Beethoven Music Outline

1. Beethoven was a genius in music, but not in other things. His successors were not as talent as they were expected to be. Future musicians might spend their whole life to practice his compositions. For example, Opus 131 requires a lifetime of contemplation.

2. E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German writer, composer, and painter, known for his stories in which supernatural and sinister characters move in and out of men’s lives, ironically revealing tragic or grotesque sides of human nature. Hoffmann wrote two novels, and more than 50 short stories before his death from progressive paralysis. His later story collections, Nachtstücke, 2 parts (1817; Hoffmann’s Strange Stories), and Die Serapionsbrüder, 4 vol. (1819–21; The Serapion Brethren),

Hoffmann’s criticism is like a turning point. After that, music is being accorded powers at once transcendent and transformative. Beethoven’s music hovers far above the ordinary world, yet it also reaches down and alters the course of human events. Appearing at an appropriate moment in the history of music, Beethoven was able to connect polities, societies and music.

4. Beethoven was so crushingly sublime that posterity capitulated. Composer, too, was shaped by circumstances, and he happened to reach his maturity just as listeners of an intellectual bent, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, were primed for an oversized figure, an emperor of an expanding musical realm.

5. The disorder of the Napoleonic Wars, which redrew the map of Europe and ended the Holy Roman Empire, caused many to look toward music as a refuge. Amid universal chaos, Beethoven exuded supreme authority. Moreover, the burgeoning of his reputation, notably in Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, coincided with a movement that the early-twentieth-century theorist Carl Schmitt identified as “political Romanticism”—a pan-German nostalgia for vanished medieval Christendom and mythic national roots. Napoleon pushed Beethoven to shift in his final years, when his works involved many political