Beethoven Imagines India: Personal Calling and Social Duties, 1815–1816
2023; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/23801883.2023.2260575
ISSN2380-1891
Autores Tópico(s)Thoreau and American Literature
ResumoABSTRACTBeethoven’s diary entries for 1815–16 reveal the composer’s strong interest in India. They also present puzzles: How much can the intellectual historian tease out of a handful of notes? What can they teach us about his inner life? And what do they teach about cultural transmission in an age of revolution in Europe and British colonial expansion? Scholars have thus far dismissed his interest as romantic fantasy. Closer examination, however, reveals Beethoven’s serious engagement with the Sanskrit play Sakuntala and the Bhagavat Gita. At a moment of personal crisis, he found in them the balance of personal calling and social duties that he sought in his own life. Beethoven’s cultural context was the admiration for Indian letters of Herder, Schiller, Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel, as mediated through a survey of Indian civilisation by an enlightened monarchist geography professor, E. A. W. Zimmermann. In an era of status anxiety for Germany’s cultural elite, India was portrayed as a utopia of rule by the educated; its ethos aided Beethoven’s quest to reconcile artistic calling and service to humankind. Insights from Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault further the article’s analysis of Beethoven’s search for a satisfactory way of life.KEYWORDS: BeethovenEnlightenmentNapoleonic eracultural transmissionHerderIndia AcknowledgementsA shorter version of this essay was presented at “Beethoven’s ‘Empire of the Mind’: Artistic ‘Effigies of the Ideal’ and the Cultural Politics of Resistance,” Tenth Bonn Humboldt Award Winners’ Forum, Beethoven House, Bonn, Germany, October 20–23, 2021. Other versions were presented to the Early Modern History Workshop, Princeton University, April 3, 2019, and to the Philadelphia Area Modern Germany Workshop, March 19, 2022. Participants at all these events mixed stimulating questions with enough encouragement to keep me writing and revising for six years. I am very grateful to William Kinderman for suggesting the topic in 2017, reading the essay after my presentation at the Beethoven House, and discussing it with me since then. Thanks as well to Mark Micale, Federica Rovelli, Sudev Seth, and the anonymous Global Intellectual History referees for reading the essay and offering thoughtful comments. Finally, special thanks to Rosario Lopez for her judicious and efficient shepherding of the essay through the process of editing and review.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.NotesWhere not otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s.Spelling and use of diacriticals for Indian terms such as ‘Sakuntala’ and ‘Bhagavad Gita’ very from author to author. They have been standardised without diacriticals in all parts of this essay except in the titles of recent books and articles.1 Solomon, Beethovens Tagebuch, hereinafter cited as Tagebuch; Appel, “Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,” 37.2 There is a valuable account of Beethoven’s troubles during these years in Drabkin, Kerman and Tyson, “Beethoven, Ludwig van.”What role did Beethoven’s deteriorating hearing play in the crisis of the mid-eighteen-teens? The composer began to notice his hearing difficulties in 1797 or 1798. By 1801 he wrote to a friend that he had avoided social engagements for the past two years in order not to reveal his loss of hearing. In October 1802 he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament, a private confession of his suffering as a result of his growing deafness; only his dedication to his art, he wrote in this private confession discovered after his death, had pulled him back from the brink of suicide. Beethoven’s deafness continued to grieve him, but was not a specific factor in his crisis of the late Napoleonic and early Restoration years. Rather, the initial loss of hearing initiated a lasting pattern of tension between sociability – Beethoven was tormented by his growing unsociability, he made clear right at the opening of the Heiligenstadt Testament – and his turn inward to his art. Lewis Lockwood notes that in later years he mentioned other sicknesses to friends, but rarely his deafness. Lockwood gives a clear account of the crisis years and the secondary role of his loss of hearing in Beethoven, 111–123, 193. Maynard Solomon emphasises the loss around mid-decade of some of his key patrons, who had been a source of emotional as well as financial support. He also makes the case for a stylistic crisis, in which Beethoven reached a dead end in his heroic, so-called middle period, but could not take inspiration from either his