Would the Real Beethoven Please Stand Up
My first post about Beethoven was on the OS platform. It had been there since September of 2009. Here’s the title: “WasBeethoven Black? Was His African Heritage Whitewashed?
Several years, 113 comments, and 2k “likes” later, it was one of my best, if not simply my best, effort at creating a post that would provoke some thought and stimulate comment and conversation. The last comment was dated September 12, 2012.
The “argument” that ensued as a result of the post, centered on the question of whether or not Beethoven was in fact a black man of African descent.
In the course of responding to comments, some of which were quite vitriolic, I found myself reiterating the question which, I think, is at the heart of the post: Why was it necessary for Beethoven’s likeness to undergo the transformation which, in my humble opinion, is so readily apparent when the array of sketches and paintings are juxtaposed as they are here.
Why was it necessary for artists and historians to systematically remove any hint of the possibility that Beethoven might have been, or was in fact, a black man?
Why was it imperative that his image go from having distinctly Negroid/African features to some kind of stylized Aryan ideal?
06/16/2019 @ 8:01 am
You can now get comments on this post
06/17/2019 @ 2:09 pm
I personally think that the “artists” of that time were the same ones who insisted portraying pictures of Jesus as a white, blue eyed, blonde.
06/22/2019 @ 9:40 am
That was the ideal appearance as far as those artists were concerned, given where they were and who they were. They liked their composers and their gods to look like them.
06/22/2019 @ 4:25 pm
By the same token, no one ever talked about the fact that Alexander Dumas was black. It wasn’t even a topic of conversation in France where interracial marriages was commonly accepted long before they became acceptable in the Anglo Saxon world (and not yet in certain parts of that world.) The conventional depictions of historical icons always reflect the prejudices of the predominant culture of the period. What is remarkable is that we are now conscious of this when before times we weren’t.
06/22/2019 @ 4:26 pm
PS- i am messing around the page layout,. fixing something that went off.
06/23/2019 @ 12:53 am
When a people is forced into a role and others’ experience with them is almost exclusively in that role, those others will make assumptions about that people based on that experience. Keep a population enslaved, uneducated, poor, and the only people you see who look like that are enslaved, uneducated, and poor, you can start to assume that those people are that way because they are rather than because they were forced to be. That’s American racism in a nutshell, or at least a lot of American racism’s origins. Its continuation is a little more complicated, because the information about being forced to be like that is freely available but widely ignored because the belief in the inferiority of others is more convenient than acknowledging the artificial factors that led one to think that. “Widely ignored” describes current American racism in a nutshell.
06/23/2019 @ 10:26 pm
I suspect his ancestry likely was whitewashed. He would not be the first person in history to have his ancestry whitewashed, nor will he be the last. The same people who see Jesus as blond haired and blue eyed are also going to be unable (or unwilling) to “see” other historical figures as anything other than looking “like them”. (MrsRaptor)
06/24/2019 @ 9:10 am
The great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin was actually an African slave, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who later became a general to “Peter the Great”. …
Pushkin is considered to be the greatest Russian poet and pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems, plays, mixing both drama and romance…
Alexander Pushkin, the Black father of Russian literature
BindleSnitch - The Unwitting Perpetration and Perpetuation of Racism
07/20/2019 @ 12:47 pm
[…] Would the Real Beethoven Please Stand Up […]
07/20/2019 @ 6:46 pm
I think Alan has it right, largely.
I am aware of the controversy tho I am unaware of the evidence that suggests LvB was of African descent.