The Question
Was Beethoven black? He surely wasn’t, but some insist otherwise. The question is not a new one—it has been rehashed over the course of several decades, although it never seems to have caused much of a stir in any public intellectual debates. Indeed, what is perhaps most fascinating about this question is that is has remained somewhat under the radar despite its stubbornness. Nobody really thinks Beethoven was black. And only a few have even stumbled upon the possibility. That Beethoven may have been black is pure trivia—a did-you-know factoid for the classical music enthusiast. The composer ranks with Alexanders Pushkin and Dumas as one of history’s great ethnic surprises, with the obvious exception that Beethoven wasn’t ethnic. He was simply swarthy.
The logic goes something like this: Beethoven’s family, by way of his mother, traced its roots to Flanders, which was for sometime under Spanish monarchical rule, and because Spain maintained a longstand-ing historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, somehow a single germ of blackness trickled down to our beloved Ludwig. This very theory—that Beethoven was descended from the Moors—has re-appeared in several works throughout the twentieth century. Jamaican historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) popularized this theory in several writings around midcentury, but the birth of the myth can be traced back further to approximately 1915 or even earlier according to music historian Dominique-René de Lerma, the world’s leading scholar on classical composers of color. Rogers asserted in his provocative and controversial works such as the three-volume Sex and Race (1941–44), the two-volume World’s Great Men of Color (1946–47), 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (1934), Five Negro Presidents (1965), and Nature Knows No Color Line (1952), that Beethoven—in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others—was genealogically African and thus black. Musicologist Donald Macardle and de Lerma both refuted this possibility with several decades between them. De Lerma also authored a brief account of this historical contestation in 1990 in an article entitled “Beethoven as a Black Composer” for the Black Music Research Journal. But the myth of Beethoven’s hidden ethnicity still lingers in contemporary culture. Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer published a short story collection in 2007 called Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories. Novelist Darryl Pinckney hoped to refute Rogers once and for all in Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002), based on his Alain Locke Lectures at Harvard University. Pinckney declares simply, “We don’t need to claim Beethoven.”
Surprisingly enough, a recent blog post has once again sparked interest in the historical question of Beethoven’s ethnic heritage. An intellectual rigor in that article is, of course, basically nonexistent. But it deserves mentioning simply because it has been somewhat widely circulated throughout the “blogosphere” and even considered legitimate despite its intellectual laziness. Author “Ron01” writes on his blog on open.salon.com:
In an age where history is seriously being rewritten, new information is coming forth that is shocking intel-lectual sensitivities. What was once considered written in stone is now melting away with the discovery of facts that heretofore have been hidden or omitted; things so different that they are generally classified as controversial or unusual. That brings us to the topic of this post; the true identity of Ludwig van Beethoven, long considered Europe’s greatest classical music composer. Said directly, Beethoven was a black man.