Romantic contemporaries or a frivolous populariser (in his eyes) like Rossini. In Solomon’s judgment his ongoing loss of hearing exacerbated but did not give shape to his despondency (Solomon, Beethoven, 194–196).3 Es gibt keine Abhandlung die sobald zu gelehrt für mich wäre, ohne auch im mindesten Anspruch auf eigentliche Gelehrsamkeit zu machen, habe ich mich doch bestrebt von Kindheit an, den Sinn der bessern und weisen jedes Zeitalters zu fassen, schande für einen Künstler, der es nicht für schuldigkeit [sic] hält, es hierin wenigstens so weit zu bringen. (Italics Beethoven’s.) Cited in Appel and Ronge, Foreword to Beethoven liest, vii–viii.For some of Beethoven’s other sources of inspiration, see Appel and Ronge, Beethoven liest, and Solomon, “The Masonic Thread,” in Late Beethoven, 135–158. As with Indian literature and thought, Beethoven turned to the Odyssey for life wisdom, finding in Odysseus a model for the virtues of heroic persistence in the face of an unkind fate. See Grigat, “Die Odyssee, Leitbild für Kunst und Leben,” 245–247. Van der Zanden, Beethoven and Greco-Roman Antiquity, systematically surveys Beethoven’s interest in classical sources, emphasising the place of Plutarch’s Lives as well as the Odyssee among his favourites. He was attracted to many of the same themes that he found noteworthy in Indian sources: moral virtue, acceptance of fate along with heroic striving to achieve one’s ends, and female steadfastness and faithfulness to one’s spouse. His receptiveness to Indian sources and their idiomatic presentation of these familiar themes demonstrates how sincere was his search for wisdom from ‘the better and wiser [people] of every age.’4 Perhaps the best-known example of this approach comes from Michel Foucault in the third volume of his history of sexuality, The Care of the Self, Part Two, especially 43–45. Foucault was alert to the dialectic of self-discipline and society that I emphasise in the following essay: ‘The care of the self – or the attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselves – appears then as an intensification of social relations.’ (53) Foucault’s work was indebted to a source more directly relevant to Beethoven’s life story: Pierre Hadot’s studies of philosophy as a way of life, which argue that the philosophers of antiquity were expected to be exemplars, not just abstract thinkers, demonstrating a disciplined pattern of conduct for others to follow. See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, especially the critical discussion of Foucault, 206–213; and Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre, 214–215, which provides interesting biographical details, including Foucault’s generous-minded nomination of Hadot for the Collège de France.5 Tagebuch; Solomon, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–1818.”6 Solomon, Late Beethoven, chaps. 7 and 8, quote from 165.7 Cf. Appel, “Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,” 38. Zimmermann, Taschenbuch der Reisen. Hereinafter vol. 12/1 is cited as Zimmermann, Taschenbuch. The one excerpt from a different volume is Tagebuch entry 93b (89–90), which comes from vol. 12/2 (1813).In volume12/2 there is a discrepancy between the author’s and publisher’s dates of completion and publication respectively. publisher’s and the author’s date. The title page says 1813, and so it is catalogued by libraries; but Zimmermann dates his preface September 18, 1814 (Zimmermann, Taschenbuch der Reisen 12/2 [1813], “Vorrede,” viii). Did the publisher backdate the volume? Or was there a slip of the pen by Zimmermann or printer’s error?The title pages of the three volumes include the honorific ‘von,’ but the definitive Deutsche Biographie omits it from its index entry, only listing it as an alternative entry. See https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz86676.html#indexcontent. I have included the ‘von’ in my bibliographical listing of the book below but otherwise left it out.8 In addition to the Solomon and Appel studies, Birgit Lodes has directly analysed Beethoven’s music for the influence of Indian thought. In Lodes, “‘So traümte ich mir, ich reiste … nach Indien’: Temporality and Mythology in Op. 127/I,” she detects moments of Hindu-inspired circularity or stillness that interrupt the dramatic drive of his composition. Vinay Lal notes the Indian passages in the Diary and mentions Beethoven’s familiarity with Sakuntala and the Bhagavad Gita in ‘Imagining Beethoven in India.’ Lodes and Lal offer valuable reminders that the need to reconcile private and public imperatives, the central theme of this essay, was not the only theme driving his interest in India; another was his search for religious wisdom.9 Solomon in Late Beethoven, 288/n.19, rejects the notion of any meaningful connection to India and regards Beethoven’s entries relating to it as ‘materials that had become embedded in historical memory as an imaginary construction or idea of the East.’ Appel in ‘Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,’ writes: ‘Was sich ihm an hinduistischer Geisteswelt erschließt, ist aufbereitet in der Manier des Reader’s Digest: mit europäischer Brille gelesen und mit abendländischer Weltsicht gedeutet.’ (49) (‘The Hindu spiritual world as opened up to him is worked up in the manner of Reader’s Digest: read through European glasses and interpreted through a European worldview.’) Lodes relies on Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage as well as Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen to subsume Beethoven’s India references under a general framework of mythological thinking. (“So traümte ich mir, ich reiste … ,” 169 and 204/n.1.) Brandenburg in Tagebuch, 148/n.61, refers the reader to similarly belittling works: Willson, A Mythical Image, Gérard, L’Orient et la pensée romantique allemande, and Schwab, La Renaissance orientale.Unlike these earlier works, post-colonial scholarship includes a knowledge of non-European languages and histories in its critique of European knowledge and turns to the history of empire – sometimes fruitfully, sometimes too exclusively – to understanding Indian-European cultural relations. From an explicitly post-colonial perspective, Ghuman, Resonances of the Raj gives a detailed portrait of the impact of Indian music on British composers and its absorption into imperial culture during the first half of the twentieth century. More relevant than empire to understanding Beethoven, however, was his contemporaries’ status anxieties. His ‘India’ cannot be understood without reference to his specific post-Napoleonic moment and German setting.For other perspectives on the influence of non-Western, including Indian, music on the West, Zon, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain brings in the history of ethnology as important context. See also the perspectives on non-Western music in the West in Liebersohn, Music and the New Global Culture.10 Osterhammel, Unfabling the East; Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters; Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World.Music scholarship has become increasingly concerned in recent decades with global contexts. On India, in addition to Ghuman, Zon and Liebersohn, Music and the New Global Culture, see Farrell, Indian Music and the West. A few other collections, containing a stimulating variety of approaches, deserve mention as recent introductions to the larger literature on Europeans and music beyond European borders: Bohlman, The Cambridge History of World Music, and Radano and Olaniyan, eds., Audible Empire.Part of the energy for dismissing Beethoven’s engagement with India as superficial or fantastic comes from a general critique of German interest in Asia as irredeemably Eurocentric. Yet the thinker who mattered the most for Beethoven (and his German contemporaries) when it came to exploring the non-European world was Herder. Recent scholarship has effectively disputed older notions of Herder as the prophet of radical German nationalism and made the case for his philosophical and ethnomusicological significance. See the editor’s introduction to Herder, Philosophical Writings; and Herder and Bohlman, Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism.11 ‘Transitional age’ is my translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s much-discussed term Sattelzeit to describe the period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century as neither Enlightenment nor Romantic, but a distinct historical moment. See Koselleck: “Einleitung,” xv. For a recent discussion of this historical moment see Fulda, “Die Erfindung der Aufklärung.”12 Solomon, “A Beethoven Acquaintance,” 15. Solomon does not justify this dating.13 For example, compare Zimmermann’s mention of the lingam (Taschenbuch, 240) with the comments on it as a non-Aryan religious institution in Thapar, History of India, vol. 1, 166.14 Beethoven’s notation of the notes of the Indian scale comes in Entry 94b (p.91), Tagebuch. Zimmermann discusses music in Taschenbuch, 168–171.15 Beethoven Tagebuch Entries 61[a] and [b] (71–72).16 Beethoven: “Aus Gott floß alles rein and lauter aus. Werd’ ich nochmals durch Leidenschaft zum Bösen verdunkelt[,] kehrte ich nach vielfacher Büßung und Reinigung zur erstern erhabenen[,] reinen Quelle, zur Gottheit zurück, - - und - zu Deiner Kunst.” Beethoven Tagebuch Entry 63[a]. Zimmermann: ‘Aus Gott floß nämlich alles rein und lauter aus, ward nur nachmals durch Leidenschaft zum Bösen verdunkelt, kehrt aber nach vielfacher Büssung und Reinigung zur ersten erhabnen reinen Quelle, zur Gottheit zurück.’ (Taschenbuch, 215).17 Beethoven makes two changes that personalise Zimmermann’s text. In addition to adding the phrase about returning to his art (‘zu Deiner Kunst’), Beethoven makes the turn to evil a passage about himself: ‘Werd’ ich nochmals durch Leidenschaft verdunkelt,’ (italics H. L. ) instead of Zimmermann’s general statement about the corruption of the divine (‘ward nur nachmals durch Leidenschaft zum Bösen verdunkelt.’ (Taschenbuch, 215).18 Absorption of religion into art characterises literary modernism in founders like Baudelaire and Flaubert as well as successors like Joyce and Proust. An intertwining of religion and the aesthetic – comparable to Beethoven’s retention of religious aspiration alongside dedication to art – takes place in T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats.19 ‘A peasant farm, then you’ll escape your misery!’ (‘Ein Bauerngut, dann entfliehst du deinem Elend!’) Tagebuch entry 66 (79). Beethoven’s loneliness pervades the first Tagebuch entry (39).20 See the superb translation and editor’s introduction to Kalidasa, Recognition of Sakuntala. The play is written in a mixture of Sanskrit for the more elevated characters and Prakrit, a language derived from Sanskrit, for the less elevated. For the dating of Kalidasa’s life, see the editor’s introduction, ix, paraphrased here. On the mixed use of Sanskrit and Prakrit, see ibid., xx. Cf. Thapar, History of India, 156–157.21 Cf. the reply of Sarngavara, Sakuntala’s chaperone, to the royal priest in Johnson’s English translation, more sharply worded than Forster’s: ‘It’s commendable, of course, but should we be impressed, great priest?’ Recognition of Sakuntala, 61.22 Chakrabarti, “The Plays of Kalidasa: Treading the Line between Constraint and Freedom,” beautifully captures this union of opposites in Kalidasa’s work.23 In the original Zimmermann uses two different words for social life: ‘die wechselseitigen Pflichten der Menschen in der Societät des geselligen Lebens.’ Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 206.24 Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 206–207.Wendy Doniger in The Hindus singles out Sakuntala as an example of how Sanskrit court literary art ‘drew upon folk traditions’ and in doing so ‘edited out a great deal, but not all, of the power and dignity of women.’ (375) ‘Sakuntala,’ she adds, ‘loses her agency in Kalidasa’s hands.’ (377) It is hard to reconcile this with the text of Kalidasa’s play, which in fact accords agency and interiority to Sakuntala. The interweaving of natural, psychological, social and cosmic worlds throughout the play gives the status of women a complexity that offhand remarks do not do justice.Romila Thapar in Sakuntala offers a contrasting reading anchored in historical evidence. Thapar emphasises the centrality of birth legitimacy for monarchs – in this case, Dusyanta – as a component of the play. She, too, notes the decline in the empowerment of women from the Mahabharata, the source of the Sakuntala story, to the play. Yet she raises this point as part of a critique of Rabindranath Tagore, whom she accuses of promoting a middle-class, nationalist ideal of womanhood. (48–49, 262).For a fuller treatment of the historical background to Kalidasa’s art and its presumed setting in the Gupta Empire, in particular its relationship to court culture and Aryan patriarchal norms, see Thapar, History of India, chapter 7. Andrew Robinson offers a judicious, more recent overview of the Gupta Empire and its culture in India: A Short History, which does not supplant Thapar’s more detailed survey of the era.25 Zimmermann’s full text – together with the moral instruction of the lines cited above – reads: Daß aber alles in der Moral der Hindus auf wirkßame, uneigennützige Tugend abzweckt, ergiebt sich selbst aus ihren Gedichten und Schauspielen. Im Sacontala, oder dem entscheidenden Ringe, sagt z. B. der Bramine Sarugawara sehr schön vom Könige: ,Das war unser Wunsch : kein Eigennutz beseelt uns dabei. (Taschenbuch, 207). (‘That however everything in Hindu morality aims at effective, unselfish virtue emerges even from its poetry and plays. For example in Sakuntala, or the deciding ring [Forster’s subtitle for the play, referring to the king’s keepsake for Sakuntala, H.L.] the Brahmin Sarugawara says very beautifully of the king: ‘That was our wish: no selfish purpose animates us thereby.’)Beethoven changed the critical passage to read: ‘kein Eigennutz beseele dich dabei.’This not only substituted ‘dich’ (‘you’, i.e., himself) for the original’s ‘uns’ (‘us’). It also substituted a subjunctive verb form, ‘beseele’ (‘might animate’) for the original indicative, ‘beseelt’ (‘animates’), augmenting Beethoven’s wish that no selfish wish might animate him. (Tagebuch 63b, 75).26 Franklin, Orientalist Jones, 256–257.27 Forster, Werke, vol. 7, 