Leo Schrade wrote Beethoven in France: The Growth of an Idea over sixty years ago during World War II—a benchmark study notwithstanding research on French Beethoven reception since then. To explicate the “culture of music,” Schrade proposed to “understand man through the musical forces of which he proves himself a master” and “to seize upon the fullness of life as a unity of which music is part.” The raging war sounds behind these words. Schrade noted that “ideas, married to the forces of life, are stronger than inanimate, bare facts where man's mind is not visible” and that their true test lay in “times of ordeal.” Contemplation of a unity between art and life seems to have provided him a stronghold in the face of a cold manipulation of geopolitical facts. A deeply humanistic effort to situate music in its contexts also justifies (broadly speaking) the present volume, a miscellany that considers how culture reflects values that reverberate with social and national identity. The French “idea of Beethoven” as it unfolded over the nineteenth century was one such matrix. Following Scott Burnham and others, we might add today that the entwinement of the musical text with the larger world of ideas has an analogue in musical coherence considered on its own terms, particularly in the paradigmatic Beethovenian motivic web, where a sense of becoming and concomitant affirmation of the self (so germane to the construction and promotion of liberal bourgeois democracies) seems immanent in the musical materials themselves.

Vincent d’Indy's critical writing at the beginning of the twentieth century amply demonstrates the cultural resonance and ethical implications of Beethoven's music. His reflections have broad scope indeed, from the psychological and cultural orientation of the 1911 biography Beethoven to the many chapters given over to analysis of the technical aspects of Beethoven's music in the vast Cours de composition musicale (the pedagogical program of the Schola Cantorum, which d’Indy helped found and where he served as teacher and director for many years). Despite the stature of d’Indy in the musical culture of belle-époque France as well as the importance of Beethoven in his aesthetics and pedagogical program, Schrade gives his criticism short shrift.