Mining for Meaning with Late Beethoven: Cultural Units, Dialogic Form, and the Hermeneutic Project (with Glosses on Opp. 101, 110, and 111)

This chapter meditates on the problem of meaning in late Beethoven by reconstructing key themes of suffering, faith, and longing for transcendence in Beethoven’s life and music via the cultural unit, while considering the relevance of these connotations for today’s world. Cultural units are abstractions existing in culture that are irreducible to single lexemes or natural language, not limited to the constraints and realities of the physical world, and uniquely articulated by different linguistic, literary, and artistic media. Central to the chapter’s reconstruction are Beethoven’s innovations regarding the expressive and philosophical weight and breadth of the cultural unit’s musical realizations: these are enabled by a threefold expansion of dialogic form, one already latent in Hepokoski and Darcy’s conceptualization, while two others are unique consequences of Beethoven’s search for metaphysical and existential truth and communion with God via the medium of music. The cultural unit is explored in sketch evidence, Beethoven’s Tagebuch and letters, historically informed analysis of the late piano sonatas Op. 101, Op. 110, and Op. 111 and their revisiting of ideas from the Appassionata, op. 57, and the Cello Sonata, op. 69, along with key references to the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis, to reveal a picture of a man who asks deep and lasting questions of us, our human condition, and how to respond to it all.