The Reception and Performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Instrumental Music in “Ville Lumière” from the late 1820s through the mid–1840s

Abstract

Ludwig van Beethoven emerged as a towering figure in the French press during the first half of the nineteenth century. His “bizarre” music served as an excellent tool for contemporary progressive critics, helping them to form an elite audience and elevate “the musical intelligence of the masses”, to show professional musicians the direction which “modern music” should take and to encourage skillful amateurs to dare to perform compositions that may not have been captivating upon first being heard. Readers of the time were thus gradually compelled to accept the “new German school of composition”. It was mainly in promoting Beethoven’s instrumental music in Ville Lumière that the French press saw a strong argument for portraying the city as the hub of the most sublime and finest European music. The purpose of the present article is to contribute towards musicological studies by depicting a complex picture of assimilating, interpreting, and evaluating Beethoven’s music as well as adapting it to French performance conventions. All these points are considered through the lens of the music and non-music press targeting a highly diverse readership during the first half of the nineteenth century. The article is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the reception of Beethoven’s instrumental music by the elite Parisian audience, while the second one discusses the French peculiarities in the performance of Beethoven’s music from the late 1820s to the mid-1840s.