After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony.

Levy, David Benjamin

By Mark Evan Bonds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. [212 p. ISBN 0-674-00855-3. $35.]

The impact of literary criticism on musicological inquiry continues unabated. Critical theories that examine music, "deconstructing" it from various perspectives, have, depending on one's point of view, either yielded fresh revelations or hopelessly befuddled the scene. Music criticism, the study of which (Rezeptionsgeschichte) has become an important subset of musicology, has played no small role in creating the kinds of assumptions about music that some practitioners of the "new musicology" have sought to overthrow. Our need to free ourselves from the oppression of the canonical "masterworks" has led to the phenomenon of "resistant readings" that call into question the qualities that hitherto were touted as the ones that made the music great in the first place.

Nineteenth-century composers who chose to write symphonies - that is to say, during the very time when the "canon" was becoming established - were, as Mark Evan Bonds demonstrates in his newest book, After Beethoven, forced to engage in the act of "resistant readings" from the very start. A driving force for this phenomenon, as Bonds's subtitle tells us, was an "imperative of originality" motivated by many factors, none more compelling than the dominant figure of Ludwig van Beethoven, whose huge shadow was inescapable. Using the theories of literary critic Harold Bloom (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973] and A Map of Misreading [New York: Oxford University Press, 1975]) as his touchstone, Bonds leads the reader through intriguing and informative examinations of symphonies by Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler. The result is an engrossing book that intelligently addresses an issue that has long needed systematic investigation - the question of Beethoven's influence on the symphony in the nineteenth century.

Tovey once wrote that "No artist of such a range as Beethoven has ever set up a tyranny from which revolt is possible" (Essays in Musical Analysis [London: Oxford University Press, 1935], 2:8). Be that as it may, several composers chose to write symphonies, fully aware that comparisons to Beethoven were inevitable. The word "chose" is important here, for there was no law mandating that composers after Beethoven needed to write symphonies in the first place. Other genres had come into existence - think of the concerto grosso, sinfonia concertante, or trio sonata - only to fall into disuse after running their "natural" course. Beethoven himself was aware of the "imperative of originality," which is why one is hard-pressed, as Bonds acknowledges, to identify a "typical" Beethoven symphony (one might as well add to the list sonata, string quartet, or any other genre in which he worked!). But the "widely-held perception of Beethoven's symphonies as exemplars of an essentially dramatic genre" (p. 20) became the paradigm with which composers were forced to contend. They essentially had three options: imitation, avoidance, or deliberate misreading, the latter of which forms the basis of Bonds's study. The single work by Beethoven that raised the most vexing issues was, of course, his Ninth Symphony, whose introduction of human voices forever changed the rules of the game. But, as Bonds astutely observes, Beethoven's symphonies issued many challenges or obstacles for his successors, which After Beethoven categorizes under five technical areas: form, the role of text and voice, the fusion of genres, cyclical coherence, and the role of the finale.

The first symphony Bonds examines, Berlioz's Harold en Italie (1834), is a work that presented challenges in at least three of his five categories. The fusion of genres (concerto and symphony), cyclical coherence (the function of the solo viola and the recurrent "Harold" theme), and the role of the finale (the nihilistic "Orgie des Brigands") all come into play as controversial issues. Bonds coins his own title for Harold ("Sinfonia anti-Eroica") to demonstrate what he sees as a "resistant" kinship with Beethoven's "Eroica" insofar as both symphonies deal with "a central protagonist" (p. 34) - Napoleon and the "hero" of Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, respectively. But this is not all. Bonds further suggests that Berlioz's symphony struggles against the entire "heroic" ideal exhibited in Beethoven's Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth symphonies. The titles ascribed to each movement of Harold, of course, beg comparison with Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony, just as surely as the process of thematic review near the beginning of the finale of Harold invites comparison with the Ninth. But the emotional trajectory of Harold is, as the author suggests, a "mirror image of the Ninth, which begins with struggle and culminates in joy" (p. 44).

Chapter 2, "The Flight of Icarus: Mendelssohn's Lobgesang," is particularly insightful. Rejecting the argument that dismisses the piece as "the most dismal attempt to follow the lead of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ever conceived by human mediocrity" (Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music, 4th ed. [London: Duckworth, 1974], 63), Bonds proposes that the Lobgesang was Mendelssohn's "most powerful misreading" of the Ninth. He further suggests that Mendelssohn came to terms with the Ninth by "relativizing" it within a "much broader network of allusions to other icons of Germany's cultural past, including Gutenberg, Luther, J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Schubert" (p. 80). Carefully tracing the history of its composition and placing it within the larger context of Mendelssohn's career as a symphonist, Bonds shows how the composer struggled with the influence of the Ninth, confronting it even more forcefully in his "Reformation" Symphony.

"Relativizing" also informs Bonds's discussion of Schumann's Fourth Symphony (chap. 4, "Going to Extremes"), showing its indebtedness to Franz Schubert's Ninth - discovered by Schumann in 1839 - and Beethoven's Fifth, and how Schumann tried to create a symphony that would be, as he wrote in 1831, a "higher echo of the past" (p. 114). In this chapter, one suspects that Bonds may have looked too hard for a connection between Schumann the critic and Schumann the composer. When Schumann wrote, for example, about dissecting a Beethoven symphony to see whether an idea would have "any effect in and of itself" (p. 134), I suspect he was not referring to whether individual movements could stand alone - as Schumann was avoiding by having all movements of his Fourth Symphony played without interruption - but to more specific elements of musical composition.

The next chapter, logically enough, deals with Brahms's First Symphony - a work that stands in crucial relationship to Beethoven's Ninth because of its overt evocation of the "Ode to Joy" melody. Bonds arrives at a conclusion similar to one articulated by Richard Taruskin (Text and Act [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 244): that Brahms's finale offers a "solution" to the dilemma Beethoven created by literally introducing the human voice into the symphony. My sense is that Bonds and Taruskin are too eager to seize upon Beethoven's alleged self-doubt (reported by Carl Czerny) that he had made a mistake in including voices in his finale. Beethoven's use of a choral finale was his choice, whether or not one found it inevitable, and he never rescinded it. Bonds is entirely correct, however, in pointing out that Brahms's First Symphony was a musical polemic designed to show Richard Wagner and his supporters that instrumental music was decidedly not in need of redemption from "its intrinsic element" (p. 162).

Bonds concludes his study with an analysis of Mahler's Fourth Symphony that shows how the composer used its more simple idiom as a "means by which to counter the oppressive certainty of the Ninth's optimism" (p. 199). The author suggests that in choosing "Der Himmel hangt voll' Geigen" (retitled "Das himmlische Leben" by the composer) from Arnim and Brentano's anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler had discovered a more "Ambivalent Elysium" - the title of chapter 6 - to serve as a counterpoise to Beethoven's optimistic interpretation of Friedrich Schiller's "An die Freude." This speculative chapter suffers, however, by failing to establish convincingly that Mahler stood in particular need of exorcising the influence of the Ninth Symphony, even when creating a modest symphony that followed the Ninth's overall four-movement design (lively opening movement, scherzo, adagio, vocal finale).

The scholarship undergirding After Beethoven is first rate, and this study will prove very useful as a text or required reading for a course on the symphony in the nineteenth century offered at either the undergraduate or graduate level. My sole regret is that it was not yet available when I was writing parts of my monograph on Beethoven's Ninth (Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony [New York: Schirmer Books, 1995]). Bonds's book is highly recommended to all.

DAVID BENJAMIN LEVY Wake Forest University