CHAPTER TWELVE

THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC

For Edward W. Said

There are documented reports telling of occasions when Beethoven and

Schubert used their music for a singular purpose. The first was set down by
the nineteenth-century biographer Otto Jahn, who over the years had been
gathering materials for a full-length life of Beethoven along the lines of his
great W. A. Mozarts Leben, and had "assembled letters, . . . documents, au­
thentic memoranda and traditions" for that purpose.1 Among those whom
he personally interviewed was the composer's intimate friend Antonie
Brentano nee Birkenstock, when she was in her eighties.Jahn printed a brief
account of the interview in an article published in 1867, which included
the following recollection:

During her sojourn in Vienna in the years 1809 to 1812 Frau Antonie Brentano
was often ailing for weeks at a time, suffering to such an extent that she with­
drew to her room, where she remained by herself, unfit to see anybody. On
such occasions Beethoven was regularly in attendance; he came in, seated him­
self without any further ado at a piano in her antechamber and improvised;
when he had "said everything and given solace" to the sufferer in his own
language, he left as he had come, without taking notice of anybody else.2

The passing of half a century had not affected Frau Brentano's memory.
A letter to her sister-in-law Bettina, written in early 1811, described these
same events at the very time that they were taking place:

Beethoven has become for me one of the dearest [liebsten] human beings. . . .
His whole nature is simple, noble, good-natured, and his tender-heartedness

229
230 LATE BEETHOVEN

would grace the most delicate woman. It speaks in his favor that few know
him, and even fewer understand him. He visits me often, almost daily, and
then he plays spontaneously because he has an urgent need to alleviate suffer­
ing, and he feels that he is able to do so with his heavenly sounds. . . . That
there is such power in music I hadn't yet known until Beethoven informed
me of it.3

A related and in some ways even more poignant story is told in connec­
tion with Beethoven's former student, the pianist Dorothea von Ertmann
nee Graumann, who was one of the leading exponents of his keyboard music,
and to whom he dedicated the Piano Sonata in A, op. 101, written in 1816
and published the following year. After the death of her three-year-old son,
in 1804, she found herself unable to weep—and she was additionally trou­
bled by Beethoven's failure to offer his condolences in person. Some years
afterward she told her niece, "I could not understand at all why he did not
visit me after the death of my beloved only child."4 Apparendy he had some
reluctance to come to her house, and finally—reportedly at her husband's
urging—he invited her to his own home. According to Felix Mendelssohn's
account, when Beethoven sat down at the keyboard, his only words to his
bereaved friend were "We will now talk to each other in tones." He played
for more than an hour until, as she said, "he told me everything, and in the
end even brought me comfort [Er sagte mir alles, und gab mir auch zuletzt den
Trost]."5 According to another account of the incident, recalled by the noted
actress Antonie Adamberger, he uttered not a single word of greeting, but
sat down at the piano and played for Ertmann until at last "she began to sob
and thus her grief found both expression and relief."6 "I felt as if I were lis­
tening to choirs of angels celebrating the entrance of my poor child into
the world of light," Ertmann told her niece. "When he had finished, he
pressed my hand sadly and went away as silently as he had come."7
A parallel anecdote from the life of Franz Schubert indicates that Beetho­
ven was not the only composer who invested his music with such unusual
powers. In March 1825 Schubert participated in a psychotherapeutic treat­
ment of a young woman, Louise Mora, while she was being treated under
hypnotism by the painter Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who moonlighted
as a mesmerist healer, sometimes in collaboration with Romantic writer
Friedrich Schlegel.8 Schubert was called in because the patient persisted in
awakening from a sleep induced by hypnosis.
 THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC 23 I

EXAMPLE 12.i. Schubert, DeutscherTanz in B-flat, op. 33, no. 7, D783, mm. 1—4.

1 ii NH f
p

i f f T= H 1 11 - 1
•

LJ—£—£— 'j1
'

Schnorr kept detailed minutes of the treatment; the entry for 20 March
1825 reads:

In the evening at 7:30 the patient was hypnotized. She fell asleep, was placed
in her armchair, and awoke soon thereafter. After the sounding [Beruhrung]
of several chords from no. 7 of Schubert's German Dances she fell asleep [see
ex. 12.1]. At a quarter to eight, after again [hearing] the above mentioned
Deutscher Tanz, she again fell asleep.