478–480, 486.28 Forster, Werke, vol. 7, 488; idem., vol. 18, 451, 499.29 Herder to Georg Forster, Werke, vol. 18, 467.30 Wilhelm von Humboldt to Georg Forster, late January 1792, in Forster, Werke vol. 18, 491.31 Friedrich Schiller to Wilhelm von Humboldt, December 17, 1795, in Forster, Werke, vol. 7, 487.32 Forster, Werke, vol. 7, 500.33 These lines come from Goethe’s Italienische Reise, which he worked up into publishable form in 1813–1816. He dated the passage as a diary entry from March 1, 1787. This was obviously an anachronism, since Forster’s did not reach him until four years later. See the quote and comment about the dating in Faas, “Faust und Sacontalá,” 370/n. 13. Original in Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. 1, 246.34 Cultural admiration can move in more than one direction. Abhishek Sarkar describes how Bengali intellectuals enjoyed making comparisons between Shakespeare and Kalidasa. They participated in what she calls ‘the necessarily hybrid and multi-accentual colonial modernity of 19th-century Bengal.’ (Sarkar, “Rosalind and Śakuntalā,” 107).35 A work of art – in this case Sakuntala – could be appropriated within an imperial enterprise yet also have layers of meaning for contemporaries that went beyond the power asymmetry of metropolis and colony. For that matter – to turn to an earlier imperial enterprise – Kalidasa himself, observes Sheldon Pollock, may have written Sakuntala in praise of the Gupta empire, but with other layers of meaning as well, including religious devotion as the setting for earthly politics. Reduction of art to ideology misses the multiple resonances that inspired admiration for Sakuntala in Beethoven’s age. Cf. Pollock, “What happens in Sakuntala,” especially 63, 69/n. 41, and 70/n.44.36 Forster to Heyne, March 8, 1791, in Werke, vol. 16, 247.37 Forster, “Cook der Entdecker,” in Werke, vol. 5, 191–302. On stage theories of civilisation, see Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage; and Stocking, Victorian Anthropology.38 On Goethe’s concept of nature, see Hadot, The Veil of Isis: Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, 247–261.39 Appel, “Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,” 54–55; Herder, “Über ein morgenländisches Drama.”40 Gerow, “Plot Structure and the Development of Rasa in the Sakuntala.”41 There is a quip in the play that sounds comic today, and perhaps was meant to be so. Sakuntala’s girlfriend Priyamvada declares: ‘They say it is the king’s duty to relieve the pain of those who live in his realm.’ King Dusyanta replies: ‘There is no higher calling.’ Well then, continues Priyamvada, he had better save Sakuntala’s life by taking her under his protection. (Kalidasa, Recognition of Sakuntala, 38). Intertwining of duty and pleasure!42 Herder, “Vorrede zur Sakontala,” 211–212.43 Schlegel, Über die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier, iii–iv.44 See Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 141, 144, 148, 156, 163, 166, and 210.45 This duality – of respecting women as equal conversational and spiritual partners, and attraction to the highborn – is a good example of the complexity of Beethoven’s social views. He was forthright in affirming equality (in this case, women’s equality with men), but also wished to take his place among aristocracy. Any attempt to declare him either a republican tout court or a renegade from the principles of 1789 would be simplistic.46 On women’s changing legal status, see Gerhard, “Legal Particularism and Complexity of Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” and Gerhard, Meunier and Rundell, “Civil Law and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Europe.” Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life gives an excellent summary of Beethoven’s relations toward women, 196–201.On Fidelio see Lockwood, “Beethoven’s ‘Leonore’ and Fidelio’”; and the remarkable interpretation in Kinderman, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times, 110–139, which weaves together the opera’s political context, representation of its heroine, and mythic dimension.Another leading character who represents Beethoven’s ideal of female virtue is Klärchen in Beethoven’s overture and incidental music to Goethe’s play, Egmont. See Biermann, “Who is the Hero? Beethoven’s Music for Egmont”; and Calhoun, “Music as Subversive Text: Beethoven, Goethe and the Overture to ‘Egmont.’”The enormous literature on the Immortal Beloved – so-called after the letter he wrote to an unnamed recipient in 1812, keeping a copy among his personal papers – has not produced any definitive candidate for the identity of the woman who inspired his passionate devotion. Among the leading candidates, Antonie Brentano fit the pattern of a highborn object of admiration; her father was court secretary