A new album by the group Beethoven Was African aims to prove that the polyrhythms of the composer’s music point to west African heritage. But does their quest open up a more important debate in classical music?

My initial response to the question, “Are Beethoven’s African origins revealed by his music?” that has been asked at the website Africa Is a Country, is a definitive “no”. It is based on questionable premises that lack real historical evidence, at least to the story of Beethoven and his music over the past couple hundred of years.

This is far from a new idea. Here, Nicholas T Rinehart outlines the century-long history of the “Black Beethoven” trope and analyses the cultural and racial politics that have made this such a potent idea. He suggests our attraction to the notion that Beethoven was black is a symptom of classical music’s tortured position on race and music: “This desperation, this need to paint Beethoven black against all historical likelihood is, I think, a profound signal that the time has finally come to make a single … and robust effort [to reshape] the classical canon.” Rinehart says we must reimagine the entire history of western art music.

Overturning that conventional wisdom is exactly the point, for the researchers and musicians behind Beethoven Was African, a website and album of new performances. And it’s exactly this narrative that the pianist ANY, a member of the collective, refutes in their interview with Africa is a Country.

ANY gives a spirited interpretation of the possibilities of Beethoven’s African heritage, and believes there are key questions about his background thanks to gaps in the records of his portraiture, biography and social life.

ANY also believes Beethoven was a master at manipulating his image. “We can say he shaped and transformed his public image in the manner of a [person such as] Michael Jackson, but two centuries before him. He had no plastic surgery at the time, however he had portraitists who lent themselves to this game of illusion, mainly because they were paid to do so.”

Beethoven Was African​ project​ wants to discover – or rediscover – the global roots of ​Beethoven

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How could Beethoven, living in 19th-century Vienna, have garnered a ‘precise knowledge’ of west African polyrhythmic traditions? Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns via Getty Images

This thesis rests on the argument that Beethoven wanted to conceal his African origins. It is suggested that his father was Frederick II of Prussia and his mother one of the king’s kammermohr, African room servants. (This claim is based on an entry in the 19th-century Dictionnaire Historique des Musiciens and is part of a long-standing tradition of turning great men into princes by genetic default, thus proving the essential elevation of royal blood. It will surprise many since Frederick II’s homosexuality is well-known - it’s several degrees of bonkers-ness above the more long-standing theory from many purveyors of the Beethoven-was-black idea: as Rinehart says, which has it that his mother’s family traces its lineage back to Spanish-controlled Flanders; Beethoven’s blackness is thanks to from the close connection between the Spanish and the Moors.)

We do know that Beethoven had a close friendship with the black virtuoso violinist George Bridgetower, for whom he composed his most ambitious violin sonata, the Kreutzer (they premiered it together, and Beethoven called it his “Sonata per un Mulattico Lunatico”). The sonata’s dedication was only changed to another violinist when the two fell out over a girl. Bridgetower is not known to have made any reference to his friend having African or Moorish heritage. Let alone, for example, the mountain of other evidence that supports the more conventional reading of Beethoven’s origins.

No matter. Because whatever the truth is, mundane facts don’t necessarily reduce the potential impact of ANY’s interpretation, because Beethoven Was African wants to discover – or rediscover – the global roots of the composer’s music. ANY tells Africa Is a Country: “Ludwig van Beethoven had a precise and almost absolute knowledge of polyrhythmic systems and patterns from the Gulf of Guinea region, on the west African coast. Although they are unwritten, I would even say that these traditional patterns … were fundamental to his work as a composer. Beethoven has achieved the perfect synthesis between polyphonic modes and tonal system, developed in Europe in the centuries that preceded his era, with polyrhythmic system and patterns from west Africa.”

Which is, I would humbly suggest, a patently ludicrous assertion: how could Beethoven, in 19th-century Vienna, possibly have garnered this “precise and almost absolute knowledge” of west African polyrhythmic traditions, even if he had wanted to? I look forward to being contradicted, as ever. But what is irrefutable in ANY’s testimony is the sense that there is even more in Beethoven’s music than conventional classical music wisdoms have so far found.

Sonatas performed by Beethoven Was Any – audio

Back to ANY: “These polyrhythms allow us, for the first time in the history of the recording of these music pieces, to cleanly hear the part played with the left hand, to hear the rhythm of the latter, to reveal its hidden polyphony, and not consider it as a simple accompaniment of the melody played with the right hand.” Which could be a fascinating upbeat to an album that promises to redress the balance of Beethoven playing: “If you compare the pieces of the Beethoven Was African album with previous [similar] recordings of [music by] 20th-century pianists, for example, you will realise with astonishment that the left hand appears almost with no rhythm, no soul.”

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My problem with the album isn’t the idea of opening up classical music to vivid new interpretations – however justified, ancient, or historically spurious – it is that the album itself doesn’t at all live up to the claims made for it. This is partly because the sound-recording quality is so poor, and partly because the performances veer from the technically compromised to the eccentrically interventionist (the movement from the Waldstein sonata especially). Far from adding new life to these pieces, ANY’s louder left hand flattens out the difference, diversity, and imagination of Beethoven’s music.

Beethoven Was African offers a potentially mind-opening idea as far as interpretative fictions go, and that could inspire new approaches to his music. But the essential question is: why do we need to claim Beethoven as black at all in order to think more deeply or differently about his music? Rinehart has it right, I think: the significance of the idea that he might have been black is that it is a symptom of classical music’s ossified canons, and a bigger story of cultural-racial politics, rather than a historically accurate line of questioning.

• The subheading of this article was amended on 10 June 2015 to correct the name of the group Beethoven Was African.

