(II) Beethoven's influence on music and musical thought.

Beethoven's music seemed almost at once to establish a watershed in Western musical history, both as a culmination of the Viennese Classical style and as the beginning of a new musical age. He is treated time and time again as the most imposing feature in the landscape of 19th-century music, the mountainside from which the music of the rest of the century would echo. Wagner, breathing the intoxicating air of his own heights, clamorously proclaimed Beethoven's music as a transhistorical force leading to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Even nowadays, in the lapidary invocation of ‘the three Bs’, Beethoven is popularly imagined as rising above the historical terrain of Western music, linking Bach to Brahms.

The sheer drama and scope of Beethoven's most ambitious works fostered an overriding perception that his music coheres organically even to the point of inevitability. Beethoven's art registered as a sublime force of nature: here was a music that fully embodied the recently propounded shift in aesthetics from mimetic imitation of the products of nature to expressive emulation of her processes. The overmastering coherence felt in Beethoven's music became an imposing measure of the greatness of musical artworks. Not only individual works but whole genres in his output came to assume a wholeness and totality, as well as a sense of teleology: the symphonies, the string quartets and the piano sonatas are all treated as coherent narratives of creative development. Playing these ‘cycles’ in their entirety continues to be a standard test for ambitious performers.

Mainstream symphonic composers above all chafed under the magnitude of Beethoven's accomplishment; as Schubert put it, ‘who would be able to do anything after Beethoven?’. Few escaped this stifling anxiety, and for some, like Brahms, it was practically overwhelming. Musical reactions to Beethoven range from the obvious to the subtle, and are both epigonal and agonistic. The Ninth Symphony by itself may be said to have fathered, for better or for worse, any number of later works: its opening alone furnished Bruckner with a problem he tackled anew in each of his symphonies. There are isolated cases of consuming interest: the teenage Mendelssohn's precocious modelling of several of Beethoven's late string quartets – the enigmatic sounds of the late style incorporated into the melodramatic emotional life of adolescence; or Schubert's modelling, in his Piano Sonata d959, of the proportions and textures, but not the themes or motifs, of the rondo finale of op.31 no.1. We have Schumann's quasi-philosophical reaction to Beethoven, in his Fantasy for piano, where he muses on a wistful theme from An die ferne Geliebte, and Berlioz's parodistic reaction in his anti-heroic symphony Harold en Italie. There is Brahms's earnest, historically burdened reaction: the opening of the First Symphony actually sounds as if it were dragging some great weight. The symphonic art of Dvořák is impossible to imagine without the Beethoven of the Pastoral and Eighth Symphonies. Mahler, Richard Strauss and Sibelius carry Beethoven's most sweeping manner into the 20th century; and even the more distinctly modernist composers of the 20th century do not shy from his influence, particularly with the ascendance of the late style. Schoenberg emulates Beethoven's motivic art, Bartók's string quartets breathe the air of the late quartets, and Stravinsky was impressed by the perpetual modernity of the fractiously grandiose Grosse Fuge. Even the iconoclastic Boulez owes much to Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata in his own Second Piano Sonata.

Beethoven was to exercise a more subtle and no less pervasive influence within mainstream music criticism and theory. From the beginning, his music seemed to demand a more serious and attentive manner of listening. In several landmark reviews, E.T.A. Hoffmann lauded the deep coherence in Beethoven's music, noting that, as in the case of Shakespeare, the music's underlying unity could easily elude those critics attuned to conventional surfaces. Music critics could no longer hope to judge this music competently at a first hearing; according to A.B. Marx, whose editorship of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung did so much to promote the music of Beethoven, critics needed to learn how to divine the Idea embodied in each of Beethoven's works. A hermeneutic imperative quickly gathered strength in the face of his music, one which has not abated. His works have been heard to be telling us something, as a kind of secular scripture in need of hermeneutic mediation. The 19th-century tendency to respond to much of his instrumental music with detailed extra-musical programmes has found renewed life throughout the 20th century, in the work of Arnold Schering, Harry Goldschmidt, Owen Jander and others. In 1994, Albrecht Riethmüller and others published two volumes containing variously authored interpretations of each of Beethoven's major works; here the hermeneutic impulse unites with the equally familiar compulsion to deal with every note of Beethoven's music.

