The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination

by Matthew Guerrieri

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guerrieri, Matthew.

  The first four notes : Beethoven’s fifth and the human imagination / by Matthew Guerrieri.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96092-4

  1. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827. Symphonies, no. 5, op. 67, C minor. 2. Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770–1827—

  Appreciation. I. Title.

  ML410.B42G94 2012

  784.2′184—dc23 2012019886

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  For my father,

  who let me steal his books and records

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PREFACE

  1 Revolutions

  2 Fates

  3 Infinities

  4 Associations

  5 Secret Remedies

  6 Earthquakes

  7 Samples

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A Note About the Author

  FORD: … here, how about this … “Da da da dum!” Doesn’t that stir anything in you?

  f/x airlock door opens

  VOGON GUARD: ’Bye, I’ll mention what you said to my aunt.

  f/x airlock door closes

  FORD: Potentially bright lad I thought.

  ARTHUR: We’re trapped now, aren’t we?

  FORD: Errrrr … yes, we’re trapped.

  —DOUGLAS ADAMS

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio series)

  Preface

  MARTEN: What about you? Do you have any big nostalgia-inducing songs?

  HANNELORE: Beethoven’s Fifth reminds me of Canada. I don’t know why. I’ve never been to Canada.

  —JEPH JACQUES, Questionable Content1

  In his best seller Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music, first published in 1929, the poet and essayist Robert Haven Schauffler polled a parade of opinions of Beethoven’s Fifth from a pool of straw men:

  To Brown it may signify a fierce conflict with a sexual obsession. To Jones a desperate campaign against an inferiority complex. To Robinson an old-fashioned pitched battle à la “Paradise Lost,” between the forces of good and evil. To a victim of hysteria it may depict a war between sanity and bedlam. To a neurasthenic a struggle between those two mutually exclusive objectives: “To be, or not to be?” To an evolutionist it may bring up the primordial conflict of fire and water, of man with beast, of civilization with savagery, of land with sea.2

  Such mutable celebrity had already long surrounded the symphony. Beethoven’s Fifth, the Symphony in C minor, op. 67, might not be the greatest piece of music ever written—even Beethoven himself preferred his Third Symphony, the Eroica3—but it must be the greatest “great piece” ever written, a figure on which successive mantles of greatness have, ever more inevitably, fit with tailored precision. And its iconic opening is a large part of that: short enough to remember and portentous enough to be memorable, seeming to unlock the symphony’s meaning but leaving its mysteries temptingly out of reach, saying something but admitting nothing.

  This is a book about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. More specifically, it is a book about the opening notes of that symphony; and more specifically than that, it is a book about what people have heard in those notes throughout history, and how history itself has affected what was heard. It is, then, history viewed through the forced perspective of one piece of music; though, to be fair, there is only a handful of pieces of music that could yield a comparable view, and most of them are by Beethoven. And, even within the subject’s limited parameters, it is hardly a comprehensive history. Any writing on Beethoven is an exercise in selection, and the selection says at least as much, if not more, about the writer’s obsessions as it does about Beethoven. This is only one possible path through the biography of the Fifth Symphony; there could be many others.

  To say a piece of music has meaning is to say that it is susceptible to discussions of meaning; by that standard, Beethoven’s Fifth is easily one of the most meaningful pieces of music ever written. The number and variety of the interpretations assigned to the Fifth, the creativity with which the piece has been invoked in support of countless, often contradictory, causes—artistic, philosophical, political—all this is a tribute to its amorphous power. It is also, on the side of the interpreters, a testament to human creativity, ingenuity—and folly. The vaunted universality of Beethoven’s achievement encompasses the sublime and the ridiculous.

  Not that he didn’t try to warn us. In 1855, an unknown writer felt compelled to make a handwritten addition to a copy of Anton Schindler’s biography of Beethoven:

  Something about the beginning of the C minor Symph[ony]. Many men were disturbed over the beginning of the Fifth. One of them ask[ed] Beethoven about the reason for the unusual opening and its meaning. Beethoven answered: “The beginning sounds and means: You are too dumb.”4

  1

  Revolutions

  The first thing to do on arriving at a symphony concert is to express the wish that the orchestra will play Beethoven’s Fifth. If your companion then says “Fifth what?” you are safe with him for the rest of the evening; no metal can touch you. If, however, he says “So do I”—this is a danger signal and he may require careful handling.

