Beethoven allo specchio dei Volkslieder: Save me from the grave and wise WoO 153 n. 50 e Glencoe WoO 156 n. 18

This essay argues for a reassessment of Beethoven’s Volkslieder corpus, challenging its longstanding historiographical marginalization associated with the so-called ‘years of silence’ during which these works were composed. After critically reconsidering interpretations that have emphasized either their economic function or their aesthetic ambiguity, it advances the hypothesis that the Volkslieder functioned as a central compositional laboratory within Beethoven’s oeuvre. An ‘operational theory’ grounded in five parameters – melody, accompaniment, rhythm, modality, and form – frames an investigation of the corpus’s intertextual function in relation to earlier, contemporary, and later works. Two case studies, Save me from the grave and wise (WoO 153 no. 50) and Glencoe (WoO 156 no. 18), demonstrate how Beethoven reworked melodies of folk tradition into materials that resurfaced in works central to the Beethovenian canon through generative or resemanticizing processes. Identifying earlier sources – particularly in the collections edited by Moore and Stevenson – makes it possible to reconstruct the melodies’ pre-Beethovenian history and to reassess George Thomson’s role in their transmission. The Volkslieder thus emerge as a site for the codification of a new musical vocabulary that shaped Beethoven’s style and called into question the Romantic myth of originality, aesthetic autonomy, and individual authorship – pillars of a musical category that paradoxically found its most authoritative confirmation in Beethoven himself.