Beethoven's "Elite" Social Order and Claims to Distinction

Abstract

This article investigates Beethoven's term hohere Menschen (intellectual elite) from a historical and social perspective. The goal is to make Beethoven's self-positioning and claims to distinction comprehensible within the historical and social conditions at that time. While Beethoven rejected the feudalistic principle of inborn status and supplanted it with the Enlightenment's principal of equality, he nevertheless made elite claims to distinction based largely on the criteria of education, civilized behavior, and type of occupation. His positioning of himself in the group of hohere Menschen as well as his dissociation from the common citizen can be understood against the background of the then prevailing disparate social structure with its gradations between lower and higher levels.