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At the end of a year of birthday celebrations in honour of Beethoven, a year also clouded by COVID-19 restrictions on all social activities, it is perhaps worthwhile to return to a thought-provoking article published earlier this year by Francis Grier: “The inner world of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Masculine and feminine?” Beethoven would have appreciated the irony in the fact that a serious pandemic had yet again intervened to tone down all the planned grand public celebrations in favour of more intimate, socially distant and more clearly articulated musical interactions. For distanced listeners this has made Beethoven’s more difficult compositions, including his Ninth Symphony, if not more understandable at least more accessible as things in themselves in all their musical complexity and thematically multidimensional emotional richness. He would also of course have been disappointed that he was not given the opportunity to shock and rouse into hope his listeners, now as then in much need of his optimism for the future.
Grier’s article is predicated on the assumption that psychoanalysis and music have a great deal in common in theory as well as in interactive communicative practice. Psychoanalysis, like art, functions, as George Elliot phrased it to “amplify experience and extend our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (Ashton 2003, xi). Artists make fresh threads of connection between different groups, creating a bridge between them and for them to enable transcendence in a multitude of directions. As academic disciplines and professional practice they both ultimately appeal to a common humanity, a humanity shared across a variety of socially constructed dimensions of differentiation. Grier focuses on the psychology of the music itself, rather than on details of Beethoven’s personal biography, and he approaches the music in three ways: through a structural analysis of Beethoven’s deviance from the classical sonata form; through a met