Greatness in art is a function of the art itself, but not so the recognition of greatness. The keys to the pantheon have always been in the hands of the hoi polloi. For Beethoven, whose nine symphonies are the focus of the St. Louis Symphony's soon-to-open subscription season, the gatekeepers stood ready even as the composer lay on his deathbed.

The funeral took place on the sunny afternoon of March 29, 1827. Eight singers from Vienna's royal opera served as pallbearers. They were preceded in the cortege by a quartet of trombonists and a 16-member choral ensemble that performed a ''Miserere'' concocted especially for the occasion by the city's Kapellmeister. Behind them, carrying long white ribbons, were the brightest lights of Viennese intelligentsia, and then came government officials, students from the conservatory and members of the general public. From the house where Beethoven lay in state to the cathedral it was a mere 500 steps, yet it took the procession almost an hour and a half to go the distance; the crowd through which it squeezed was estimated at some 20,000 persons. The oration was delivered by the poet Franz Grillparzer, a friend of Beethoven's since 1805 and long one of his most ardent champions. Grillparzer spoke, in the metaphor-rich language so typical of the early 19th century, of the unique position Beethoven had held among composers of the day.

''As the behemoth sweeps through the seas, he swept across the boundaries of his art,'' Grillparzer said. ''From the cooing of the dove to the thunder's roll, from the subtlest interweaving of willful artifices to that awesome point at which the fabric passes over into the lawlessness of clashing natural forces - he traversed all, he comprehended everything. He who follows him cannot continue; he must begin anew, for his predecessor ended only where art ends.''

Grillparzer spoke, too, of the esteem in which Beethoven would be held by future generations, and he observed that a transformation - one not so much spiritual as cultural - had occurred the moment Beethoven gave up the ghost. ''You have not lost him but have won him,'' Grillparzer reminded the crowd. ''No living man enters the halls of immortality. The body must die before the doors are opened. He whom you mourn is now among the greatest men of all time, unassailable forever.''

Eighteen years later a similar conviction was expressed, albeit with considerably less grace, by Oskar Ludwig Bernhard Wolff. Wolff was active primarily as an editor of literary anthologies, but a commission from the town council of Bonn spurred him to wax poetic:

The occasion for the inflated panegyric, of which the above is just a small excerpt, was the dedication of a statue of Beethoven in Bonn's main square. Bonn was where Beethoven was born. Even though the composer had fairly abandoned the place as soon as he was old enough to travel, the townfolk were nonetheless proud of their native son. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, they planned a festival that would climax with the unveiling of the monument. For reasons one suspects had something to do with local politics, it was decided to ask Wolff to pen the words of the cantata that would accompany the unveiling. But for the music the committee turned to no less a figure than Franz Liszt.

The premiere of Liszt's ''Festkantate zur Enthuelling des Beethoven-Denkmals in Bonn'' took place as scheduled, on Aug. 13, 1845, and five months later the work was presented in Paris. Neither performance made much of an impression on its audience, and soon the piece was consigned to Liszt's closet. In the dusty archives the music survived in the original orchestral score and in Liszt's own arrangement for four-hand piano; from both versions, however, the text was missing, and so the cantata was deemed unpublishable as well as unperformable.

It was only seven years ago that German musicologist Guenther Massenkeil, digging through relics of the 1845 Bonn festival, found Wolff's perhaps deservedly long-lost poem. Massenkeil matched the words with what seemed to be the appropriate melodic lines, and in 1989 his reconstruction of the cantata was performed in Bonn and Budapest. Liszt's ''Cantata for the Unveiling of the Beethoven Monument in Bonn'' will get its third modern production in Indianapolis on Friday and Saturday evenings, when Indianapolis Symphony music director Raymond Leppard uses it to open his orchestra's 1992-93 season.

