Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works

Rumph, Stephen. 2004. Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Beethoven is moving steadily rightwards. After a century or so of criticism that has taken Beethoven's revolutionary convictions and Enlightenment utopianism for granted, the last decade of Beethoven scholarship has witnessed the beginnings of a revisionist trend. Most importantly, several scholars have given unprecedented critical attention to the neglected group of compositions that Beethoven composed in the reactionary political climate of the Congress of Vienna-the notorious Wellingtons Sieg foremost among them.1 With Stephen Rumph's splendid new book, this revisionist sensibility has finally blossomed into a thesis: Beethoven's late music, argues Rumph, partakes of the counterrevolutionary politics, nostalgic medievalism, and anti-Enlightenment attitudes of German "political Romanticism." Rumph gives us a Beethoven more at home with Friedrich Schlegel than Immanuel Kant.

Rumph's study is doubly radical insofar as he primarily takes on the late music-the very compositions that critics have traditionally portrayed as the most unworldly products of western music. Nowadays, to be sure, critics are armed with the kind of rarefied hermeneutic equipment that can detect power relations in the most unworldly places; as one might expect, there is some hard hermeneutic labor in this book, often leading to a view of politics that seems too abstract or immaterial to be considered political at all. But for the most part Rumph permits constructive dialogue between the intellectual and material world of Beethoven's music. Indeed, the interplay of concrete political conditions and contemporary intellectual responses to them is at the heart of Rumph's musical-historical premise: the stylistic and political characteristics of the late style emerged during the last years of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna. "To put it bluntly," writes Rumph, "the same ideology that shaped Beethoven's late style helped create the restoration" (107).

Before he arrives at the late style, however, Rumph wants to straighten out the "heroic style," a critical category that his own periodization requires him to uphold, even reinforce, rather than query. Rumph accordingly begins with three chapters that stand apart to some degree from the main thrust of the book. The most relevant to his wider argument about Beethoven's late style is the opening chapter, "A Kingdom Not of...