{"id":263709,"date":"2020-08-01T05:26:04","date_gmt":"2020-08-01T09:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=263709"},"modified":"2020-08-01T09:49:34","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T13:49:34","slug":"was-beethoven-black-a-twitter-meme-reveals-more-about-race-and-music-than-the-composers-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/08\/01\/was-beethoven-black-a-twitter-meme-reveals-more-about-race-and-music-than-the-composers-origins\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Beethoven Black? A Twitter meme reveals more about race and music than the composer’s origins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
As it turns out, though, Beethoven being of African descent is not a new idea: the notion of the great composer\u2019s secret ethnicity has circulated at the fringes of the media and scholarship for more than a century. (Pixabay photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The year 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven\u2019s birth, and in mid-June this year, he started trending on Twitter. Perhaps it wasn\u2019t so strange that Beethoven was popping up on social media platforms, but what was unusual and certainly unforeseen: the claim that \u201cBeethoven was Black.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where did this idea come from? The circulation of this trope has no doubt been catalyzed by recent events \u2014 namely, the death of George Floyd<\/a> and the subsequent ascendancy of Black Lives Matter \u2014 and by the rigorous debates over race that have since permeated mainstream and social media.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, though, Beethoven being of African descent is not a new idea: the notion of the great composer\u2019s secret ethnicity has circulated at the fringes of the media and scholarship for more than a century.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Those who argue in favor of Beethoven\u2019s black heritage point to contemporary accounts of his likeness that describe the composer in ways stereotypically associated with people of African descent. https:\/\/t.co\/1YkONAv0SK<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) July 28, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Anecdotal evidence<\/h2>\n

The original theory of \u201cBlack Beethoven\u201d first appeared in the popular press in the early 20th century<\/a>. Much of the anecdotal evidence for this claim is based on contemporary accounts, many of which were collected in Sex and Race<\/em>, published in 1944 by historian and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers. These accounts present the composer as having the features and complexion of a Black person<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Beethoven was described by some contemporaries as \u201cdark,\u201d \u201cswarthy\u201d or as a \u201cMoor.\u201d This latter term, \u201cMoor,\u201d was used in the 18th and 19th centuries to refer to a Muslim person from North Africa or the Iberian peninsula, or more generally a dark-skinned person, and has generated particular interest and conjecture about Beethoven\u2019s race.<\/p>\n

Historians have suggested that a member of the Habsburg royal family, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy I, even called both Beethoven<\/a> and Joseph Haydn<\/a> \u201cMoors,\u201d supposedly because of their dark complexions. Such accounts are likely specious. But one possibility is that, if the prince used this term for Haydn (whom he employed as a court composer) or for the young Beethoven, he was using it idiomatically: that is, \u201cMoor\u201d could be a dismissive epithet for a servant.<\/p>\n

For some scholars, Beethoven\u2019s music itself, its rhythmic complexity \u2014 specifically its syncopation \u2014 points towards his hidden ethnicity, as it suggests a knowledge of West African musical practices. A few writers even go so far as to suggest the presence of reggae- and jazz-like rhythms in his piano sonatas<\/a>. Beethoven was Black because his music \u201csounds\u201d Black; in other words, notwithstanding the unlikeliness of his familiarity with African music or that syncopation was commonplace in European music at that time.<\/p>\n

Others cite Beethoven\u2019s friendship with the Afro-European violinist and composer George Bridgetower<\/a> as somehow evidence of the composer\u2019s own multiracial identity.<\/p>\n

Friendship with Bridgetower<\/h2>\n
\"A<\/a>
An illustration of the composer George Bridgetower by Henry Edridge, c.1790.<\/span>
\n(Wikimedia Commons)<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ultimately, there is no reason to believe that Beethoven was Black: the genealogical evidence going back to the 1400s shows unambiguously that Beethoven\u2019s family was Flemish<\/a>. Speculative anecdotes from the early 19th century about his swarthy complexion, broad nose and coarse, black hair are unsourced and racist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The suggestions that jazzy syncopations in his music somehow derive from African genetics are anachronistic and absurd. Calling a white person with a darker complexion a \u201cMoor\u201d was also not uncommon in the 19th century: Karl Marx\u2019s companions referred to him as \u201cthe Moor,\u201d not because of his race, but apparently because of his thick black hair and voluminous black beard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pursuing the idea that \u201cBeethoven was Black\u201d both whitewashes and blackwashes music history<\/a>, as African American studies scholar Nicholas Rinehart has observed. Blackwashing makes important historical figures Black for the sake of seeking to validate the cultural contributions of people of colour. Whitewashing refers to the practice of valourizing Black musicians and composers by giving them white referents: a gifted Black composer becomes, for example, the \u201cThe Black Mozart\u201d or the \u201cAfrican Mahler\u201d \u2014 a mere \u201cfootnote\u201d to a white composer, in Rinehart\u2019s words.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it may be Beethoven\u2019s friendship with Bridgetower, and not internet memes<\/a>, the blogosphere or the Twitterati, that provides a way to productively approach racial politics in classical music.<\/p>\n

How many of us, in the 21st century, are even aware of Bridgetower, who was an accomplished and well-known violinist in England and Europe during his lifetime<\/a> and was also the original dedicatee of Beethoven\u2019s famous \u201cKreutzer\u201d sonata for violin and piano? As the African-American writer and poet laureate Rita Dove insists, Bridgetower might have become a \u201chousehold name\u2019 in the 19th century musical world had he not been Black<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Beethoven originally dedicated his composition \u2018Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 in A major\u2019 to his friend, the Black composer George Bridgetower (after they fell out, Beethoven later re-dedicated it to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer).<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Forgotten and overlooked<\/h2>\n

Efforts to make Beethoven Black \u2014 an awkward dance of trying to examine the issue of race and classical music while simultaneously maintaining the canonic centrality of Beethoven \u2014 ultimately obscure the existence and contributions of actual people of colour in the history of music. Black composers like Joseph Boulogne<\/a>, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor<\/a> and William Grant Still<\/a>, Rinehart argues, have simply been “forgotten, overlooked and overwritten.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cBeethoven was Black\u201d trope trending on Twitter serves the interests of current racial politics and social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, just as it served the Black Power movement in the early 1960s: Malcolm X<\/a> and Stokely Carmichael<\/a> both invoked Beethoven\u2019s would-be Moorish ancestry to claim that he \u2014 along with other historical figures, including Hannibal, Columbus and Jesus \u2014 was a Black man.<\/p>\n

If the genealogical or phenotypical pursuit of \u201cBlack Beethoven\u201d leads to a dead end, it nonetheless emphasizes the importance of past and ongoing work by Black scholars to research and document the history of music and race. Just as musicology finally embraced feminist and gender theory in the 1990s, providing new and more inclusive ways to examine the meaning and experience of classical music, the recent conversations about \u201cBlack Beethoven\u201d points in the direction of fruitful and necessary avenues of inquiry into music history.<\/p>\n

This, in turn, may help inform our contemporary cultural dialogues in these turbulent times.\"The<\/p>\n

Alexander Carpenter<\/a>, Professor, Department of Fine Arts, University of Alberta<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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