Four days later, the treatment continued, as recorded in the minutes for 24
March:

In the evening at 7:25 the sfomnambulist] fell into a trance when Herr Schubert
played the same German Dance that regularly produced that effect upon her.
She was awakened in a clairvoyant state, rubbed her eyes etc., when, at 7:45,
Herr Sfchubert] sang and accompanied himself in a bed that was in the same
key [B-flat] as that German Dance; then the patient fell into a trance and then
a sleep that lasted until the bed ended, at which point she was mesmerized
(magnetized). Around 8:00 a renewed trance, because Herr S[chubert] played
that familiar German Dance once again and said, "Don't wake up! [Nicht
wecken!]" As she continued sleeping, he played still other things that she said
she found pleasing. She was so taken with one of the German dances that the
m[esmerist] once had to awaken her through stroking and found it necessary
to stay with her.
Among other pieces that were played was also "Der Wanderer," composed
by himself, which similarly made a deep impression on her. She wanted to be
awakened, which was done in the usual way by stroking. . . . On this musi­
cal occasion it was still very striking to remark the various ways in which the
tones and chords could affect a sfomnambulist]. Several, which were very mov­
ing, produced the most wonderful motions and contortions of her body.9
232 LATE BEETHOVEN

Though it is uncertain which Schubert work titled "Der Wanderer" was

designated, it seems to me most likely that it is Schubert's 1819 setting of a
poem by that name by Schnorr's collaborator in Mesmerism, Friedrich
Schlegel (ex. 12.2).10 The music, in slow march time and marked Langsam,
has a lulling character; and the imagery of the wanderer in the moonlight
suggests a somnambulistic or clairvoyant state of being. "How clearly the
moon's light speaks to me, encouraging me on my journey . . . gentle ebb,
high tide, low in spirits, I wander on in the darkness, climb courageously,
sing joyfully, and the world seems to be so good."
By participating in this curious venture into a byway of early nineteenth-
century psychotherapy, Schubert not only encountered extreme and disabling
mental states (as Lisa Feurzeig suggests) but expressed and acted on a desire
to help cure them—and to do so by his music. He was a willing recruit in
an effort to provide solace and aid to a suffering creature. In a quite literal
sense, both he and Beethoven used music as an instrument of healing—in
Antonie Brentano's words as a means "to alleviate suffering."
It is one thing for us to speak generally and imprecisely about the "heal­
ing power of music," and to invoke examples of it in the Orpheus or other
myths and claims about the efficacy of that power by Plato, Aristode,
Pythagoras, Boethius, Luther, and Calvin. It is quite another to find plain
signs that Beethoven and Schubert shared a matter-of-fact belief that music
indeed has healing powers. More, they both used their music for healing
purposes.
Of course, these anecdotes describe different kinds of attempts at
healing—and different degrees of success. Schubert wanted to help a trou­
bled young woman, evidendy a stranger to him, whose Mesmerist therapists
were successful in treating her minor physical complaints, such as hiccoughs,
but were helpless to cope with her emotional needs. They were not gifted
or empathic counselors; as Feurzeig shows, they attributed Louise Mora's
episodes of self-destructiveness and frenzied raving to "anger and intransi­
gence [Zorn und Unversdhnlichkeit]," for which their prescribed remedies were
to bind her hands, to counsel her to maintain "a firm moral attitude," and
to require her priest-confessor's attendance at the sessions.11 They did not
consider the possibility that their treatment might have activated in the pa­
tient a variety of concealed anxieties, morbid states, or forbidden desires.
One is reminded of similar experiences and reactions by the eminent psy­
chiatrists Charcot, Breuer, and Freud, who later in the century also found,
about; and he effectively provided them with consolation that words could
not achieve. His music enabled Dorothea Ertmann at last to find cathartic
tears for her dead child. Through his music he reached the core of Antonie
Brentano's desolation, established a bond compounded of sympathy, un­
derstanding, and love, provided reasons for her to return to the world from
the edge of despair.
Prominent in all three instances is that music is placed in the service of
healing a suffering woman—from depression, heartbreak, rejection, pain,
or unfulfilled longing. Also noteworthy is the essential wordlessness of the
efforts: Beethoven deliberately remained mute, making no effort to put his
sympathy into words; Schubert's only words, apart from the poetic texts of
his lieder, were the urgendy whispered command, "Don't wake up!" Music
was able to say that which language could not express, could make a direct
appeal to the emotions, could speak from the heart to the heart. Further-
234 LATE BEETHOVEN

