How black was Beethoven
Why BeethovenThe issue of the composer’s mixed ancestry is no longer denied It has become a question of degree.
From my essay today in the Sunday Times:
…. What if we are ignoring physical evidence that stares us in the face? Two portraits of Beethoven, drawn in 1801 and 1814, show a man with a dark complexion. A bust by Franz Klein in 1812, taken from a plaster cast, confirms that he looks nothing like a fair-skinned north German of Netherlandish extraction. In Vienna they called him “the Spaniard”. He could be Mediterranean, even north African.
Scholars have known for about a century that his paternal grandmother, María Josefa Poll, belonged to a family that fled north during the 1700s War of Spanish Succession. Recent research locates her in Moorish eastern Spain. Beethoven knew his origins. He felt a deep affinity with Spain, setting his only opera, Fidelio, in the country and cheering Britain’s defeat of Napoleon’s peninsular army.
And that’s just his mother’s side. Take another look at the portraits and you will find that they differ in almost every feature from those of his two brothers.…
Read on here.
And in Why Beethoven, out next week.
“Recent research locates her in Moorish eastern Spain.”
The “musicologists” don’t know about music, don’t know about history, don’t know about geography, and definitely don’t know anything about Spain.
A good relatively recent book length study of Beethoven is Lewis Lockwood’s, from 2003.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393326383
I assure you Lockwood is very erudite and exceptionally intelligent scholar.
For musicological research on Spanish and Latin Americna music check the work of the American musicologist Robert Stevenson (1916-2012).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stevenson_(musicologist)
For more fun, listen to countless recordings by Jordi Saval and his many distinguished colleagues. Many of the CDs include very informative booklets.
Feel free to ask further questions.
How black was Beethoven?
How Jewish was Mendelssohn?
How fascinated is Mr Lebrecht with ethnicity in classical music?
How racist are the consumers of these blog posts?
Ad hominem seem unnecessary whether you agree or not.
It reminds me in my last job people always
Asked me where are you from.you do not sound
english. I always told them near Harrow
Oh, so that was a harrowing experience for you!!
i have been taken for an italian. my wife said i do not look italian . their men
are good looking.
Mendelssohn’s paternal grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was a significant figure in Jewish history. He was a catalyst in the Prussian emancipation of the Jews in the eighteenth century. His mother also came from a prominent Jewish family. His ancestry is well known. The case of Beethoven is different. These were not well known people, and it takes some digging to determine his family tree.
It‘s not THAT important. mildly interesting, for both.
And since we have no actual record of Beethoven’s birth, only his christening, family geneaology may be irrelevant.
To constantly bang on about race is racist. Give us a break. who cares whether Beethoven was black or green with pink spots?
You speak truth. And you must pay!!
We’ve never known Beethoven’s birthdate, and his appearance, personality and abilities do make it seem like he may not have been genetically related to his family. But attempts to discuss this online have gone sideways from the very first days of the internet. A very famous pianist I encountered in a chat room on AOL 30 years ago damaged my opinion of him by ranting about it in a fashion that can only be described as racist, and I am not using that as an ad hominem insult.
I guess being 1/4 Iberian makes you a “person of colour” in the UK.
Someone should inform the Spanish!
I think the view is that some of his ancestors were from Moorish Spain and thus possibly partially North African. A DNA study would answer the questions. They seem important because there is a recent history of people in classical music harboring ideas that racial considerations should be a part of employment practices. The Vienna Philharmonic is a notable example. See:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm
And in German:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets-ger.htm
Unfortunately, this recent history is still a taboo topic in Vienna.
That seems to me to be a simplistic way of looking at it. Of course Iberians and North Africans have been in contact and intermixing since forever… they are neighbors. There is no clear “racial” divide there and biologists have rejected the idea of races for very good reasons.
When the Muslims conquered Spain and many Iberians converted to Islam, their DNA didn’t change; perhaps it resulted in increased intermixing. Likewise, during the Christian Reconquista, when many people were forced to convert to Christianity, the Moors in Spain didn’t somehow change races. It is much more accurate to think of them in terms of language, culture and religion, rather than race.
Anyway, is the evidence suggesting that Beethoven’s grandmother was a Muslim? They would’ve faced heavy repression at that time.
