Beethoven and the invention of genius

Beethoven is typically portrayed as the quintessential genius of western culture and as a revolutionary of music. These portrayals underplay the ways in which his success and reputation as a genius among his contemporaries can be understood as a social. cultural und technological construction. This paper explores the social bases of Beethoven's success during his first decade and a half in Vienna. Beethoven's success was facilitated by changes in the social organization and cultural climate of musical patronage, by the supportive and practical activities of his close circle of aristocratic patrons and by Beethoven's own efforts to renegotiate the musician-patron relationship at the turn of the nineteenth century. The expanding climate of receptivity to Beethoven's work became in turn a resource for the further development of Beethoven's own artistic projects and for the perceived idiosyncrasies of Beethoven's musical style.