The Romantic Beethoven: 1827–1927–2027

Does Beethoven belong to the Romantic period? What sounds like a musicological exam question turns out, on closer reflection, to be a complex issue in cultural history. The central thesis of Arnold Schmitz’s 1927 book *Das romantische Beethovenbild* was that the 'Romantic Beethoven' was also a phenomenon of reception – a book which, not coincidentally, marks the beginning of musicological research into reception. For Schmitz, the association of Beethoven with Romanticism was in fact a purely reception-based phenomenon, a fatal misinterpretation for which he held ‘Romantic’ poets, female poets (!) and composers responsible. Even in Schmitz’s work, it becomes clear that, in these contexts, the issue was never solely one of stylistic history – Classicism or Romanticism? His book deals with aspects of ‘political Romanticism’ (in the sense used by Carl Schmitt), contemporary theology, and the debate within the history of literature and art. For Schmitz, the cultural struggles of the Weimar Republic were also played out through the lens of the Romantic Beethoven. The history of Beethoven’s reception began under the auspices of a critique of Romanticism that, viewed from today’s perspective, was excessive.#

In the history of ideas of the 20th century, the 1920s marked merely the beginning of a long phase of, at times, fierce anti-Romanticism, which persisted into the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, particularly in the wake of the postmodernism debate, there has been a reappraisal of Romanticism and the ‘Romantic’. In research into the history of literature and philosophy today, the focus tends to be on identifying common underlying concepts shared by (Weimar) Classicism and (Jena) Early Romanticism: the autonomy of art, the emphasis on creative individuality, and the departure from ‘imitatio naturae’. The reflexivity and modernity of the Romantic movement are also emphasised (“Romanticism as the first modernity”), as is its pan-European dimension. The leading figures of Romanticism wrote and thought against the backdrop of the French Revolution – with varying consequences that also shifted in the course of their personal development.

Although Beethoven’s music responds to the aforementioned characteristics in a particular way, these discussions in musicological literature have as yet scarcely led to a revision of conventional periodisations and entrenched notions about the ‘Viennese Classical period’. This carries with it – despite all the progress made in detailed research – the risk of uncritically perpetuating stereotypical notions (such as Beethoven as the epitome of ‘heroic historiography’, as a paradigm of classical formalism, etc.) and squanders the potential for in-depth historical research and the development of aesthetic theory in this field.

The project, marking the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death in 2027, consists of two parts: a practical workshop at the HMDK Stuttgart (25–27 November 2026) and an international conference at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn (15–18 April 2027). The results will be published by the end of 2027 in an anthology of the ‘Stuttgarter Musikwissenschaftliche Schriften’.