Or are we just saying that she was from a part of Spain that was Muslim a few centuries before? Because that applies to most Spanish people.
Your information is completely false. Recent DNA studies provide detailed scientific information about the ethnicities of the people of Spain. This also includes the era after the Reconquesta when many Muslims and Jews were forced to become catholic. Professor Mark Jobling of Leicester University and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona found that 20 per cent of men in Spain and Portugal today still have distinctive Sephardic Jewish ancestry while 11 per cent have DNA that reflects Moorish ancestors. More information here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/07/genetics-conversion-catholicism-spain-religion
I often notice that people try to obfuscate or undermine with false information the issues surrounding the Vienna Phil’s history of racist employment practices.
Thank you for this interesting article, I think this is pretty much in line with what I said. That people are mixed and that conversions were the dominant effect, rather than simply one group replacing another.
The majority ancestry of the Moors of Spain was from Iberia itself, not from Berbers and Arabs moving there, which happened to a lesser extent.
I didn’t say anything about the VPO.
More complete nonsense. The Moors did not originate in Spain. They came from Morocco. See:
https://www.pilotguides.com/study-guides/short-history-of-the-moors/
They occupied Spain for 800 years and it is only in that sense that they could be seen as native to Spain which is a different matter. And indeed, you said nothing about the VPO and its history of racial employment practices. It’s a taboo topic most everyone pretends doesn’t exist.
Sorry for the misunderstanding: When talking about the “Moors in Spain”, I meant the entire Muslim population in Spain, which was the way the term (a Christian exonym) was used in the Middle Ages, at least according to Wikipedia. Not to Berbers or other North Africans specifically, but not excluding them either.
I see. Whatever their history, we can be thankful for the musical influences they had on Spanish music, even if indirectly.
This sounds like the Third Reich to me. Was Beethoven a true Aryan?
Everyone is of mixed ancestry. Humanity supposedly began in Africa so we are all either partly or wholly black.
A bust taken from a plaster cast shows him as black? The plaster cast would have been pure white though! Have you seen Rodin’s bust of Mahler? According to that Mahler was totally black.
So Beethoven’s maternal grandmother fled from the war of the Spanish succession and had Moorish ancestry – supposedly that’s why Fidelio was set in Spain – but can anyone prove that Beethoven cared enough about her to set his opera there? Never mind though – he had black hair and that clinches the matter.
He could be Mediterranean? That includes Italy and Greece – neither predominantly black. However, I can now reveal that he must have been partly Greek because he twice set three words of that language to music and wrote incidental music to The Ruins of Athens. He must have been partly British too because he wrote Variations on Rule Britannia and God Save the King – and his Battle Symphony celebrated Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Vitoria. What about all those settings of English, Scottish and Welsh songs? A manuscript of a short work for string quartet was recently found in Britain so that conclusively proves it.
Who will be the next victim of ethnic reassignment? Schubert, Wagner, Brahms? Take your pick.
You will never appease haters and racialists.
Goodness. So Is Beethoven black enough to be allowed by musicologists ?
Whats more, half of his ancestors were female, going back many generations. So perhaps we can treat him as an almost trans composer ?
Suddenly his music sounds even better !
I would even go so far as to say that all of his maternal ancestors were female.
Good one, Herbert!
But, did they all IDENTIFY as females?
My goodness, an unbroken line of virgin births! No wonder Beethoven’s mother took to drink, the trauma of being the first of her family to conceive after intercourse with a man.
More seriously, I hope Mr Lebrecht wrote this article (which is behind a paywall, so I haven’t read it) with tongue firmly in cheek.
I hope this means that it will now be OK to play Beethoven and thus fulfill that need for diversity and equity programming of minority composers as everyone must do these days in America 😉
Beethoven’s ethnicity aside, he does belong to another minority. It’s remarkable to think that there are so many people calling for the cancellation of someone with a disability.
So based on this flimsy nonsense, from now on it will be obligatory for Beethoven to be portrayed as a sub-Saharan black person. Nothing else will be considered acceptable; that’s the way it goes.
Ridiculous.
He ate regularly at Zum Schwartzen Kameel in Wien – if that helps.
I think he could have been almost as black as Obama, who is not completely black.
