Ludwig Beethoven

A continuing controversy surrounding Beethoven is whether he was a Romantic or a Classical composer. As documented elsewhere, since the meanings of the word "Romantic" and the definition of the period "Romanticism" both vary by discipline, Beethoven's inclusion as a member of that movement or period must be looked at in context.

If we consider the Romantic movement as an aesthetic epoch in literature and the arts generally, Beethoven sits squarely in the first half along with literary Romantics such as the German poets Goethe and Schiller (whose texts both he and Franz Schubert drew on for songs) and the English poet Percy Shelley. He was also called a Romantic by contemporaries such as Spohr and E.T.A. Hoffman. He is often considered the composer of the first Song Cycle and was influenced by Romantic folk idioms, for example in his use of the work of Robert Burns. He set dozens of such poems (and arranged folk melodies) for voice, piano, violin and cello.

If on the other hand we consider the context of musicology, where Romantic music is dated later, the matter is one of considerably greater debate. For some experts, Beethoven is not a Romantic, and his being one is a myth; for others he stands as a transitional figure, or an immediate precursor to Romanticism, the "inventor" of the Romantic period; for others he is the prototypical, or even archetypal, Romantic composer, complete with myth of heroic genius and individuality. The marker buoy of Romanticism has been pushed back and forth several times by scholarship, and it remains a subject of intense debate, in no small part because Beethoven is seen as a seminal figure. To those for whom the Enlightenment represents the basis of Modernity, he must therefore be unequivocally a Classicist, while for those who see the Romantic sensibility as a key to later aesthetics (including the aesthetics of our own time), he must be a Romantic. Between these two extremes there are, of course, innumerable gradations.


Beethoven's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.Listening to Beethoven's music yields another possible scholarly analysis: there is definitely an evolution in style from Beethoven's earliest compositions to his later works. The young Beethoven can be seen toiling to conform to the aesthetic models of his contemporaries: he wants to write music that is acceptable in the society of his day. Later, there is much more iconoclasm in his approach, like adding a chorus to a symphony, where a symphony had until then only been a purely instrumental genre. This means that the question changes from whether Beethoven was a classicist or a romantic, to: where is the pivotal moment that Beethoven tilted from dominant classicism to dominant romanticism?. Most scholars seem to concur: the presentation of the 5th and 6th symphonies in a single concert in 1808 is probably closest to that pivotal point. In the 5th symphony, he let a short pounding motto theme run through all movements of the composition (unheard of until then). Then the 6th symphony was the first example of a symphony composed as "program music" (what in Romanticism became standard practice), and it broke up the traditional arrangement of a symphony in four movements. Yet, after that, Beethoven still wrote his gentle 8th symphony and some innocent-sounding chamber music for the English market. However, by the end of the first decade of the 19th century, Beethoven the romantic was without a doubt primary.

In contrast, Carl Dahlhaus argues that the evolution of Beethoven's style actually takes him past Romanticism to a place where he was separate from the music of his contemporaries. Dahlhaus points out that our understanding of Beethoven as a Romantic composer derives largely from Beethoven's early middle period, which contains the Symphony No. 3 and Symphony No. 5. Beethoven's impact on other Romantic composers, however, is taken largely from works between Opp. 74 and 97, of the second half of the so-called middle period. Dahlhaus argues that the tradition of Romantic music is essentially a tradition of Schubertian music, and that Beethoven's influence on Schubert is largely taken from Opp. 74 to 97. By the time Beethoven reaches the late period, he is such an individual as to be best understood as no longer belonging to the same genre as his Romantic contemporaries.