ABSTRACT
Among Beethoven’s works are a number that were highly successful in their own time but that became an embarrassment to later critics. In this article I explore the critical strategies used to explain away the success of two such works, Wellingtons Sieg and. Der glorreiche Augenblick—works marginalized by the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm that came to regulate critical interpretation of the composer’s music as well as underwriting the Beethovenian canon. I also explore ways in which such noncanonic works might be reexperienced, reading Wellingtons Sieg in terms of an aesthetic of hyper-representation and Der glorreiche Augenblick in terms of the enactment of community: such approaches, I argue, give access to aspects of Beethoven’s music that the “Beethoven Hero” paradigm suppressed.