But the color of his skin does not change at all the value of his music, one way or the other. It is culture that forges music, not race. Folks who believe that Beethoven’s music irradiated from a colonialist, slave trading society, should remain coherent and still believe the same thing, regardless of his ancestors.
Obama is exactly half black: raised by a white mother after black father skipped out (unusual, I know).
So? What’s the point?
Here he looks like he has some kind of autoimmune disease with skin symptoms like lupus (malar rash) or Addison disease (hyperpigmentation of the skin).
A definitive conclusion might be possible by DNA analysis of his hair strands, which have been analyzed for their mercury content. While it’s more common to do DNA testing on hair follicles, it’s also possible to extract nuclear DNA from hair strands to yield similar fidelity to Ancestry or 23andMe results. It’s surprising that someone hasn’t already done it.
You need to read: Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History by Nicholas T. Rinehart. https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/hc:17168/CONTENT/black_beethoven_and_the_racial_politics.pdf/
I think this kind of misses the point about why things like diversity and inclusion are a thing today.
Race is a social construct – it’s not biology, it’s not DNA. At least in the United States (and probably to some degree in Europe), efforts to promote diversity and inclusion are not based on the color or hue of someone’s complexion, but on being inclusive of people with different life experiences, socioeconomic status, etc.. Because in the U.S., as most people are probably aware, we enslaved Black people for several hundred years and spent another century excluding them by law from equal participation in many parts of society. And haven’t come close to atoning for that.
None of this is relevant to whether Beethoven had some more southern-originating ancestors.
Exactly. The US playing out its own neuroses and stupidity on the rest of the world, as usual.
No – I’m thinking more about the trolls on SD who will say “So does Beethoven now qualify for ‘woke’ programming…?”
“We” didn’t do a damn thing to them. The slaveholders were a very small demographic, and large owners very very small. Also, then as now, those who benefitted, north and south, from this system were the monied elites. All those people are long dead.
Of course the US had a massive influx of of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe AFTER the Civil War. Most of these people settled in the north, “rust belt”, and coal country. Few would’ve participated directly in the Jim Crow oppression farther south. As it is, these generations are essentially all dead as well.
The ONLY “living” party bearing any responsibility for the centuries of oppression the slaves and their progeny suffered is the United States of America, that is the selfsame corporate entity that permitted said atrocities. The only argument that has any legal OR moral legitimacy is this one. The US as a corporate entity violated the human rights of the slaves and their descendants, increased its wealth as a direct result of their economic exploitation, and is therefore legally obliged to make reparations to them.
However, that being said, many could make a compelling case that generations of federal programs involving billions of dollars ought to count as reparations. Others might say the debt is paid and nothing more is owed. I personally disagree with this assessment, BUT I am also clear eyed about the political realities with which we must contend. I maybe naive, BUT I suspect a critical majority of more right-leaning voters might support a serious reparations program IF it was more than just blindly throwing money at a problem, IF it were a comprehensive Marshall Plan type effort to overhaul dysfunctional communities of color, and therefore had a demonstrated chance of success, AND involved the less divisive and less vengeful justification given above.
The “woke” garbage that is currently circulating has very little to do with reality, and indeed even less to do with any serious desire to improve the lives of POCs…or anyone else for that matter, save the plutocrats. Indeed, this off the rails divisive insanity only serves to perpetuate the divisions among ordinary folks that prevent a united front against our common foe. Nothing gets better until a sufficient mass of wokesters grow up and stop taking the white hate bait. The traitorous globalist elites robbing us all and destabilizing the entire world are not any one race or ethnicity, and have no allegiance to any. Their only allegiance is to greed, and only to each other as it serves their individual interests.
Incidentally, the ill gotten wealth that supports these elite crooks was established centuries ago, and it’s quite factual to say this very same group initiated and were the greatest beneficiaries of the Atlantic slave trade. Obviously this trade had a racial component, and very long racial implications indeed, but the motivation was as colorblind as it ever was. Greed doesn’t care.
Gustav Mahler looks very brown in photographs. What was his “secret” ethnic/racial origins?
Prof. Philip Ewell, distinguished Professor stated on his blog on April 24th, 2020:
“Beethoven occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years”.