to Emperor Joseph II. See Lockwood, Beethoven, 199. So did another leading candidate, Countess Josephine Brunsvik-Deym-Stackelberg, who was obviously of high social rank. Cf. Steblin, “New Evidence for Josephine as the ‘Immortal Beloved’.” For another recent account favouring Steblin’s argument in favour of Josefine, see Caeyers, Beethoven, 330–336.47 Joseph von Hammer to Beethoven, February 24, 1819, and Beethoven to Joseph von Hammer, after February 24, 1819, in Beethoven, Briefwechsel Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4, 243–244. Cf. Solomon, “A Beethoven Acquaintance,” 15, and Appel, “Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,” 50.48 Appel, “Beethoven und die indische Geisteswelt,” 56.49 D number 701, listed under theatrical works in Brown, Sams, and Winter, “Schubert, Franz.” The work is now available in a critical edition: Schubert, “Sacontala,” in Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke.50 Wilkins was Jones’s collaborator in founding the Asiatic Society and a figure of eminence in his own right, celebrated for his translation. See Trautmann, “Wilkins, Sir Charles,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; and Dorothy Figueira, The Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gītā, chap. 1, which emphasises the overall accuracy of Wilkens’s translation and his recognition of the hazards of translating across widely disparate cultures.51 “Selig heißt es, ist der Mann, der alle Leidenschaften unterdrückt hat, und dann mit seiner Thatkraft alle Angelegenheiten des Lebens, unbesorgt um den Erfolg verrichtet.” Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 208; cf. Beethoven’s transcription in Tagebuch 64 a, 75–76. Beethoven makes a few minor changes in the text, changing the beginning from ‘Selig heißt es, ist der Mann’ to ‘Selig ist,’ leaving out a comma after ‘hat,’ and adding an exclamation point at the end (perhaps in this way adding Beethovenian emphasis to his affirmation of the text). Zimmermann only identifies this passage as coming from the Mahabharata (207). Brandenburg localises it in the Bhagavad Gita in Tagebuch 151/n.64. Cf. Bhagavad Gita, Third Discourse, verse 7 (38).52 Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 207–208. Beethoven also transcribed a long passage that immediately followed and continued in a similar vein. Tagebuch 64 b (p.77).Davis, Bhagavad Gita, 17–18, considers the injunction ‘to avoid all desire-based action (17)’ to be the work’s central and novel teaching. On the conception of action ‘without regard for the fruits,’ see also Patton, introduction, Bhagavad Gita, xx–xxi. Krishna, she adds, is not advocating withdrawal, but action in the world without regard to consequences.53 On the conflicting principles underlying the Bhagavad Gita and their resolution through selfless action, see the clear and careful analysis in Theodor, “Bhagavad-gītā,” especially on the tensions between dharma and renunciation, and their resolution. (2–4).54 On these tensions in Beethoven’s thought, see Kinderman, Beethoven. On the Ode to Joy, see Kinderman, Beethoven: A Political Artist, 195, 208–212.55 Paul Zimmermann, “Zimmermann, Eberhard August Wilhelm,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.56 The third volume was a history of India, with extensive comments on British conquest and rule, followed by discussion of miscellaneous topics.57 Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, “de[n] grosse[n] Wert ächter, nur allein auf Volksglück und Moralität abzweckender Monarchie (xii).”58 Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 1.59 Hence it would be a misleading simplification to label Zimmermann’s views as simply ‘conservative.’ Rather they belonged to a broad spectrum of opinion in which older and newer politics, Enlightenment and traditional social loyalties, intermingled. The Enlightenment itself contained a broad range of political opinion from Voltaire’s skepticism toward radical social change to the late Enlightenment accelerating rage against privilege.60 Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon, argues that the traumatic French occupation of Vienna in 1809 turned Beethoven into a cultural conservative. The reception of Rumph’s book has been mixed, with Barry Cooper writing an especially acute critique (Cooper, review of Rumph). Other recent scholarship has persuasively affirmed Beethoven’s republican sympathies to the end of his life. See Kinderman, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times; Lockwood, “Beethoven’s ‘Leonore’ and ‘Fidelio’”; Lockwood, Beethoven; Hinrichsen, Ludwig van Beethoven: Musik für eine neue Zeit; Breyer, “Beethoven’s politische Einstellung”; and Biermann, “Who is the Hero? Beethoven’s Music for Egmont,” especially 53 and 63–64.Beethoven’s political views belonged