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The Beethoven Syndrome

The “Beethoven syndrome” is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer’s inner self. Beethoven’s music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general—not just Beethoven—in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric, in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. Expression was thought of as an objective construct with a purpose. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the framework of rhetoric gave way to a framework of hermeneutics. Under the paradigm of expressive subjectivity, concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. The aesthetics of “New Objectivity” around 1920 marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high-modernist aesthetic that dominated the century’s middle decades. Perceptions of compositional subjectivity have nevertheless endured in surprising ways, and we find ourselves today in an era of dual and often conflicting paradigms.