playing itself out. Espousing a particular position in the debate is no business of the historian. (Some
readers may know that I have espoused one as a critic; I would like to think that readers who do not know
my position will not discover it here.) But to report the debate in its full range, and draw relevant
implications from it, is the historian’s ineluctable duty. That report includes the designation of what
elements within the sounding composition have triggered the associations—a properly historical sort of
analysis that is particularly abundant in the present narrative. Call it semiotics if you will.
But of course semiotics has been much abused. It is an old vice of criticism, and lately of scholarship,
to assume that the meaning of artworks is fully vested in them by their creators, and is simply “there” to
be decoded by a specially gifted interpreter. That assumption can lead to gross errors. It is what vitiated
the preposterously overrated work of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and what has caused the work of the
“new musicologists” of the 1980 s and 1990 s—Adornians to a man and woman—to age with such
stunning rapidity. It is, all pretenses aside, still an authoritarian discourse and an asocial one. It still
grants oracular privilege to the creative genius and his prophets, the gifted interpreters. It is altogether
unacceptable as a historical method, although it is part of history and, like everything else, deserving of
report. The historian’s trick is to shift the question from “What does it mean?” to “What has it meant?”
That move is what transforms futile speculation and dogmatic polemic into historical illumination. What it
illuminates, in a word, are the stakes, both “theirs” and “ours.”
Not that all meaningful discourse about music is semiotic. Much of it is evaluative. And value
judgments, too, have a place of honor in historical narratives, so long as they are not merely the
historian’s judgment (as Francis Bacon was already presciently aware). Beethoven’s greatness is an
excellent case in point because it will come in for so much discussion in the later volumes of this book.
As such, the notion of Beethoven’s greatness is “only” an opinion. To assert it as a fact would be the sort
of historians’ transgression on which master narratives are built. (And because historians’ transgressions
so often make history, they will be given a lot of attention in the pages that follow.) But to say this much is
already to observe that such assertions, precisely insofar as they are not factual, often have enormous
performative import. Statements and actions predicated on Beethoven’s perceived greatness are what
constitute Beethoven’s authority, which certainly is a historical fact—one that practically determined the
course of late-nineteenth-century music history. Without taking it into account one can explain little of
what went on in the world of literate music-making during that time—and even up to the present. Whether
the historian agrees with the perception on which Beethoven’s authority has been based is of no
consequence to the tale, and has no bearing on the historian’s obligation to report it. That report
constitutes “reception history”—a relatively new thing in musicology, but (many scholars now agree) of
equal importance to the production history that used to count as the whole story. I have made a great effort
to give the two equal time, since both are necessary ingredients of any account that claims fairly to
represent history.
****Statements and actions in response to real or perceived conditions: these are the essential facts of
human history. The discourse, sooften slighted in the past, is in fact the story. It creates new social and
intellectual conditions to which more statements and actions will respond, in an endless chain of agency.
The historian needs to be on guard against the tendency, or the temptation, to simplify the story by
neglecting this most basic fact of all. No historical event or change can be meaningfully asserted unless its
agents can be specified; and agents can only be people. Attributions of agency unmediated by human
action are, in effect, lies—or at the very least, evasions. They occur inadvertently in careless
historiography (or historiography that has submitted unawares to a master narrative), and are invoked
deliberately in propaganda (i.e., historiography that consciously colludes with a master narrative). I