  —DONALD OGDEN STEWART, Perfect Behavior (1922)

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS LE SUEUR was not quite sure what to make of Beethoven’s Fifth. Le Sueur was a dramatic composer, a specialist in oratorios and operas, and the Parisian taste for such fare (along with Le Sueur’s career) had persisted from the reign of Louis XVI through the Revolution, through Napoléon, through the Restoration. For audiences suddenly to be whipped into a frenzy by instrumental music—as they were in 1828, when a new series of orchestral concerts brought Paris its first sustained dose of Beethoven’s symphonies—was something curious. Le Sueur, nearing seventy, was too refined to fulminate, but he kept a respectful distance from the novelties—that is, until one of his students, an up-and-coming enfant terrible named Hector Berlioz, dragged his teacher to a performance of the Fifth. Berlioz later recalled Le Sueur’s postconcert reaction: “Ouf! I’m going outside, I need some air. It’s unbelievable, wonderful! It so moved and disturbed me and turned me upside down that when I came out of my box and went to put on my hat, for a moment I didn’t know where my head was.”

  Alas, in retrospect, it was too much of a shock: at his lesson the next day, Le Sueur cautioned Berlioz that “All the same, that sort of music should not be written.”1

  IN 1920, Stefan Wolpe, then an eighteen-year-old student at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, organized a Dadaist provocation. He put eight phonographs on a stage, each bearing a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He then played all eight, simultaneously, with each record turning at a different speed.

  A socialist and a Jew, Wolpe would flee Nazi Germany; he eventually ended up in America, cobbling together a career as an avant-garde
composer and as a teacher whose importance and influence belied his lack of fame. (The jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, shortly before he died, approached Wolpe about lessons and a possible commissioned piece.)2 In a 1962 lecture, Wolpe recalled his Dada years, revisiting his Beethoven collage; in a bow to technological change, this performance used only two phonographs, set at the once-familiar 33 and 78 r.p.m. Wolpe then spoke of “one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability”:

  That means that every moment events are so freshly invented,

  so newly born,

  that it has almost no history in the piece itself

  but its own actual presence.3

  • • •

  IF TODAY we regard Le Sueur’s frazzled confusion as quaint, it is at least in part because of the subsequent ubiquity of the Fifth Symphony. The music’s immediacy has been forever dented by its celebrity. Wolpe’s eightfold distortion can be heard as a particularly outrageous attempt to re-create Le Sueur’s experience of the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the work’s course was still unforeseeable. It is an uphill battle—in the two centuries since its 1808 premiere, Beethoven’s Fifth has become so familiar that it is next to impossible to re-create the disorientation that it could cause when it was newly born.

  The disorientation is built right into the symphony’s opening. Or even, maybe, before the opening: the symphony begins, literally, with silence, an eighth rest slipped in before the first note. A rest on the downbeat, a bit of quiet, seems an inauspicious start. Of course, every symphony is surrounded by at least theoretical silence. Though, in reality, preconcert ambient noise, or at least its echoes—overlapping conversations, shifting bodies, rustling programs, air-conditioning, and so on—may in fact bleed into the music being performed, we nonetheless create a perceptive line between nonmusic and music, enter into a conspiracy between performers and listeners that the composer’s statement is self-contained, that there is a sonic buffer zone between everyday life and music. (Like most conspiracies, it thrives on partial truths.) The obvious interpretation is that silence functions as a frame for the musical object.4 The less obvious (and groovier) interpretation is that the music we hear is but one facet of the silence it comes out of.5

  This is almost certainly not what Beethoven was thinking about when he put a rest in the first measure of the Fifth Symphony. But, were Beethoven really trying to mess around with the boundary between his symphony and everything outside of it, he would have been anticipating the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the guru of deconstruction, by nearly two hundred years. Derrida talks about frames in his book The Truth in Painting, noting that when we look at a painting, the frame seems part of the wall, but when we look at the wall, the frame seems part of the painting. Derrida terms this slipstream between the work and outside the work a parergon: “a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out, but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”6

  Our minds dissolve the frame as we cross the Rubicon into Art. But Beethoven drags the edge of the frame into the painting itself, stylizing it to the point that, for anyone reading the score, at least, this parergon refuses to go quietly, as it were. Beethoven waits until we’re ready, then gruffly asks if we’re ready yet.

  We can see the silence on the page, in the form of the rest. But do we hear it in performance? The rest completes the meter of 2/4—two beats per measure, with the quarter note getting the beat—which, normally, would mean that the second of the three following eighth notes would get a little extra emphasis. But most readings give heavy emphasis to all three eighth notes, steamrolling the meter (which is really only one beat to a bar anyway—more on that in a minute). Paleobotanist, artist, and sometime composer Wesley Wehr recalled one consequence of such steamrolling:

  Student composer Hubbard Miller, as the story goes, had once been beachcombing at Agate Beach. He paused on the beach to trace some musical staves in the sand, and then added the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Hub had, however, made a slight mistake. Instead of using eighth notes for the famous “da, da, da, dum!,” Hub had written a triplet. He had the right notes, but the wrong rhythm—an easy enough mistake for a young lad to make. Hub looked up to find an elderly man standing beside him, studying the musical misnotation. The mysterious man erased the mistake with one foot, bent down, and wrote the correct rhythmic notation in the sand. With that, he smiled at Hub and continued walking down the beach. Only later did Hub learn that he had just had a “music lesson” from Ernest Bloch.7

