Schubert and Beethoven

Abstract

rightly understood as a fusion of tragic and comic components in Beethoven's art. It was a fusion which he then deplored and which, I believe, he never fully accepted. He decried eccentricity that is common among most composers nowadays, and is due almost wholly one of our greatest German artists-that eccentricity which joins and confuses the tragic and the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings, and the holiest with harlequinades, without distinction. Concluding on a curiously pious, almost Tolstoyan note, Schubert described the effect of Beethoven's music as serving to goad people madness instead of dissolving them in love, incite them laughter instead of lifting them up God.' If Schubert's early repudiation of Beethoven seems remarkable, even if one ascribes it the influence of his teacher Salieri, it may appear less so when viewed against the vagaries of Beethoven's reputation in the second decade of the nineteenth century. For, beginning in the waning months of the Congress of Vienna, Beethoven's popularity diminished and public performances of his music became markedly less frequent.2 It was, of course, inevitable that a drastic realignment of taste would accom-

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