Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Jan Swafford

In Germany and Austria it was to be a peace enforced by relentless repression. Metternich was determined to sacrifice liberty to stability, to the eternal “legitimacy” of thrones and aristocracies. In essence the state decreed that, to the greatest extent possible to enforce, history was to stop moving. The status quo was all. Politics were erased from public life. There were to be no more dreams or dreamers, only tranquil and submissive subjects. As Emperor Franz I informed a delegation of schoolmasters, “I have no use for scholars, but only for good citizens . . . Whoever serves me, must teach what I order; whoever cannot do this or comes along with new ideas, can leave or I shall get rid of him.”108 While the Final Act of the congress turned out splendidly in terms of the peace and stability of Europe, likewise for the old thrones and aristocracies, for the people of Germany and Austria it represented the beginning of a spirit-killing twilight age: the bland, conformist, philistine era that came to be called the Biedermeier.