Emerson and Beethoven

In a journal entry of August 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his experience of the music of Beethoven:

Emerson would have had the opportunity to hear Beethoven's music in public concerts and private gatherings on his European tour of 1832–3, as well as in the United States. In New England, the Boston Academy of Music, founded in 1833 to further the teaching of sacred and secular music, had begun to champion instrumental music, in particular that of Beethoven, from the mid-1830s, giving its first predominantly orchestral concert on 14 November 1840. Emerson's journal entry is, in part, a commentary upon the new aesthetic prestige of instrumental music. Liberated from its traditional functions as a servant of visual spectacle or of the written and spoken word, instrumental music could now be seen on both sides of the Atlantic as the maker of its own meaning, a vehicle for ideas and a potential catalyst of revelation, ‘accessible’, in Mark Evan Bonds's words, ‘to those who actively engaged the work by listening with creative imagination, with Einbildungskraft’. Emerson, however, by his own admission, was unable to follow the argument of such music and comprehend it as a whole. Yet after reading the ‘fine account’ of Beethoven in the October 1838 issue of the London periodical, the Gentleman's Magazine – a review of Bettina Brentano von Arnim's Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child) (1835) – Emerson would discover in the composer's ‘genius’ an object of fruitful contemplation.