Conference Agenda

The scholarly and popular reception of Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte op. 98 seems inescapably intertwined with the composer’s love for his so-called “Unsterbliche Geliebte” (Immortal Beloved). Typically, the songs are interpreted autobiographically as expressing Beethoven's personal feelings towards his „distant beloved“. I suggest a rather different context for the composition: that Beethoven and the poet Alois Jeitteles conceived the cycle as a gift for Prince Franz Maximilian Lobkowitz, whose wife had died unexpectedly in January 1816.

This paper pursues the implications of this alternative contextualization, shedding new light on both the poetic and musical dimensions of An die ferne Geliebte. I highlight the cycle’s textual parallels with contemporary poetry on death and mourning, as well as the ways in which Beethoven crafted specific musical features to convey consolation and transcendence. Two aspects of op. 98 are particularly revealing in this regard:

First, the cycle’s exuberant conclusion, often perceived as paradoxical in a work suffused with longing, can be understood as a vision of reunion of husband and wife in the afterlife—a theme that resonates with Beethoven’s broader reflections on immortality. Secondly, one of the most conspicuous and famous features of the oeuvre is its construction as a series of songs without interruption which, by ending thematically where it began, forms a true “cycle,” a symbol for eternity – even further reinforced visually by an explicitly open ending (without double bar-lines) in the autograph. In so doing, Beethoven created a highly symbolic musical ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent that bites its tail.

This imagery was well known in learned Viennese circles of the early 19th century, not least through Antonio Canova’s famous monument to Princess Maria Christina in the Augustinerkirche—just steps away from the Palais Lobkowitz. By invoking such a potent symbol in an innovative musical form, Beethoven imbued An die ferne Geliebte with levels of meaning far deeper than its conventional reading as a mere earthly love song cycle.

Beethoven’s scherzos are often filled with rhythmic jokes, as in the Scherzo of Op. 127, which disrupts static hypermetrical structures. Lewis Lockwood (2024) briefly notes Beethoven’s revisions in the coda of Op. 127/III as evidenced in the Juilliard autograph, and calls for deeper analysis of these alterations. A closer look at both the Artaria and Juilliard sketches reveals significant hypermetrical revisions, underscoring the need for further study. By comparing these two sketch sources with the final version, I argue that Beethoven uses hypermeter to create contrast, resolve tension, and achieve structural stability akin to sonata form.

Op. 127/III follows a scherzo-trio-scherzo structure, concluding with a coda, with the second scherzo repeating the first exactly. The scherzo itself, in rounded binary (A-B-A’) form, features a shift from a six-measure unit to triple hypermeter—indicated by ‘ritmo di tre battute’—toward the ends of the A and A' sections.

Beethoven’s revisions in both sections reveal a deliberate contrast in how the shift to triple meter is handled, demonstrating his use of hypermeter to introduce and resolve tension, echoing sonata form principles. In the A section, the Artaria 206 sketches show a gradual shift: a six-measure unit, a four-measure unit, then a three-measure unit. In the final version, Beethoven condenses the middle four bars into three, creating a more abrupt shift. By contrast, in A', Beethoven smooths this transition through hypermetrical elision, creating a continuous flow and resolving the tension introduced in A.

Beethoven's revision in the coda resolves the hypermetrical instability in the original seven-measure sketch. Initially, the scherzo’s return on a weak hypermetrical beat led to an unstable ending. But in his revision (Juilliard), Beethoven inserts a partial return of the trio, breaks off abruptly on a hypermetrically weak beat, and then elides the scherzo’s return with a hypermetrically strong measure in the scherzo’s original codetta, thereby providing a more conclusive ending.

My study deepens our understanding of scherzo form by exploring its integration with sonata-form principles. This paper contributes to emerging philological research (Levy and Emmery 2021) and provides new insights into the intersection of theory, analysis, and Beethoven’s creative process.

After the problematic premiere of the Grand Fugue as finale of the quartet op. 130, in March 1826, Beethoven’s publisher thought a four-hand arrangement might ease the public’s acceptance of the work. But Beethoven rejected the commissioned version, which favored players’ ease over voice-leading; the visual aspect of counterpoint was as important as the aural result (Wallace, 2018), so he set about making his own arrangement in August (Novara, Beethoven-Werkstatt, 2017-19). He empowered Karl Holz to ask for twelve ducats, because “the service that I have rendered to him … is too menial (knechtisch) for me not to insist on compensation.” Beethoven enclosed a humorously money-grubbing canon: “There is the work, now see to the money!” (WoO 197) with the singers farcically counting up to twelve over and over.

Beethoven’s labor was surely not “menial,” with changes that only the composer would have dared to make (Winter 2008). The proof is that “it has become a work of my own,” i.e. an opus. To Beethoven, the musical and conceptual labor that resulted in a work required recognition with an opus number and with cash. This was the cause of an earlier dust-up with Breitkopf over the exact number of variations in his Prometheus set, op. 35 (Sisman 2020). Soon after Beethoven was paid for op. 134 came his decision to write a new finale to op. 130 (Cooper 2011).

The novel consequences of Beethoven’s labor on the four-hand arrangement include hitherto unobserved tactile-formal motivations for separating the Grande Fugue (Beethoven's own title for op. 133) arising from the imperfect match between four-strings and four-hands, and a humoristic effect on his final compositions, especially the finale of op. 135, then under construction with another humorous pay-me-now canon, “Es muss sein” (WoO 196), in its backstory. Isolated in the country in October, Beethoven was forced to copy all the parts of op. 135 himself, "menially," yet he did not stint on writing out in full the finale’s famous paratext, words and music, on each of the four parts: “The decision reached with difficulty: Must it be? It must be! It must be!”