The sources for this study comprise: the artistic
and critical works assembled for the Beethoven exhibit of 1902
by the Viennese Secessionists (a group of artists who withdrew
from mainstream cultural institutions in 1897 to develop an
independent modernist aesthetics); the writings of a group of
modernists around Adolf Loos and Arnold Schoenberg; and documents
providing insight into Mahler's and Schoenberg's interpretations
of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The dissertation argues that
the Beethoven reception of these bourgeois artists served the
fundamental purpose of defining and promoting their authority
against the cultural hegemony of the monarchy and the emerging
authority of women.