Ode to Beethoven: David Cormack greets a new critical translation of a landmark Wagner essay

Review of Richard Wagner’s ‘Beethoven’ (1870), tr. Roger Allen (Boydell Press, 2014).

March 2015, Volume 9, Number 1, 77–81.

It’s only just over 200 pages in all (which includes some 84 pages of German parallel text), but Roger Allen’s translation of Wagner’s essay ‘Beethoven’ comes sturdily bound by Boydell Press in thick weighty boards. The book comes without a wimpy dust jacket, and those libraries that can afford it can be assured that this is a publication built to last. Nominally inspired by the Beethoven centenary, ostensibly inspired by Schopenhauer, initially inspiring Nietzsche but eventually precipitating his apostasy, Wagner’s essay dwells on the eternal worth of the ‘noumenal’ and the transient meretriciousness of the ‘phenomenal’. But this new critical edition is itself a phenomenon, its physical substantiality encasing much care and attention.