Why does a piece of music end? Or rather, why does it end where it does? Webern, during the composition of his Six Bagatelles for string quartet op. 9, felt driven to a particularly uncompromising answer: “Here I had the feeling, ‘When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over.’” He was, admittedly, recalling his path to twelve-note composition; yet Heinrich Schenker, concerned exclusively with the structure of tonal music – to him, Webern's was a “path” that led away from music altogether – was equally clear about endings. In Free Composition he claimed that “with the arrival of Î the work is at an end. Whatever follows this can only be a reinforcement of the close – a coda – no matter what its extent or purpose may be.” There will be more to say about codas in due course; but we need immediately to distinguish Schenker's construal of “coda” from the conventional one whereby, for example, the section of music that follows the end of a sonata-form recapitulation is denominated the “coda.” A particularly clear Beethoven example is the coda to the finale of the “Appassionata” Sonata, beginning at m. 308: the double bar and new tempo indication articulate this coda especially strongly.

Despite its familiarity, its secure place in the operatic canon, and the large body of literature that surrounds it, Beethoven's Fidelio continues to pose challenges to interpretation and understanding. Its complicated genesis, performance history, and transmission present troublesome philological questions that in certain cases may never be fully resolved. And its position as the sole opera of a composer known primarily for his instrumental music makes it a difficult work to place within the context of his artistic development. But if Fidelio is nearly as much a problem for critics and scholars as it was for the composer himself, it is also a central work, an understanding of which is crucial for any attempt to comprehend Beethoven's ambitions and accomplishments, his self-critical spirit, and his world-view.

Whose Fidelio ? the historical background and the textual problem

The complex text-critical issues that surround Fidelio are perhaps best approached through a review of the biographical circumstances that led to its creation and revisions. In 1803 Beethoven accepted a commission for a new opera from Emmanuel Schikaneder, the impresario of the Theater an der Wien, who himself provided the composer with a libretto entitled Vestas Feuer. Beethoven began to compose Schikaneder's text in the autumn of that year, but he quickly abandoned it; by early January 1804 he had decided to have an extant French libretto, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal, adapted into German by Joseph Sonnleithner.

Open any textbook in music history or music appreciation and the problem of Beethoven's relation to music historiography becomes immediately apparent: is he Classical or Romantic or both or neither? Is he part of the Canonical Three of the Viennese Classical Style – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – or is he a chapter unto himself, as the One destined to inherit and transform, even liberate, the achievements of the Classical Duo? As Charles Rosen astutely pointed out, “it would appear as if our modern conception of the great triumvirate had been planned in advance by history”: Count Waldstein's entry in Beethoven's album, written in 1792 as the young composer left Bonn for Vienna, famously assured him that “You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” This attractive phrase refers to the sense of lineage both conceptual and practical that places Beethoven in a musical culture already fully fledged in its genres and expressive possibilities. Mozart's premature death and the position of Haydn as Beethoven's teacher in Vienna left Beethoven perfectly placed to come into his inheritance. This chapter will examine some of the dominant elements in European music in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, and explore some of his methods of appropriating and personalizing the expressive language of Haydn and Mozart.

Oppositions

By 1790, observers of the musical scene could classify the genres and structures of music according to shared assumptions about their place in musical life and the level of sophistication of their audience. About Vienna we read of a broad division of the musical public into the more and less knowledgeable: audience members, including patrons, comprised “connoisseurs” and “amateurs,” while performers might be classed as “virtuosi” or “dilettanti” according to their skill. Music was performed in a range of venues from the grand and costly public theaters associated with courts (for example,Vienna’s Burgtheater) to the salons of the aristocracy and wealthier middle classes, from open-air gardens and coffee- [45] houses to private homes.

One of the best-known features of Beethoven's composing activity is his enormous efforts and struggle to produce his great masterpieces, in contrast to Mozart, who is reputed to have composed with great facility, working everything out in his head. Abundant evidence for Beethoven's struggles comes from his numerous sketchbooks, which were sufficiently prominent and unusual to draw forth comment from several eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of him. For example, Ignaz von Seyfried reported: “He was never found on the street without a small note-book in which he was wont to record his passing ideas.” Although Beethoven is not the only composer to have used sketchbooks, he seems to have been the first to have done so in any kind of systematic way, and almost no other composer has devoted such a large proportion of his time to refining his initial ideas through sketching processes.

Beethoven's propensity for making rough drafts and sketches for his works began almost as soon as he started composing as a boy. Moreover, one of his first published works – a set of three piano sonatas of 1783 (WoO 47) – contains a number of handwritten amendments in the printed score he owned, which are not merely corrections but subtle refinement of such things as articulation marks. Such close attention to detail, and an incessant desire to seek improvement on his existing ideas, were elements that remained with him throughout his life, and gave the impetus to increasingly elaborate methods of sketching.

