Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the “Tempest” Sonata

Abstract

Much may be gained from approaching the works of Adorno and Dahlhaus as manifestations of a long-standing tradition in which Beethoven's music serves as an agent within the kind of historical process that Hegel's philosophy predicates. The metaphor that emerges so emphatically here is the image of form coming into being, the notion of becoming. The verb aufheben is Hegel's term for describing the result of the process of becoming. At the moment when one grasps that becoming has united a concept and its opposite, or negative, then all three elements–the one-sided concept, its opposite, and becoming itself–vanish. Certainly the most decisive contributions to the formation of a Beethoven-Hegelian tradition are the theoretical writings about Beethoven and musical form by Adolph Bernhard Marx (1799-1866). "Marx started from what he perceived to be the end-point of musical history [Beethoven] and interpreted the rest of that history as a process of development up to that point.".

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