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Most Beethoven scholars will readily grant that Carl Czerny had good reasons to make his often quoted remark, "It is certain that, in many of his finest works, Beethoven was inspired by similar visions and images, drawn either from reading, or created by his own excited imagination."1 They are reluctant, however, to attempt to identify those "readings" from which Beethoven drew his "visions" and "images," especially since Beethoven himself was notoriously reluctant to identify the sources of his extra-musical ideas. Since we frequently lack the composer's authoritative word on the matter, the challenge of identifying Beethoven's sources necessitates speculation.
Many scholars resist such speculation out of respect for the composer's attitude, again reported by Czerny, that "music is not always so freely felt by the hearers when a definitely expressed object has already fettered their imagination." While we need to honor the right of any listener to experience music (even patently programmatic music) as abstract art, such deference must not dissuade the scholar from the overriding need to learn why Beethoven 's music behaves as it does. To understand a piece of music we need to discover all we can about what went on in the mind of the composer as he created that music. "Objective" analysis can inform us how notes respond to purely musical forces. But in the case of a highly idiosyncratic composition that was elaborately motivated by extra-musical forces, only an awareness of those forces can explain why such a work goes its own strange way. Again quoting Czerny, "We should obtain the real key to his compositions and to their performance only through a thorough knowledge of these circumstances, if this were always practicable."
One key to the difficult task of identifying the "visions and images" is a work which, I strongly suspect, was widely read by Ludwig van Beethoven during the early decades of his life: Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste. The influence of this fascinating and monumentally important treatise can be quite reliably traced in several of Beethoven's compositions from the years 1794-1808 - and I assume that other links have yet to be discovered.
In Maynard Solomon's Beethoven one finds a paragraph that addresses Beethoven's interest in philosophy, literature, and the world of...