4 - Distortion – Dismantlement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2023
Summary
A first version of this essay was written in Paris in January 2020, a few weeks before the brutal disruption of everyday life caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This is how it began:
Like most commemorations of long-dead composers, the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven in 2020 will entail massive amounts of repetition. All his symphonies, all his piano sonatas, all his concertos, all his string quartets: in any genre you care to name, myriad venues all over the world will perform Beethoven's music over and over again. By the same token, audio and visual recordings of earlier performances will also be heard, thus turning earlier repetitions of this music into new objects of perception. Similar pronouncements on this cultural hero will be uttered by musicians, organizers, journalists, politicians, and audiences, including pronouncements which for two centuries have raised the hermeneutic issue of “Beethoven and Us” in ever new historical situations. To say this is not to suggest that things could or should be otherwise. Indeed, this essay is also about the issue of “Beethoven and Us,” and also intends to propose some new answers to it.
Predictions are always risky, be they grounded on science, on belief, or on tradition. They are especially risky for historians, who are supposed to be experts on the past, or rather, on a small part of it. On the other hand, the future tense in these opening sentences did not indicate an exercise in prophecy or in phenomenological protention, but a trivial reality of cultural life, namely, the fact that a commemoration of this kind always follows a long pre-established program.
For humanity, the sudden cancellation of Beethoven concerts, exhibitions, and conferences looks insignificant compared to so many catastrophes. Yet it is as good a spot as any to take the pulse of the random and dangerous reformatting of historicity in which humans are presently engaged. As the present second version of this essay is being written, in May 2020, some scholarly events are going virtual, and most concerts are being rescheduled. If this pattern holds, the disruption might eventually boil down to a chronological anomaly, with 2021 doubling for 2020.
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- Ignition: BeethovenReception Documents from the Paul Sacher Foundation, pp. 138 - 183Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020