Beethoven Papers and Concerts at the 1994 AMS Convention

annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota this October 27-30 was blessed with a Native American summer (sunshine married to unseasonably fine temperatures twenty degrees above normal) and, for Beethoven enthusiasts, seven Beethoven papers, one all-Beethoven recital, and one all-Beethoven lecture-recital. Reception history from day to our own kept surfacing in various guises, criticism was poked and analysis was prodded, traditions surrounding the Pastoral were contextualized through a look at the genre of the Classical program symphony, and a feminist deconstruction of the character of Leonore served to put in high contrast aspects of gender disparity in the opera. All these combined to form a stimulating admixture of topics, balanced for good measure with live performances of the music. meeting began on Thursday afternoon with an all-Beethoven session admirably chaired by the Classical Period scholar Elaine Sisman (author of a new and important study on Haydn's variations). first paper was read by Stephen Rumph, a recent graduate of Berkeley whose dissertation is titled Beethoven after Napoleon. Dr. Rumph's paper, entitled Beethoven's heroic sublime, explored aesthetic theories of the sublime during lifetime and their immediate connection to his works. Arguments thus far have rested upon music-theoretical treatises, rhetorical models, or implicit parallels between music and aesthetic theory. In the case of however, we have the explicit, hitherto unremarked evidence of a work actually designated as 'sublime.' This single example suggests gratifyingly wide connections, both to other works and to the leading German treatments of the sublime by Kant and Schiller. In his paper Rumph went on to examine four works - the sechs Gellert Lieder, Christus am Olberge, the Sixth Symphony, and the Choral Fantasy - as instances of what might be called 'Heroic sublime.' composite picture not only clarifies aesthetic thought, but also helps in reconstructing the political comment of his heroic style. Rumph began by focusing on the fourth of the Gellen songs, Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur (which English-speaking people know as The heavens are telling the glory of God). Noting that Beethoven indicated that it should be sung Majestically and in a sublime manner (Majestatisch erhaben), Rumph compared common-tone modulation from C Major to A-flat Major at mm. 18-19 (arriving at a root position chord with the third on top) with similar passages pointed out by William Kinderman as symbols for the divine in the Missa solemnis; Rumph also drew our attention to the striking parallels between this text and that of the hero's march in the Ninth's Finale. same tonal gesture recurs in the Choral Fantasy at the words und Kraft (and power). Also included in Rumph's exposition of middle period examples of the sublime style were the last chorus of Christ on the Mount of Olives (written in an archaic style) and the alpine (hence majestic) imagery of the Pastoral's Finale. Schiller was also the focus of the next paper, William Kinderman's Beethoven, Schiller, and the synthesis of the rational and the sensuous. Dr. Kinderman teaches at the University of Victoria and has recently finished a substantial monograph on music which will be published by the University of California Press (spring 1995). His abstract for his paper neatly summarizes the central point: Recent polemical attacks directed at the concept of artistic 'unity' in musical analysis raise abiding aesthetic questions that were already debated in the 18th century. In his Aesthetic Letters of 1785 Friedrich Schiller regarded the work of art as a tensional synthesis of the rational and the sensuous, whereby the 'play drive' ('Spieltrieb') vitalizes artistic form ('Gestalt') into a 'living shape.' Schiller's theory applies well to the aesthetic of the sublime . …