Shouldn’t this be slightly reworded?
(Just asking for a friend.)
And can we be certain that Beethoven was really male?
More research is needed.
I guess I have to weigh in as a visual artist afloat in a sea of musicians. Paintings deteriorate in time. Pigments darken, especially yellows and whites, depending on their chemical makeup, as well as the varnishes, applied and re-applied over the centuries. That might account for the dark skin. On the other hand, it could be a simple case of B. having been out in the sun too long before he sat for his portraits. He did a lot of walking out-of-doors, remember? Let us not forget the portrait of him with those wild eyes after he had reportedly downed 30 cups of coffee. Coffee in those days would have been VERY strong, even in demitasse cups.
Other than these little points of observation, for once, I am pleased that so many have reject the “racist” taint to the premise. Not surprising that it came from the British press.
Well, I don’t believe Beethoven was really African, but you clearly didn’t read the article before writing your reply or have poor reading comprehension. It’s not just the portraits; contemporaries talked about his dark looks and he was called “the Spaniard” or “the Moore.” I don’t think this means much, but it’s certainly more than portraits darken over time. Why haven’t Haydn’s, Mozart’s, Bach’s, et al portraits “darkened”?
I have the answer! Check out this podcast “Beethoven is Black…ish” here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NzI2y0qIGDhBzd4R5OQxv?si=0948c8bc153346b6
The portrait you use with the article is a monochrome, which explains the dark complexion. There is also a color version that shows a white, almost pale, Beethoven. http://www2.csudh.edu/oliver/beetport/beetport.htm The caption to this portrait says, “This engraving was regarded in Beethoven’s circle as particularly lifelike. Beethoven himself thought highly of it, and gave several copies to his friends.”
The 1801 portrait shows ruddy cheeks, like a Flemish painting. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven_Riedel_1801.jpg
The first link gives other portraits of Beethoven, none of which give him a dark complexion.
In comparing the two versions, it is interesting to note that the lighter version shows details of his coat whereas the darker, “black” version obliterates the details almost entirely. This suggests to me that it is artificially dark.
Anyone who has used even basic image software will be familiar with the impact of crude brightness adjustments.
but why?
Humans first evolved in Africa. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Any human being with a minimum of intelligence knows that.
So what? Does that make Beethoven’s music even greater or more special? What’s the point with all this navel-gazing?
This is a very old narrative which has proven to be wrong, I’m afraid.
The oldest bones found are not only 6-7 million years old but almost 12 million years and they found them – believe it or not – in South Germany
Danuvius guggenmosi
https://www.n-tv.de/wissen/fundsache/Neuer-Vorfahr-des-Menschen-entdeckt-article21377899.html
Graecopithecus freybergi
https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article164823057/Lebten-die-Vorfahren-des-Menschen-doch-in-Europa.html
https://greekreporter.com/2022/06/24/greek-fossils-suggest-human-ancestors-evolved-in-europe-not-africa/
So the out-of-Africa theory seems to be outdated and it is Europe according to the latest findings.
Apart from this it is very unfair these days to reduce a composer to his race. This is Racism 2.0. The Nazis also tried to argue with pseudo science. BS. From a biological point of view races to not even exist. PERIOD!
I see you are unaware of Godwin’s Law.
The findings you mentioned DO NOT suddenly upend the current paradigm. That’s not how science works. IF these specimens were proven to be what the least conservative interpretation suggests, it would introduce complexity to the Out of Africa model, but not debunk it. All hominin evolution would still be confined to Africa, and our species still originates there ~250kya.
Or it just speaks volumes about how any great art from centuries past is assumed to have been created by a white man. But I suppose introspection is too much to ask from the upper-class.
That’s a load of nonsense. It’s assumed that some historical figure is of this or that lineage because the preponderance of the evidence always suggested it. It’s pretty damn firm ground to assume aristocrats from Germanic countries in the time period of interest were “white.” It’s only when conflicting data arises that one is compelled to wonder, “Maybe he was of mixed heritage.” It’s not FQing racist to ponder that question or doubt it. It is racially motivated to latch onto the tiniest anecdote and scream, “AHA! He’s one of ours!” This entire manner of “reasoning” is just so ridiculous and cringe anyway. It’s as if everyone with pale skin reflects on Beethoven, or Edison and then ponds his chest and thinks, “We did it!” “We” of course didn’t do squat! This business of collective pride over the singular achievements of great individuals is just silly. It’s as ridiculous as holding an entire people, or racial category, responsible for the evil deeds of a few who happened to be among them…and usually positioned above them.
