The Changing Image of Beethoven - A Study in Mythmaking

Abstract

Book Review: Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven - A Study in Mythmaking. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1987. 480 pp., including endnotes (52 pp.), bibliography, index, 10 color plates, and 211 black-and-white illustrations. $45. Here is a recent, noteworthy, large-scale contribution to the Beethoven literature. Its aim, as stated at the outset (pp. 10,13-14 and 21, and on the jacket), is to trace the changing image of Beethoven from his own time to the/m de siecle, especially in pictorial and sculptural art works and in written records - comparing that image with what we know today of the real Beethoven. Its author is a respected art historian and popular teacher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Furthermore, to judge from this book, she is a flamboyant, unconventional author, endowed with a flair for the brilliant as well as a healthy penchant for things musicological. That she achieves both less and more than her aim for this book is a conclusion to be advanced shortly. Among previous studies of Comini's topic are three books by Arnold Schmitzjean Boyer, and Leo Schrade - each with a different orientation.1 Of these studies only Schrade's excellent book, Beethoven in France, the Growth of an Idea, is listed and utilized by Comini (rather heavily in Chapter 4). Comini's book consists of six chapters, the first chapter being an introduction that amplifies its aim while commenting on mythmaking as cultural history. Chapter 2 concerns the pictorial records of Beethoven that remain from his own times and how they compare with his actual appearance and nature as they can be deduced today. Chapter 3 surveys pictorial records and especially written accounts of him up to about the middle of the century, with generous excerpts from the critiques and recollections of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Reichardt, Bettina Brentano, Rochlitz, Rossini, and Schindler. In a central position is Chapter 4, much the longest chapter. It is devoted largely to the enthusiastic, if varying, reactions expressed and demonstrated by a whole succession of musicians who wrote about and championed Beethoven in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In Part 1 of this subdivided chapter, Comini proceeds from Haydn and Mozart to Czerny, Ries, Moscheies, Hummel, Schubert, Spohr, Paganini, Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Liszt. In Part 2 she carries on with Berlioz, Wagner, and Brahms, among others. Chapters 5 and 6, like 2, concentrate on depictive artists, their Beethovian creations, and their aesthetic intentions, but mainly with regard to sculpture rather than painting. Chapter 5 gives much space to the realization of the Beethoven monument in Bonn from 1828 to 1845, including Liszt's important contributions; also, to the subsequent monument done by the sculptor Zumbusch and unveiled in 1880. Finally, Chapter 6 details the background and philosophy behind Klinger's wellknown Beethoven monument, first exhibited in Vienna in 1902 (and a triggering stimulus for Comini's study). It also takes up Gustav Klimt's remarkable Beethoven Frieze, exhibited at the same time, and Mahler's vital interest in Beethoven. Whereas written reactions to Beethoven are quoted, often at length, throughout the book, relevant landmarks in literature, whether prose or poetry, usually are not included. Exceptions are a very few works like Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and Rolland 's Jean-Christophe, although these are dispatched in fairly short order (pp. 19-20 and 339-41). The art works and most of their chief creators who are discussed are richly illustrated by ten excellent color plates (as one might expect in a book published by Rizzoli) and by 211 black-andwhite reproductions. The latter are choice, but often a bit too fuzzy for the reader to see the details that Comini so expertly spots in her analyses of them. Even the color plates do not reveal some of those details, such as two music titles, by Beethoven and Liszt, that she finds (p. …