Another pervasive, if less overt, influence on Beethoven's music lives on in the more mainstream methods of musical analysis, for it is not far-fetched to claim that they were formed largely in response to his music. For example, the codification of sonata form in the work of A.B. Marx – one of the imposing legacies of 19th-century music theory – was essentially a codification of Beethoven's sonata forms, as manifest in his piano sonatas. And inasmuch as one can speak of a theory of form in the work of Tovey, it will perforce refer to Beethoven, the mainspring of Tovey's analytical and critical élan. Form was a kind of temporal logic for Tovey, a logic most manifest (and most worth tracing) in Beethoven.

Beethoven's music was both proving ground and breeding ground for two of the most pervasive methods of demonstrating coherence in tonal music, motivic analysis and Schenkerian part-writing analysis. For proponents of motivic analysis, Beethoven's musical art was heard to live at the level of the motif rather than the theme; motivic ubiquity and transformation were shown to betoken underlying unity and compelling thematic process. From Schoenberg's Grundgestalt to Rudolph Reti's prime cell, the method that works so transparently with the music of Beethoven was eagerly and automatically transferred to other music, not always without strain.

Easily the most practised and most respected method of tonal analysis in Anglo-American academia continues to be Heinrich Schenker's part-writing analysis. Here the theoretical emphasis on deep structure finds resonance with prevailing attitudes towards coherence in Beethoven's music; moreover, the compelling sense of forward motion, of line, often heard in Beethoven's music is well served by Schenker's concept of Urlinie, or primal line, a coherent linear entity discernible beneath the surface phenomena of local themes and motifs. Schenker published many analyses of Beethoven's works throughout his career, including monographs on the Ninth Symphony, the Fifth Symphony and several of the late piano sonatas; these analyses tended to coincide with major turning points in the development of his thought.

The music of the late period came into its own in the 20th century, and enjoyed a special role in shaping the methods and aims of musical analysis. With the continued viability of psychoanalytical theory and Schenkerian depth analysis, the late works took on a special aura, beckoning analysts to discern a deeper seated – latent – coherence underlying the often shockingly dissociated musical surfaces of these works. As such coherence is not so much visceral as abstract, not directly felt but indirectly intuited, much ingenuity has gone into establishing it.

Despite such analytical efforts, the surface dissociations of the late works have continued to disturb; ultimately these works resist assimilation into some saving unity. This very sense of resistance lies at the heart of several influential strands of 20th-century critical thought about Beethoven and about music. Much of Theodor Adorno's musical philosophy hinges on establishing Beethoven's music as a quasi-Hegelian representative of the subject in the modern age. For Adorno, the middle-period music represented a unique and unrepeatable reconciliation of subject and object, individual and world; in the late style the subject proceeds to absent itself, in a critique of that former synthesis that leaves behind a kind of desubjectivized musical materiality. More recently, the dissociations of the late style have proved stimulating to a burgeoning poststructuralist critical sensibility that seeks to challenge more strictly formalist analytical suppositions. In particular, the A minor quartet, op.132, has become a favourite site for these newer efforts. Here, the idea of musical unity seems to share the fate of the unified self: both are disarticulated, opened up to the variegated forces of the postmodern condition. Recent feminist music criticism also finds itself vitally concerned with Beethoven and subjectivity. It has been argued that the compelling autonomous self heard in the heroic style is the sound of an exclusionary masculinist ideal whose coronation as a priviledged norm deters appreciation of other musical sensibilities. Beethoven's music has thus been heard to embrace and encompass the fate of the subject in the West, and to define and circumscribe the fate of the Other – what other music could be said to have such reach, to fit such overarching narratives of modernity?

Some scholars, such as William Kinderman and Maynard Solomon, are intent on developing a more specifically historicized view of Beethoven's place in Western culture, particularly the nature of his relation to Enlightenment thought. Here the work of Schiller has begun to figure heavily as a source of many of Beethoven's artistic aims and accomplishments. Like Schiller, Beethoven's music is said to explore problems of reason and sensibility, aesthetics and ethics, nature and freedom. As always, there continues to be much speculation on meaning in Beethoven's music, and from many different quarters; one semiotic theory of music (Hatten, J1994) is predicated on the music of Beethoven. A common theme runs through the work of all these recent critics: all argue strongly against the persistent notion of Beethoven's music as a timeless aesthetic force, agreeing instead that it performs specific cultural work. Just what that work is remains a source of fruitful and lively contention.

Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception