Music and Letters Advance Access published online on December 7, 2007
Music and Letters, doi:10.1093/ml/gcm089
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Beethoven Instrumentalized: Richard Wagner's Self-Marketing And Media Image
*University of South Carolina. Email: vazsonyi{at}sc.edu.
 |
Abstract |
|---|
Wagner's ‘theatricality’, his tendency to make a production of himself, has been explained as evidence of his megalomania and as an attempt at self-aggrandizement. In this article Wagner's extravagant behaviours and utterances are placed on a different discursive plane, as imaginative and highly successful forms of self-marketing. Beethoven, central to Wagner's iconoclastic historiography of music and legitimation of his aesthetic project, was also a crucial element in Wagner's effort to create his own distinct persona and to establish a ‘unique’ niche for his works. A close reading of Wagner's novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven (1840) and an analysis of his publicity campaign to attract and prepare the Dresden audience for his 1846 performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony reveal both the complexity and the mechanics of Wagner's highly constructed self-image and talent at drawing a crowd. They also explain how and why Wagner's instrumentalization of Beethoven needs to be viewed from this perspective as well.