  Knowledge of the rest is like a secret handshake, admission into the guild. (Bloch, best known for his 1916 cello-and-orchestra “Rhapsodie hébraïque” Schelomo, was also a dedicated photographer who liked to name his images of trees after composers: “Bloch sees ‘Beethoven’ invariably as a single massive tree appearing to twist and struggle out of the soil.”8)

  Indeed, one practical reason for the rest is to reassure the performers of the composer’s professionalism. Beethoven knew that any conductor would signal the downbeat anyway, so he put in the rest as a placeholder for the conductor’s gesture. And it’s liable to be a fairly dramatic gesture at that. The meter indicates two beats to the bar, but no conductor actually indicates both beats, as it would tend to bog down music that needs speed and forward momentum. Instead, the movement is conducted “in one,” indicating only the downbeat of every bar.

  So the conductor has one snap of the baton to get the orchestra up to full speed. And the longer the Fifth Symphony has retained its canonical status, the more that task has come to be seen as perilous. For the two leading pre–World War I pundits of conducting, Richard Wagner and Felix Weingartner, starting the Fifth was no big deal. Wagner takes ignition for granted, being far more concerned with the lengths of the subsequent holds,9 while Weingartner scoffs at his colleague Hans von Bülow’s caution: “Bülow’s practice of giving one or several bars beforehand is quite unnecessary.”10 But jump ahead to the modern era, and one finds the British conductor Norman Del Mar warning of “would-be adopters of the baton” suffering “the humiliation of being unable to start the first movement at all.”11 Gunther Schuller, American composer and conductor, is equally dire, calling the opening “one of the most feared conducting challenges in the entire classical literature.”12 Del Mar reaches this conclusion: “It is useless to try and formulate the way this is done in terms of conventional stick technique. It is direction by pure force of gesture and depends entirely on the will-power and total conviction of the conductor.”13

  It is only a coincidence that the eighth rest resembles the trigger of a starter’s pistol:

  Beethoven was known for being moody and intolerant long before he began to lose his hearing. Apparently he was just as pissed off by what he could hear as by what he could not.

  —PAULA POUNDSTONE,

  There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say

  IF ONLY for the blink of an eye, the eighth rest leaves the symphony hanging in fraught silence, a condition that, even at the time of the Fifth’s premiere, was already becoming attached to the Beethoven mythos. The fame of the Fifth Symphony has its biographical match in Beethoven’s deafness.

  Beethoven first noticed a deterioration in his hearing sometime in his twenties; when, in 1801, he first broached the subject in letters to close friends (“I beg you to treat what I have told you about my hearing as a great secret,” he wrote to the violinist Karl Amenda, underlining the request for emphasis14), he had already been seeing physicians about it for at least a year. The initial symptoms were those of tinnitus—buzzing and ringing in the ears, a sensitivity to loud noises. (“[I]f anybody shouts, I can’t bear it,” he complained.15)

  It would be difficult to overestimate how disconcerting the onset of such a condition must have been to the young Beethoven, especially at that point in his career, having moved to the cultural metropolis of Vienna, on the precarious
cusp between notoriety and lasting success. But it is also important to note that—contrary to much popular opinion—even at the time he was composing the Fifth Symphony (1804 to 1808, on and off), Beethoven could still hear fairly well, at least well enough to conduct the 1808 premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and then write his publisher about correcting the score: “When I gave these works to you, I had not yet heard either of them performed—and one should not be so like a god as not to have to correct something here and there in one’s created works.”16 His fellow composer-pianist Carl Czerny reported that Beethoven “still heard speech and music perfectly well until at least 1812.”17 While that optimistic characterization is more likely a testament to Beethoven’s adjustment to his infirmity, it’s clear that the Fifth Symphony was not born out of an absolute pathological silence.

  Tracing the progression of Beethoven’s deafness is difficult not just because of Beethoven’s own tendency to overdramatize his affliction, but also because of the tendency of his friends and acquaintances to attribute to deafness symptoms that might just as easily be traced to another underlying condition: that of, well, being Beethoven. In 1804, Stephan von Breuning writes to a mutual friend that as a result of Beethoven’s “waning of hearing … [h]e has become very withdrawn and often mistrustful of his best friends, and irresolute in many things!”18 But, as biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us, the withdrawal, mistrust, and retreat from everyday concerns were there all along: “During his childhood, Beethoven often wrapped himself in a cloak of silence as a shield against both the vicissitudes of external reality and the traumatic events within his family constellation.”19 Pushed forward as a Mozart-like prodigy by his alcoholic, dissolute, abusive father, Beethoven retreated into solitude and daydreaming, the defense of a figurative deafness, well before any literal manifestation.