Leppard, it should be noted, is one of a half-dozen conductors who will be leading the St. Louis orchestra through the Beethoven symphonies this season. Usually when an orchestra announces a symphonic cycle so weighty as Beethoven's, the result represents the interpretive concept of a single maestro. Whether or not St. Louis Symphony music director Leonard Slatkin actually has a concept of Beethoven remains to be heard. But maybe it is only for reasons of scheduling that Slatkin has opted to do just four of the nine symphonies here. In any case, he's assigned himself - in order - Nos. 1, 7, 9 and 3; the others, also in order, will be led by Joseph Silverstein (No. 6), Leppard (No. 8), Hans Vonk (No. 4), Marek Janowski (No. 2) and Eduardo Mata (No. 5).

Even divvied up and chronologically scrambled, a traversal of Beethoven's entire symphonic output ought not pass unnoticed. It is a somewhat informal monument to Beethoven, but it is a monument nevertheless. One beholds it with awe, for it is a reminder that in Beethoven's genius there was indeed ''the surest promise of immortality.''

Is Mozart similarly blessed? Is Bach, or Schubert, or any of the other composers whose music we continually celebrate and to whom posterity has awarded the mantle of greatness? The answer, I think, is no. At least, I don't believe that Mozart et al. are immortal in quite the same way that Beethoven is.

Grillparzer was on the mark when he told the funeral crowd that ''he whom you mourn is now among the greatest men of all time,'' and I'll bet he put emphasis on the word ''now.'' Had Beethoven lived and died a generation earlier he would have been, as was Mozart, a sublimely gifted craftsman. Had he lived and died later, he would have joined Mahler in the ranks of brilliant artists. But Beethoven's timing was right. He burst on the scene when Romanticism was in its fullest flower, at precisely the moment in European history when a musician of talent could also be a god-like hero.

It is no wonder that Beethoven's ascension happened immediately upon his death. And it is no wonder that Beethoven's exalted position has never been seriously threatened. Although the Romantic spirit eventually went out of fashion, it seems that many of the ideas born of that spirit took permanent hold in Western culture.

One of those ideas, surely, has to do with the moral superiority of the free-minded individual who defies convention and who ultimately sacrifices personal well-being for the sake of integrity. This individual, of course, is a fictional character, today presented to us by Hollywood screenwriters in the same routine way hack authors presented him to readers of novels in the latter half of the 19th century. But early in the 19th century, when the character was invented, he could be exemplified by at least one flesh-and-blood human being.

Beethoven was of his time, but he is also of our time, more so than any of his mates in the Great Composers' Hall of Fame. Eighteen years after his death he was memorialized in Bonn; 165 years after his death he is being memorialized in St. Louis, probably for the same reasons.

Composers approach their task in various ways, and surely one of the most common involves the writing out of at least a few preliminary outlines and drafts. That for Beethoven the making of sketches was an integral part of the creative process is not in itself unusual, then. But Beethoven went about it in a dogged way that is almost unique in the history of music.

When he was still in his youth he developed the practice of seeking the right shape for an embryonic tune not by playing various versions of it on the piano but by shifting the notes around - again and again - on paper. Later, in the years when he was producing his most famous masterpieces, it was not uncommon for him to put a melodic fragment through as many as 60 or 70 written-out variations before he granted it status as a finished theme.

Beethoven bought large quantities of manuscript paper just for these sketches, and for the sake of convenience he often stitched sheets together himself when he could not afford ready-made notebooks. Toward the end of his life, when his deafness was the most profound, he regarded his pocket-sized sketchbooks as far more important than the ''conversation books'' through which his friends communicated to him. ''He was never to be seen in the street without a small notebook in which he jotted down whatever occurred to him at the moment,'' recalled his friend Ignaz von Seyfried, ''and whenever conversation turned to this he would facetiously quote the words of Joan of Arc: 'Without my banner I dare not come.' ''

EVEN MORE unusual is the way Beethoven held on to his sketches. In the last 35 years of his life he changed residences more times than scholars care to count; practically the only thing that followed him in every move was the ever-growing pile of sketches. When he died, in 1827, the sketches found in his apartment filled more than 50 volumes and several hundred unbound leaves. The earliest of them date to 1792.