more, in each case, it is a composer-performer who employs his music as

an instrument of healing. The composer's presence, his actual participation
as a musician in these rituals of healing, may suggest that it is the per­
formance as much as the music that is essential to the recuperative process.
Beethoven's playing signified that he understood what Antonie Brentano
and Dorothea Ertmann felt, that he too had experienced despair and grief
and thus could help them to mourn. In turn, Schubert acted as a personal
agent; but in his case he was part of a team, providing music to aid in the
trance- and sleep-inducing stage of the treatment. Often, then, healing may
be in the physical act of making music—which can signify the bestowal of
a gift upon one who is in need. Without the need, there can be no heal­
ing. More, without a reciprocal belief in the power of music, there can be
no such healing. For this kind of healing involves a relationship between
two people, of whom, in the psychoanalyst Phylhs Greenacre's telling
phrase, "one is troubled and one is versed in the ways of trouble," medi­
ated by a method whose effectiveness they both are willing to take for
granted.12 By contrast, when Mozart offered his C-minor Mass to his fa­
ther as a token of his desire to heal the terrible breach between them,
Leopold Mozart refused to accept the fiction that a musical work—even
one of such magnitude—could make his family whole again. With that
refusal, music reverted to being mere marks on a ruled page instead of the
hieroglyphics of the heart's language.

II

These unusual episodes from the fives of Beethoven and Schubert are tes­
timony to some of the ways in which music can heal, or, more exactly, can
be put in the service of healing. But healing in music is not always indi­
vidual, personal, reducible to a telling anecdote; often it touches on more
wide-reaching issues of human suffering, injustice, and loss. Thus, for ex­
ample, the closing chorales of many Bach cantatas crown narratives of sin
or suffering, reaffirming shared beliefs, restoring sinners to grace, enfold­
ing worshipers in the embrace of the congregation. Similarly, the peripatetic
chorale melody in the St. Matthew Passion is a leitmotif of healing by way
of reassurance, always keeping in sight the resurrection that follows Christ's
crucifixion.13
 THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC 235

EXAMPLE 12.3. String Quartet in A minor, op. 132, Molto adagio: "Heiliger Dankgesang," mm. 1-6.

There seem to be numberless conditions to be healed through music and

countless ways that music can heal. Indeed, it may be inherent in music's
structural and rhetorical properties that it can serve as a metaphor for many
forms of recovery and restoration, renewal and resurrection. It might be said
that the episodes involving Beethoven and Schubert started with therapy,
but our subject is not therapy. It is the power of music to set things right.
Beethoven's late works in particular may illustrate several aspects of this
power. Perhaps the most transparent example flows from the inscription at
the head of the String Quartet in A minor, op. 132, which reads, "Holy
Song of Thanks by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode." By
these words, Beethoven stipulates that music can be considered a represen­
tation of healing and convalescence, a barrier against death (ex. 12.3). Such
ideas have an ancient lineage:

The sons of Autolycus, working over Odysseus,

skillfully binding up his open wound . . .
chanted an old spell that stanched the blood
and quickly bore him to their father's palace.

(Odyssey, 19.513-19, Fagles trans.)

