a public passion
by Mary Alice Scott

Symphonies in 19th century Germany were more like sport than performance — especially if the composer was Beethoven.

e all know that symphony concerts are for listening. Dress up in fancy clothes. Don't talk. Don't move. Just listen.

But Beethoven's contemporaries would be surprised to see that kind of behavior at a concert, explains Evan Bonds, professor of musicology. At the large outdoor music festivals that sprang up throughout Germany in Beethoven's lifetime, symphonies were as much participatory events as listening experiences. "The more musicians, the better," Bonds says, leaning forward slightly in his chair and smiling as if to say he might like to participate in a sport like that.

.: Evan Bonds examines Franz Liszt's two-piano arrangement of Beethovens' Ninth Symphony in the Wilson Library Rare Books Reading Room. "We have recordings today," Bonds says. "Nineteenth-century listeners made this music in their homes through arrangements like this." Photo by Steve Exum; click to enlarge. :.

A violist himself, Bonds became interested in the interaction between people and their music through studying the way people received Beethoven's symphonies during his lifetime. While teaching a course at Boston University, Bonds found many references to the connection between the symphony and politics in the nineteenth century — the time in which Beethoven was composing.

"I wasn't looking for these things, but I kept running into them," he says. "I was a little skeptical at first. I thought these were people who were trying to push a particular agenda. But there were so many of them, and after a while I began to realize that this was really part of the way people heard symphonies in the nineteenth century."

Sitting in his office surrounded by symphonic scores and stacks of history and music books, Bonds explains that a symphony has many distinctive features in the world of music. For one thing, it is played without any single instrument dominating. And symphonies have no words, at least not most of the time. "I think that allowed people to hear it in a very open way. It allowed for a lot of different kinds of interpretations," Bonds says.

n accounts of music festivals that featured performances of symphonies, people generally didn't talk about the quality of music making. "They talk about how many people participated. The important thing was the enthusiasm of the players, most of whom were unpaid amateurs. This was something you did as a community," Bonds says.

One of the reasons behind their enthusiasm is that music festivals were one of the few public gatherings sanctioned by government officials. "Nineteenth-century Germany and Austria were pretty much police states," he points out. "Germany, moreover, was only just beginning to discover its own cultural and national identity, and symphonies — especially symphonies by Beethoven — were an important means for citizens to generate a sense of shared community."

Bonds says that Beethoven was "in the right place at the right time." His music was different and powerful, but it probably would not have had the same impact had it not been created at a time when people were inclined to hear the music in the context of emerging democracy. And he is quick to point out that although Beethoven was the most notable symphonic composer of the time and participated in discussions about politics and society, he was not the only composer in the nineteenth century whose works contributed to discussions of democracy.