criticism in the unification era has observed the abundant triumphalist literature from 1870 and 1871 and assumed that Germans both accepted and welcomed the Prussian military unification. By looking at the reception of Beethoven in this period however, this thesis questions the validity of the above assumption. 1870 was the hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and several festivals, called Beethovenfeiern, were held to honor the composer. These festivals coincided rather fortuitously with the highly successful Franco-Prussian War, affording pro-Prussian nationalists many opportunities to inscribe these remembrances of Beethoven with their own chauvinist politics, claiming both Beethoven and the cultural nation for Prussia’s unified Germany. Richard Wagner, with his 1870 essay Beethoven, played a particularly influential role in the popularization of this critical trend. Reacting against this critical trend, AmZ’s Beethoven criticism insists on demythologized visions of Beethoven. Indeed, by condemning the politicization of the composer’s memory as a betrayal of Beethoven and the cultural nation, the Saxons at AmZ were able to register their dissatisfaction with Prussian unification, their music criticism becoming the vehicle of political dissent.