The biblical echoes of Beethoven's heading, with its appeal to the Deity, are
not far from the surface; the most famous of these is the account of David's
healing of Saul's melancholia:14
236 LATE BEETHOVEN

And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David
took an harp, and played with his hand; so Saul was refreshed and was well,
and the evil spirit departed from him.
(1 Samuel 16.23)

Many have seen Beethoven's movement title as an autobiographical allu­

sion, expressing his own feelings of gratitude upon recovery from an illness.
But biographical interpretations of the inscription are surely not the whole
story. The "Heiliger Dankgesang" is not simply a composer's musical offer­
ing in return for a lessening of physical pain and a prolongation of his own
life; it is also a prayer for healing of the soul, offered by those who need to
have their sins forgiven, who are struggling for emergence from melancho­
lia or loss of faith. As Kirkendale has shown, Beethoven's choice of mode
revives an ancient tradition, recorded by Cassiodorus and communicated by
the sixteenth-century Italian theorist Gioseffe Zarlino, "that theLydian mode
is a remedy for fatigue of the soul, and similarly for that of the body."15 In
the A-minor string quartet, prayer is rewarded by an imperceptible quick­
ening, by revival through contact with the Godhead, and finally by a re­
birth, which the composer designates in the score as "Feeling new strength
[Neue Kraftfiihlend]" (ex. i2.4).16The Lydian mode has served Beethoven's
purpose; now in D major and 3/8 time he can return to life from a realm
of suffering and meditation. In this vision of restoration, prayer magnified
by music in a sacred mode achieves an irresistible power, not only to stave
off personal illness and death, but to cleanse the soul of its doubts, sins, and
imperfections.
The idea of healing through prayer occupies only a minor and fairly con­
ventional place in earlier Beethoven; for example, in the "Gellert" Songs,
op. 48—"Bitten" (Prayer) and "Bublied" (Song of atonement)—and the
Pastoral Symphony finale, with its closing "Gott wir danken Dir." The topic
of an answered prayer is given greater weight in the closing sections of
Beethoven's Missa solemnis. The Agnus Dei is a lengthy plea for mercy, a plea
to be relieved of the sins of the world. The desolate feelings aroused by the
somber, even despairing Adagio cannot be relieved easily or organically; they
require a deus ex machina, the sound of trumpets and fanfares heralding
miraculous transformations, disjunctive shifts from the timelessness of the
church into historical time, from inner to outer. The prayer for divine mercy
 THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC 237

EXAMPLE 12.4. String Quartet in A minor, op. 132, Molto adagio: "Neue Kraft fiihlend," mm.
31-34-

accomplishes its work—or reaches its nethermost depth—and then, in the

Dona nobis pacem, it is transformed into a plea for peace rather than mercy;
on the score of the ensuing Allegretto vivace Beethoven wrote the words,
"Prayer for inner and outer peace."
Music's healing powers are conspicuous in the sheer multiplicity of
classical-style endings that crown every kind of achievement: a return to com­
munity or to a pastoral-Arcadian state of nature, an ascent to a sacred region
or the discovery of a loving deity beyond the outermost vault of the heavens,
the removal of impediments to the union of lovers (as in An die feme Geliebte
or Fidelio). Celebrations are the order of the day in Beethoven: of exalted
marriage, of brotherhood, or of the freeing of prisoners from bondage, in
every kind of emergence into the light, or in any other fulfillment of an ar­
duous quest. In the Ninth Symphony this takes the form of anticipating, with­
holding, and then discovering a melody of surpassing beauty and simplicity,
one from which every trace of dissonance, conflict, or anxiety has been ex­
cluded (ex. 12.5).
The purpose of the "Ode to Joy" is reconciliation—within the band of
brothers, between God and his creatures, of the millions and the solitary in­
dividual. But this melody and the text with which it is forever intertwined
opens on the endless varieties of Utopia: not only love, brotherhood, familial
reconciliation, and religious devotion, but images of beauty, social harmony,
and every possible symbol of perfection. Remember, this is a moment of
reassembly following the violent rejection of everything that had gone be-
238 LATE BEETHOVEN

EXAMPLE 12.5. Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, finale, mm. 92-101.