There are, of course, practical reasons why a composer would retain a musty old sketchbook containing a fragment of music that, at the time of writing, seemed to hold little promise of maturing. A 16-bar snippet that Beethoven tossed off in 1802 eventually - after lying dormant for two decades - evolved into the Bagatelle in D Major, Op. 119, No. 3, and it's possible that hidden in sketches from as early as 1794 are the germs of Nos. 2 and 4 in the same collection of lightweight piano pieces. Surely Beethoven could have produced something like the Op. 119 set without referring to a 20-year-old scribble. But perhaps having access to the original notation - or perhaps just remembering that it was there, somewhere in his private files - made the job a little easier.

And there might have been other reasons why Beethoven so carefully saved his sketches. Musicologist Joseph Kerman, in a 1967 article on the composer's string quartets, suggests that the sketches served not only to aid Beethoven's creative process but also to boost his morale, that Beethoven - lonely throughout his life and especially anti-social in the 1820s - treasured them ''in order to look back over them in times of need or in times of doubt.''

For whatever reasons their author hoarded them, the Beethoven archives constitute the largest body of sketches produced by any major composer. They are potentially invaluable for scholars' understanding not only of the chronology of Beethoven's music but also of the working of his creative mind.

YET THE manuscripts' potential has gone largely unrealized. Shortly after Beethoven's death the sketchbooks were sold at auction. Some stayed intact but many were broken, their pages ending up in autograph collections. Anyone who got his hands on a Beethoven sketch recognized its value, of course; the materials were usually well-enough preserved, and there was little point in keeping secret one's possession of a manuscript. As early as the 1870s Beethoven scholars knew pretty much where all the materials were. But no one knew precisely how the widely scattered pages were supposed to fit together.

In 1970, the year in which the bicentennial of Beethoven's birth was so grandly celebrated world-wide, Joseph Kerman published an article in The Musical Quarterly praising recent work of scholars at the Beethovenhaus in Bonn. Hans Schmidt's catalogue was a much-needed contribution, Kerman wrote, for it clarified to a certain extent the order of about half the surviving pages of sketches. At least a thousand more pages, however, had not been adequately identified and placed in sequence. ''Given the currently received schedule of musicological priorities,'' Kerman wrote, it ''may well take until the tercentennial'' before a complete catalogue is available.

In fact it took only 15 years.

''The Beethoven Sketchbooks'' (University of California Press; 612 pages; $75) is the product of Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson and Robert Winter, a trio of scholars who have been jointly committed to the problem since 1974.

AS ARCHIVISTS always do, Johnson, Tyson and Winter of course made scientific examinations of watermarks and inks. But they also studied the several thousand extant sketch pages with a keen eye for the placement of stitch holes, the thickness of pencil marks, the configuration of staves, the penetration of coffee stains and the mirror images of ink blots.

Their work has been almost unbelievably meticulous, and one example can here serve to illustrate the kind of detail with which the book is packed. For years it's been surmised that 28 manuscript pages held in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin originally belonged to theso-called ''Pastoral'' Symphony sketchbook, whose other leaves are today in libraries in Bonn, Vienna and London. Not only have Johnson, Tyson and Winter been able to prove that that is indeed the case, but they demonstrate that p. 103 of one of the bundles in Berlin is supposed to come opposite leaf D of one of the bundles in Bonn.

Matching up one frayed edge with another put them on the right track. But the clincher was a greasy smudge they found at the bottom of both pages, symmetrically smooshed when Beethoven called it a day and slammed the book shut. Combining that evidence with the intensities of the pen strokes, scholars now know more or less the precise order in which Beethoven grappled with the themes of the two Op. 70 piano trios that are contained on those long-separated pages, and from there they can draw whatever conclusions they care to.

Doubtless the only persons who will actually want to read this tome from cover to cover, or even go beyond the introductory chapters, will be other Beethoven scholars and graduate students interested in learning about state-of-the-art sleuthing techniques. But sooner or later the rest of us will benefit from it as well - Beethoven's music is monumental, and finally the sketches that helped generate itare dealt with in an appropriately monumental work of scholarship.

Rastrology 101

A WORD you won't find in the unabridged dictionary is tossed about casually by the authors of ''The Beethoven Sketchbooks.'' For example, a footnote about the so-called ''Pastoral'' Symphony sketchbook says ''In the rastrology of this paper, the middle line of the second staff is shorter than the other four at its right-hand end.''