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Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works.

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Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works. By Stephen Rumph. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [ix, 295 p. ISBN 0-520-23855-9. $45.] Index.

Stephen Rumph's Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works tackles a vitally important topic: the relation of the music to its political context. The pieces that come under consideration include the Third and Ninth Symphonies and Fidelio, as well as the Egmont music, a number of sonatas and quartets, some of Beethoven's patriotic songs and marches, and particularly his "Battle Symphony" from 1813, Wellingtons Sieg. As the author rightly states in his introduction, "a political study of Beethoven can scarcely be regarded as a curiosity for interdisciplinary studies: it belongs squarely within musical criticism, alongside biography, sketch studies, and formal analysis" (p. 1).

Rumph frames his argument in relation to the movement known as politische Romantik ("political Romanticism") led by such figures as the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Heinrich von Kleist. He emphasizes their "grievances against French cultural hegemony" and their "virulent reaction to all things French and enlightened." This "ideology of political Romanticism," he claims, was "no passing fad for Beethoven" but "exercised a profound and enduring influence on his later style" (p. 5). There is scant documentation of Beethoven's connection to these writers, and although Rumph acknowledges that his study is speculative, he aims to convey a "'new way of seeing' ... [that] incarnates the ideological in specifically musical structures" (p. 8).

In the opening chapters of the book, Rumph impressively draws upon the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller, a writer whom Beethoven admired. Schiller's notion of artistic activity as...

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