fore, a rejection heightened by the strident blast of discordant sound—which

Wagner aptly named a "Terror Fanfare [Schreckensfanfare]"—that opens the
movement. This is healing with a vengeance: the restoration of a unity that
had been lost when the established world had been found wanting by Beetho­
ven, its creator, and then taken apart.
The trumpet call in act 2 of Fidelio demonstrates the metaphoric sweep
of a single, unaccompanied instrument, a simple tonic arpeggiated chord,
which awakens, rouses to action, and signals salvation all at once. The cli­
mactic call announces the arrival of Fernando, an individual of conscience,
the messenger of a good prince; it also proclaims the imminence of libera­
tion, including the literal emergence of Florestan and the prisoners from
confinement in darkness. Above all, it offers testimony to the immense power
of sound. This, too, was known to the ancients; Joshua was instructed to
have his priests circle the city of Jericho bearing seven trumpets: "And it
shall come to pass that when they make a long blast with the ram's horn,
and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with
a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people
shall ascend up every man straight before him" (Joshua 6.4-5).

Ill

Examples could readily be multiplied. Still, music is not simply an agency

of healing; and not all music has heating powers. Sometimes—as in the "Ter­
ror Fanfare"—it tears the lid off humanity's destructive impulses, or it re­
veals an abyss, spins nightmares about the void, the end of things. But when
it lays bare such a psychic wound it thereby opens up the possibility of heal­
ing it. "Ermattet, klagend"—weary, lamenting—is one of late Beethoven's
 THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC 239

EXAMPLE 12.6. Piano Sonata in A-flat, op. no, Fuga: Allegro ma non troppo, mm. 116-118.
(Ermattet, klaeend)

EXAMPLE 12.7. Piano Sonata in A-flat, op. no, Fuga: Allegro ma non troppo, mm. 136/37-43.
L'istesso tempo della Fuga
Poi a poi di nuovo vivtntc

eloquent expressive instructions in his native language, used in the fiagal finale
of the Sonata in A-flat, op. 110, to signal the rematerialization of the Ada­
gio's grief-ridden "Klagende Lied" ("Arioso dolente," "Song of Lament";
ex. 12.6). It takes all of Beethoven's imaginative powers to overcome this
grief. The sonata's culminating Fugue returns, headed "Little by little re­
viving to life [Nach und nach wieder aujiebend]," marking an emergence from
deep confinement, a resumption of existence (ex. 12.7).
Finally, the Cavatina of the String Quartet in B-flat, op. 130, speaks of
grief but also of consolation. It was perhaps the only work about which
Beethoven confessed that it brought him to tears: "He really wrote it with
tears of sadness in his eyes," reported Karl Holz, "and admitted to me that
no other work of his own had ever made such an impression on him, and
that even the remembered feelings aroused by this piece always cost him new
tears."17 This represents a notable softening of Beethoven's customary sto­
icism, for he almost always avoided an appeal to tearful sentiments in his
music, preferring, like the French Revolution's composers, to convert grief
into public display and exhortation, as in the Andante of the Fifth Sym­
phony, or into ceremonial ritual, as in the Marcia funebre of the Eroica Sym­
phony and the Allegretto of the Seventh Symphony. In the finale of the Ninth
Symphony, the Adagio is explicidy rejected as "too tender" (zu zdrtlfich]),
240 LATE BEETHOVEN

EXAMPLE 12.8. String Quartet in B-flat, op. 130, Cavatina ("Beklemmt"), mm. 40-44.

in the words Beethoven used in his sketches to describe its first theme.18
Here, however, in the penultimate movement of the B-flat String Quartet,
he openly permitted himself to acknowledge music's power to represent
depths of suffering and of fear. The contrasting section of the Cavatina,
marked Beklemmt, plunges into darkness, melancholia, and dread. And by
that unprecedented expression indication, taken from his mother tongue and
carrying an almost tangibly oppressive physicality, Beethoven poses the most
difficult questions—how to endure pain of this intensity, how to awaken
from a burdensome nightmare, how to breathe freely again (ex. 12.8). And
the fact is that Beethoven found two satisfactory answers to those questions
in the alternative closing movements of the B-flat String Quartet that he
left for posterity to puzzle over.
The opening of the Grosse Fuge appropriately is called "Overtura" be­
cause it is a prefiguration of the action, a pot-pourri of working materials,
and thus literally a reversion to a state prior to the commencement of ac-
 THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC 24I