A controversy which erupted in the final years of the seventeenth century threatened the survival of theatre in England. At its peak, the poet laureate, Nahum Tate, drew up “A Proposal for Regulating the Stage & Stage-Players,” describing it as “valuable only in case it is decided not to suppress the theatres entirely.” A character in George Farquhar's novel, Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698), similarly predicted that “in the Battel between the Church and the Stage” “the Theatre must down.” Such grim prophecies recalled the playhouses' mid-century fate, when a parliamentary edict in 1642 had heralded an eighteen-year ban on theatrical performances.

The attack which gave impetus to this new campaign – Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) – was the first book-length assault on the theatre by an English author to be published since William Prynne's infamous Histriomastix (1633). Pro-stage writers quickly dubbed Collier a “Younger Histrio- Mastix” and asserted that the drama's old enemies were once again venturing into the daylight.

So began the draft of a warrant, dated 19 July 1660, allowing two courtiers of Charles II to have shared control of the London public theatre. The document went on to authorize Killigrew and Davenant to give performances with scenery and music, to establish ticket prices and employee salaries, and to suffer no rival companies. This draft, written, remarkably, by Davenant himself, served as the basis for a warrant a month later stating essentially the same thing and directing the two new managers to be their own censors of plays.

Beethoven's professional life in Vienna was largely defined by his lack of institutional employment. Only his deafness had an equal impact on his career. In Bonn he had served the electoral court, playing organ and viola, and was expected to resume his duties after a period of study with Haydn that began in 1792. But the cessation of his salary in 1794 (perhaps for misleading the Elector Max Franz about his progress and refusing to return home) and the collapse of the electoral court in the French controlled Rhineland later in that year did not bode well for his prospects in Bonn, and the freedom and opportunities he enjoyed in the imperial city outweighed the strength of long friendships and familial obligations he had left behind. His concerted attempt to secure an appointment, with the Vienna Court Theater in December 1806, not surprisingly failed: after the problems and acrimony surrounding the performance of the first two versions of Leonore (Beethoven's original title of Fidelio) in 1805 and 1806, the directors apparently did not even respond to his multi-year offer to compose one opera and a smaller dramatic or choral work per annum. Beethoven sought the position, which would have allowed him ample time to compose instrumental music of his own choosing, despite continuing material and social support from a group of Viennese aristocrats who in the 1790s had eased his entry into Viennese cultural life.

Since its own time, Restoration drama has been controversial, provoking radically different judgments about its aesthetic value and moral significance. Critical debates reach back at least as far as 1698 when the High Tory churchman, Jeremy Collier, published a scathing indictment of Restoration comedy for its immorality and contempt for authority; various defenders of the drama, including playwrights such as William Congreve, countered these charges by arguing that comedy satirizes vice and vanity to secure the socioeconomic stability premised on feminine virtue and masculine property rights. The terms of this controversy have persisted for three hundred years – Collier and his critical descendants argue that Restoration comedy is obscene, blasphemous, and heartless; its champions claim that it offers timeless insights into the human condition or tellingly satirizes the vices and follies of its era. If these responses to the drama often tell us more about their authors than about the plays themselves, they also describe a contentious history of efforts to domesticate a morally suspect theatre by assimilating Restoration comedy to larger critical and ideological paradigms.

Of the reception of Beethoven's music these last two hundred years, one thing is clear: there has been little trace of the tidal cycles of popular and critical approbation suffered by almost every other important composer. More specifically, no significant ebb tide has yet been charted in the reception of his music. Or it may be that his fortunes are subject to a tide table of an exceedingly grander temporal scale: perhaps Beethoven will go out of fashion for the next two hundred years, only to return with force in some unthinkable new world. And yet, his image – however abiding – has not simply stood in place over the last two centuries, like some historically inert monolith. One may mark discernible stations in the critical reception of his life and music, points in the historical flow that seem to gather into a larger narrative.

I would like to construct four such stations, each anchored to a symbolic milestone in the history of Beethoven reception: 1827, death of Beethoven and birth of the artist as Romantic revolutionary and hero; 1870, centenary of Beethoven's birth and symbolic rebirth of the composer as a spiritual and political Redeemer; 1927, centenary of the composer's death and symbolic death of the figure of the Romantic artist in favor of that of the law-giver and natural force; and 1970, bicentennial of the composer's birth and symbolic birth of the culturally constructed hero. Beyond tracing the vibrant afterlife Beethoven has enjoyed in mainstream Western musical thought, the resulting trajectory illuminates a perhaps typical process of canon formation, whereby a canonic subject is gradually transformed into a canonic object.