squarely in the midstream of early nineteenth-century liberalism. Founding liberal thinkers like Benjamin Constant and Mme. de Staël developed their political theories as a critical response to the course of the French Revolution; they simultaneously upheld its principles but added skeptical caution in response to revolutionary violence and Napoleonic autocracy. Beethoven’s mature politics matched the sober reckoning of thinkers such as these. Cf. de Luca, “Benjamn Constant and the Terror”; Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, 169–171; and Fontana, Germaine de Staël.61 On the Forsters and Captain Cook’s second circumnavigation, see Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World, 32–57.62 ‘Vorrede’ to Sakontala, in Georg Forster, Werke, vol. 7, 285–287.63 Jörg Esleben considers Forster’s approach paternalistic for comparing activist Europeans and their enlightened reason to passive non-Europeans, including Indians. Esleben also points out that Forster’s portrayal of Sakuntala as childlike and naïve, the epitome of ‘pure nature,’ exemplifies his larger image of Indian culture. See Esleben’s discussion of Sakuntala in ‘Indisch lesen,’ 220. Forster’s paternalistic approach, argues Esleben, contrasts with that of Herder, who imagined parity between the two civilisations, and in some respects Indian superiority.This active-passive polarity is part of a larger turn in Forster’s final years to a ‘civilizing mission’ conception of European exploration and empire; this was the point of view that guided his biography of Captain Cook, whom he praised for advancing European Enlightenment around the world. See ‘Cook der Entdecker,’ (‘Cook the Discoverer’) published in 1787 (Forster, Werke, vol. 5).64 Franklin’s outstanding biography, Orientalist Jones, has provided a greatly enriched portrait of Jones and his intellectual context, surpassing the rather thin earlier biographies. For Jones’s newfound prominence in the general literature on the Enlightenment and early nineteenth century, see the many references to him in Osterhammel, Unfabling the East.65 See Franklin, Orientalist Jones, chaps. 2 and 5. Sanjay Subrahmanyam offers a critical corrective to Franklin’s biography by placing Jones in a transitional generation of increasing British arrogance toward Indian culture, alongside ongoing sympathetic views. See Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, 41–43, 323–324 and Dalrymple, White Mughals. Asif, The Loss of Hindustan, 43–44 and 237/ n.14, focuses on Jones’s role in creating an exclusionary myth of Hindu origins and points to Jones’s famous discovery of the affinities of Latin and Greek with Sanskrit as part of this origin myth. However, there was more to Jones’s interest in India than his situation as agent of empire. A comprehensive assessment of Jones as cultural broker requires the larger contexts provided by Franklin and Subrahmanyam.66 Franklin, Orientalist Jones, chaps. 1 and 6. On Hastings, see Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift.Even before he left for India, Jones was well known for his translations from Persian. Jones was also a student of Islamic poetry. His admiration for it earned him a rebuke from Edward Gibbon, who thought that Islamic cultures had absorbed too little of the inheritance of classical antiquity for their literary achievements to deserve respect. See Bevilacqua, Republic of Arabic Letters, 194.67 Franklin, Orientalist Jones, chaps. 2 and 5.68 Smitten, “Robertson, William (1721–1793)”.69 The phrase ‘age of transition’ comes from Mill, “The Spirit of the Age.”70 Forster, Preface, in Robertson, Historische Untersuchung, xi.71 Zimmermann, Taschenbuch, 207. On the transmission of this passage via Robertson, see Brandenburg in Tagebuch, comment on 64 b (152).72 The central statement of this view of Brahmin authority was Schlegel, Über die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier. Beethoven in the Diary did not take exception to this kind of idealisation.73 In contrast to his anti-Hindu campaign, Mill praised the Mughals as highly civilised rulers who brought the benefits of Muslim culture to India. See Mill, History of British India, vol. 1, 98, 365–369, 431, 625–626.On James Mill and the debates surrounding Indian culture and British rules, see Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, chaps. 1 and 4. Still valuable as a subtle account of Utilitarianism, with a great deal to say about James Mill, is Stokes, English Utilitarians. On the paradox of British liberalism at home and autocratic rule abroad, see Bayly, Imperial Meridian.74 Subrahmaniam, Europe’s India, 323, makes a similar point, emphasising the ‘layered’ and ‘intermittent’ nature of the European representations of India from 1500 to 1800.
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