tion. It presents itself as a labyrinthian process, a set of apparent dead ends,

with each segment apparently in search of a beginning, a path to the fugue.
One by one, disparate motifs burst into view and abruptly break off; it is,
in Kerman's description, as though the composer were hurling "all the the­
matic versions at the listener's head like a handful of rocks" (mm. 1—30).19
Though the overture's primary image is of a chaoticized state of being, or­
der will eventually emerge from this splintered chaos, the fragments coa­
lescing into a gigantic three-part fugue, as a coherent universe is assembled
from improbable ingredients. Thus, the Overtura is a return to beginnings,
a representation of creation, of fracture and assembly, and thereby an em­
blem of art's supreme restorative power.
In the substitute finale Beethoven moves directly from the torment-ridden
Cavatina to a pastoral celebration of life's simple gifts. The return to nature
is achieved without much struggle. Paradise is gained (or regained) by a quick
stroke. In this alternative version of healing, we need to act swiftly, without
thinking too much; a simple change of perspective permits us to hurdle the
barrier that separates affliction from affirmation. Whereas the Grosse Fuge
is learned and encyclopedic, the rondo is a Haydnesque romp, illustrating
that healing can be effected either by way of wisdom or by way of inno­
cence. Both endings are authentic versions of the dialectic of suffering and
healing that is central to Beethoven's creative project.
298 NOTES TO PAGES 2 2 6 - 3 0

29. For a list of exemplary papers on the finale's form, by Ernest Sanders, Michael C.
Tusa, James Webster, and William Kinderman, see Solomon, Beethoven, p. 507.
30. Whatever its suspicions of Beethoven, the imperial court had not forgotten his pa­
triotic and uncharacteristically obsequious Congress of Vienna works—Der Glorreiche
Augenblick, op. 136, Germania, WoO 94, and the "Chorus to the Allied Princes," WoO
95, which begins "You wise founders of fortunate states [Ihr weisen Griinder gliicklicher
Staaten]"—and it might well have viewed the Ninth Symphony as the latest of Beetho­
ven's pikes d'occasion, a view that would not be contradicted by the subsequent dedi­
cation of the symphony to Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. In October 1822, only
seventeen months before the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven's music for
the festspiel Die IVeihe des Houses was performed to honor Emperor Franz's nameday as
well as to celebrate the opening of the Josephstadt Theater.
31. Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, vol. 2 of Bertolt Brecht: Werke,
Berliner und Franfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 30 vols. (Berlin and Weimar:
Aufbau; and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988—), pp. 349-50.

Chapter 12. The Healing Power of Music

1. Jahn, letter to G. Hartenstein, 12 December 1852, in Otto Jahn in seinen Briefen. Mit
einem Bilde seines Lebens von Adolf Michaelis, ed. Eugen Petersen (Leipzig and Berlin: Teub-
ner, 1913), p. 83.
2. Otto Jahn, "Ein Brief Beethovens," Die Grenzboten: Zeitschrift fur Politik und Lite-
ratur 26, no. 2 (1867): 100-105, at p. 101; see also the extract published inThayer-
Deiters-Riemann, vol. 3, pp. 214—15, Thayer-Krehbiel, vol. 2, p. 179.
3. Letter from Antonie Brentano to Bettina Brentano, Vienna, 11 March 1811
(Sammlung Varnhagen, Biblioteka Jagielloriska, Krakow), published by Klaus Martin
Kopitz, "Antonie Brentano in Wien (1809-1812): Neue Quellen zur Problematik 'Un-
sterbliche Geliebte,'" in Bonner Beethoven-Studien, vol. 2, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg and
Ernst Herttrich (Bonn: Beethoven-Haus, 2001), pp. 115-44, at p. 128.
4. Mathilde Marchesi, Marquise de la Rajata de Castrone, Aus meinem Leben (Diissel-
dorf: Felix Bagel, n.d. [ca. 1888]), p. 12, quoted by A. C. Kalischer, Beethoven und seine
Zeitgenossen, 4 vols. (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, n.d. [1908—10]), vol. 3, Beethovens
Frauenkreis, part 2, p. 125, trans. George Marek, Beethoven: Biography of a Genius (New
York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), p. 291. See also Mathilde de Castrone Marchesi, Erin-
nerungen aus meinem Leben (Vienna: Carl Gerolds Sohn, 1877), p. 7. Ertmann's son, Franz
Carl, died 19 March 1804, according to information in Viennese death registers located
and generously communicated by Klaus Martin Kopitz.
5. Letter to Mendelssohn's mother, 14 July 1831, in Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
Reisebriefe aus den fahren 1830 bis 1832, 4th ed., edited by Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy
(Leipzig: H. Mendelssohn, 1862), p. 195.See alsoThayer-Deiters-Riemann, vol. 2, p. 415,
trans. Thayer-Forbes, p. 413. Antonie Brentano's account echoes the latter phrase, "said
 NOTES TO PAGES 230-36 299