Beethoven made instrumental music seem to matter as it had not before. Charles Ives interpreted the “oracle” at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony as “the soul of humanity at the door of the divine mysteries, radiant in the faith that it will be opened – and the human become the divine,” because the music apparently struck him, as it has many of the rest of us, with the vividness of revelation. Like the opening of the Fifth Symphony, the fusion of introduction and first theme in the Ninth, the point of recapitulation in the Eroica, and the interconnectedness of the C# minor quartet all have an aura of compelling significance. Ives chose to claim a portion of Beethovenian grandeur for American culture and himself by placing the Fifth Symphony's motto at the center of a theme in the Concord Sonata. And, indeed, much of music history after Beethoven reads as a series of engagements – aggressive, inspired, ironic, elegiac – with his greatness and the potential that he had revealed.

A new world of sound and a new subjectivity

Richard Wagner's reactions to Beethoven, voluminously documented in his own writings and in the recollections of his associates, exposed a number of key themes in the reception of Beethoven and his music; his observations will therefore serve as an occasional guide in this survey. Wagner attributed his very awakening as a musician to the Ninth Symphony: “I was struck at once, as if by force of destiny, with the long-sustained perfect fifths with which the first movement begins: these sounds, which played such a spectral role in my earliest impressions of music, came to me as the ghostly fundamental of my own life.”

The problem of farce

If one believes the column in Annals of English Drama which defines the “Type” of each play listed, Thomas Otway's The Cheats of Scapin (1677) ought to be the first English farce. Whatever else may be distinctive about Otway's play, it seems inherently improbable that it could claim that honor. But perhaps it is no honor: the naming of a work as a tragedy is construed as a label of dignity, an attempt to lay claim to an elevated cultural position and a network of weighty cultural resonances within which the work demands to be deemed worthy of a place; the naming of a work as a farce is more likely to be accompanied by an apology. When Leo Hughes and A. H. Scouten edited a collection of ten Restoration and eighteenth-century farces, their preface immediately set out to answer any accusation that they thought the plays good: “We have no illusions about the intrinsic merit of these little pieces. There is no great literary merit to be found in any one of them. In fact, their significance lies not so much in their merit as in their popularity.” Restoration playwrights would have had no difficulty understanding their point of view. Again and again, throughout the Restoration and long before the appearance of The Cheats of Scapin, Restoration dramatists sought carefully to define their own work as not being farce, a scrupulous resistance to the triviality that they too assumed to be inherent in the form, a resistance as necessary in the 1660s as in the 1940s.

What is Restoration comedy? The first temptation is to define the comedy of the fifty years following the restoration of Charles II in the terms used by the playwrights themselves. But it does not require much reading of seventeenth-century comic theory to realize that playwrights and critics shared few assumptions about comedy and fewer conclusions. Most agreed that comedy should meet the Horatian requirements for all literature – that it please and instruct. Most, though not all, privileged instruction over pleasure, since most maintained that the end of comedy was moral. But when the playwrights and critics turned to how that moral end was to be recognized, not to mention realized, they quickly reached the limits of their small consensus.

The best-known exchange of views about comedy in the period took place in the 1660s between two of the most important playwrights, John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, early in their careers as comic writers.

Little more than a year after Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658, the English revolutionary regime had collapsed as a result of inner dissension and popular hostility. Early in 1660, General George Monck marched his troops from Scotland to London, reinstated to the Rump Parliament the members whose exclusion in 1648 earned it its name, commanded new elections, and quickly decided to restore the monarchy. These events, up to the calling of a free parliament, were promptly celebrated in the first Restoration comedy, John Tatham's The Rump (1660), which satirizes the selfish ambition of the Puritan grandees, and the lechery and parvenu pretentiousness of their wives. (Political insurgency was at this time commonly paired with female insubordination.) But, with the intervention of Monck, hierarchy is restored to a distracted society, many of the upstarts are demoted to street vendors, and a world turned upside is set to rights.

The Rump had many successors; for one of the principal subjects of early Restoration drama was the Restoration itself. For example, the first Restoration heroic play, the Earl of Orrery's The Generall (written in 1661), transparently reworks recent events, portraying a general (Clorimun) who turns against a usurper in order to restore a rightful king.

Restoration actors and actresses worked very hard. Acting on approximately two hundred days of the year over the course of an eight- or nine-month season (not counting summer tours and fairs), key company members could each be expected to play on relatively short notice perhaps as many as thirty different roles. The bills changed quickly, alternating between stock plays, revivals from recent seasons, and new plays. In the face of sometimes fickle demand for drama (daily attendance at plays varied considerably throughout the period), the actors and actresses supplied a specialized and highly skilled service – the performance.

Their business, practically speaking, was to embody the characters sketched by the playwrights, but their larger, unstated task was to provide their audiences with symbolic actions of various kinds. Whether they intended to or not, actors and actresses in Restoration England made themselves objects of public fantasy. According to Tom Brown, the acid-tongued observer of the London underworld, their workplace became known as the “Enchanted Island,” and their job was to populate it with attractive (and compliant) natives.