Born in December 1770 in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven spent most of his adult life in Vienna, where his stunning symphonies and personal tragedy had made him a celebrity at the time of his death in 1827. Some accounts indicate that 10,000—or even 30,000—attended his funeral march. Depictions of the scene show throngs of people gathering in carriages and on foot, decked in their finery and hustling to glimpse the procession.
But his cultural ascendancy in America was far from a foregone conclusion. As historian Ann Ostendorf has written, a number of music cultures coexisted in colonial America, from the music of enslaved Africans, the many types of Native American music and the hymns sung in church congregations. As European colonizers settled and amassed wealth, they began to slowly establish centers for the music of their home countries by creating societies, which supported the incomes of musicians through benefit concerts.
Beethoven himself never traveled to the United States, and it’s hard to know for certain when his music first arrived on American shores. Performances of his work during the composer’s lifetime were scattered, and usually tied to wealth, Broyles notes. The 1805 Charleston performance, which Broyles believes to be the earliest of Beethoven’s work in the nascent United States, followed this trend.
A port city, the South Carolina city’s status as a hub for the rice trade and an epicenter for the enslavement and sale of people had made it home to some of the wealthiest men in the country.
Decades prior, these gentlemen founded the St. Cecilia Society, a music society based on similar entities in Europe. Many of these men—and membership was exclusively limited to men, with women only allowed to attend concerts as guests—had doubtless made their fortunes, in part, through the enslavement of Africans. “In one sense, then, Beethoven arrived in America on the backs of African slaves,” Broyles writes in Beethoven in America.
The 1805 concert would have looked and sounded remarkably different from what we imagine today, says Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, curator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike modern instruments, which have been exquisitely crafted to sound smooth and homogenous, 19th-century period instruments sounded “sort of like handloomed, nubby silk,” the curator says.
“Musicologists will often describe the musical world before Beethoven … as event-orientated,” Strauchen-Scherer explains. Concerts were for celebrating specific occasions, and music was not considered high art—for instance, Broyles notes that the Charleston program lists a “potpourri” of performers alongside a rendition of Beethoven’s music that included amateur musicians as well as professionals.
But the landscape of America changed rapidly in these years, and so, too, did the landscape of classical music. An influx of German immigrants in the late 1840s brought passion for Beethoven and printed scores of his music across the Atlantic. Traveling groups of European virtuosos took advantage of an ever-expanding network of railroads to crisscross the country, bringing classical arrangements to major cities across the nation.