everything and brought comfort [altes gesagt und Trost gegeben hatte]," possibly suggest­
ing that either she or Jahn was familiar with Mendelssohn's letter.
6. Adamberger, quoted by Thayer-Deiters-Riemann, vol. 3, p. 583.
7. de Castrone, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, p. 12, trans. Marek, Beethoven, p. 291.
8. See Lisa Feurzeig, "Heroines in Perversity: Marie Schmith, Animal Magnetism, and
the Schubert Circle," 19th-century Music 21 (1997): 223-43; Harry Goldschmidt, "Schu­
bert und kein Ende," Beitrdge zur Musikwissenschaft 25 (1983): 288-92.
9. Goldschmidt, "Schubert und kein Ende," pp. 290-91.
10. Goldschmidt favors the song paraphrase in the middle of the "Wanderer" Fanta­
sia, ibid., p. 291.
11. Feurzeig, "Heroines in Perversity," pp. 231-32.
12. Phyllis Greenacre, Emotional Growth: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Gifted and a Great
Variety of Other Individuals, 2 vols. (New York: International Universities Press, 1971),
vol. 2, p. 628. Leonard Meyer reached a similar conclusion via a different route, hold­
ing that "a patient's belief in the efficacy and power of music to heal may be a significant
element in the success of music therapy." Leonard B. Meyer, "Learning, Belief, and Mu­
sic Therapy," Music Therapy 5 (1955): 27-35, at p. 33; see also Meyer, Emotion and Mean­
ing in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 73-75.
13. For "the image of Bach as healer" see Walter Frisch, "Bach, Brahms, and the Emer­
gence of Musical Modernism," Bach Perspectives, vol. 3, ed. Michael Marissen (Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 127-29.
14. We are reminded also of the dying Hezekiah, "sick unto death," who in despair
had "turned his face towards the wall": but his prayer was answered, his health restored,
his days lengthened by fifteen years, and his people delivered from the hand of the As­
syrians (2 Kings 20.1-6, Isaiah 38.1-6). The Lutheran composer Johann Kuhnau told
the story in one of his Biblical sonatas for keyboard, titled "Hezekiah, mortally ill and
then restored."
15. Zarlino, Institutioni harmoniche (Venice, 155 8), p. 3 03, quoted by Warren Kirkendale,
"New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis," Musical Quarterly 56 (1970):
677. Kirkendale records several references to Zarlino in Beethoven's conversation books
for December 1819, Konversationshefte, vol. 1, p. 108 (Heft 3, 52r) and p. 196 (Heft 6,
3iv).
16. Tovey found a close analogy in the opening of the second half of the Goldberg
Variations: "Bach's sixteenth variation bursts forth, after the sombre tones of the fifteenth,
with a 'feeling of renewed strength,' not unworthy to be regarded as a foreshadowing"
of the Heiliger Dankgesang. Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Chamber Music (London:
Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 56. The healing powers of music were a serious topic
in music journals of Beethoven's time; see, for example, the lengthy article by Dr. F. W.
Weber, "Von dem Einflufie der Musik auf den menschlichen Korper und ihrer medi-
cinischen Anwendung," AmZ 14 (26 May 1802), cols. 561-69 (2 June 1802), cols.
577-89 (9 June 1802), cols. 593-99 (15 June 1802), cols. 609-17; see also the article