It’s just like the nuttery over ancient Egyptians. All genetic evidence collected thus far paint a picture of the past very similar to the present: people varied across the globe, and IN GENERAL people were most closely related to those closest geographically. North Africa has been mixing with southern Europe for as long as people were in southern Europe. Northeast Africa has likewise been mixing with southwest Asia for as long as people have existed. This is particularly the case with our species since the latest models have us evolving near the Horn of Africa.
What TF is meant by “Black people” when we are discussing these contexts? We now know we were heavily pigmented long before sapiens even comes on the scene. We didn’t go vanilla the moment we stepped foot into Eurasia. We were still black when we got to SE Asia and Australia. We were still “black” when we populated Europe. Indeed, it now looks like Europe was mostly dark skinned until only about 5000 years ago, when Neolithic farmers brought paler skin that had evolved in Asia. But what’s to be gleaned from this: dark skin means “Black people” but pale skin means something else? As if after tens of thousands of years and dozens and dozens of populations evolving in different parts of the globe, everyone with dark skin is one kind of human, and those with pale skin are another? There aren’t words for how ridiculous this is.
AND it isn’t any less ridiculous if we confine this warped logic to Africa. Owing to the fact that sapiens have been evolving there for ~250k years, Africa is the most ethnically, linguistically, and genetically diverse place on earth. To say that “African” is a type of human is ludicrous. And it’s not really better to think of Nilotic in such essentialist terms either. Yes of course there are discernible patterns in phenotypic traits like skin color that can map onto what we know about the history of populations moving in Africa…but it’s important to remember these are PATTERNS and not rigid entities.
It’s just sooooo tiresome for people to constantly try and project their modern political sensibilities into the past.
I had a friend who recently took one
of those DNA tests and it came back
saying he had some Neanderthal DNA
in him ! But I could have told him that
for free ! But the point is …who cares !
OH, for the sake of everything holy, WHY does this great musician suddenly HAVE to be BLACK? He would be Beethoven if he were purple, but to in a new fad to appease a bunch of culturally insecure folk have to be “found” to be of a particular skin color or ancestry. NO, no more special casting of opera or recasting of composers. There is but one “race” — human — and a very few geniuses among them, but a whole lot of folks who have to make themselves feel significant by appropriating the achievements of others (while castigating others whom they say are doing precisely that same thing). BE GRATEFUL for Beethoven who is a gift to everyone.
“Recent research locates her in Moorish eastern Spain. Beethoven knew his origins.” Could you give a cite for this?
Can you give a link for the 1801 portrait that shows a dark complex?
What about the 1801 portrait that shows a ruddy complexion?
The question should be, Was Mozart polka- dot.
No, Mozart didn’t compose polkas.
Funny how for so many years, decades, centuries things like this has been done,said . They say Jesus was ? that’s a lie! The lies that been told and showed all get exposed at some time!!! cheers
Beethoven’s skin color was “dark brown”, as described in the well known Gottfried Fischer manuscripts, consistent with several other decriptions of Beethoven’s skin color by his contemporaries. From c. 1775 when he was age about 5 years, Beethoven lived in the Fischer house, for about ten years. Gottfried’s recollections describe Beethoven as of ” short, stocky build, broad-shouldered, with a short neck, large head, round nose, dark-brown facial complexion, he always had a somewhat forward-bending gait. In the house, in his boyhood, he used to be called “the Spaniard.”
The comments on these Beethoven blog posts are always a shitshow. Lmao…
But, lucky for everyone, there has now been a DNA study done on the man, showing he is >99% European, and clusters with the North Rhine-Westfalia region.
So, to the question of “degree of blackness” the answer turns out to be: ZERO.
The plot…does indeed thicken! New DNA testing proves Beethoven was NOT a Beethoven, not biologically anyway…so stay tuned. A
https://www.wsj.com/articles/beethoven-dna-hair-health-98155ce5