Birgit Lodes explores how women inspired and performed, enabled and transformed Beethoven's music and legacy.

Beethoven dedicated printed works to sixty-three individuals––twenty-three of them women–– mostly from the high nobility or the “second society” that shaped Viennese musical life and patronage around 1800. Nearly all knew the composer personally and shared his enthusiasm for a refined ideal of music that functioned as social and symbolic capital in the Bourdieusian sense. Beethoven’s dedications thus can offer a window into the social conditions of composition, early performance practices, and the meanings attached to these works. The pieces Beethoven dedicated to women—chiefly songs and piano compositions—not only reflect the gendered norms of musical education and salon culture central to his professional life, but, as I will argue, were often specifically crafted to suit the individual tastes and abilities of these women. 

Several of these works might never have existed without the inspiration and engagement of these female patrons and performers. Shifting the focus from the composer’s public “heroic” oeuvre to works reflecting his artistic and social engagements within these circles reveals a different Beethoven: one deeply embedded in the musical, cultural, and sociological networks of his time. Reconsidering these contexts challenges long-standing nationalist and bourgeois-masculine narratives and highlights the active, formative role of aristocratic women as patrons, performers, and mediators of Beethoven’s art in Habsburg Vienna.

Birgit Lodes studied in Munich, at UCLA, and at Harvard University. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Vienna and currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University. She is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Her research focuses on musical life in Central Europe around 1500 (https://musical-life.net/en), as well as on Beethoven, Schubert, and their circles.