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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  The first movement depicts the chaotic feelings that overwhelm a great soul when prey to despair. It is not the calm, concentrated despair that shows the outward appearance of resignation, nor is it Romeo’s dark and mute grief on learning of Juliet’s death, but Othello’s terrible rage on hearing of Desdemona’s guilt from Iago’s poisonous lies.… Listen to the gasps in the orchestra, to the chords in the dialogue between winds and strings that come and go, sounding ever weaker, like the painful breaths of a dying man.10

  The German Romantics had revered Beethoven for expressing what was beyond language, but Berlioz, with his explicitly literary programmatic reading of the Fifth (the first four notes as the ominous flutter of Desdemona’s handkerchief, maybe?), is expanding the idea of language to encompass Beethoven. Schrade points out how often Berlioz describes the symphonies as “poetic” and the composer as a “poet,” epithets Berlioz used “to denote the supreme degree that cannot be surpassed, and in point of language a superlative which cannot be further compared.”11 France was a country where literary elegance and power sat at the summit of cultural achievement. To insist that Beethoven was not just a composer, but a poet, was to make him a little more French.

  In The Arcades Project, his unfinished analysis of nineteenth-century Paris, critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin devoted an entire section to the flâneur, the perpetually strolling observer so typical of the city—“Paris created the type of the flâneur,” Benjamin noted.12 The rapport the French had established with Beethoven was paralleled in the flâneur’s mindset, at least as Benjamin imagined it: “That anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through.”13 The French experienced the abstract knowledge of Beethoven’s symphonies and thus adopted him into the French cultural pantheon. Benjamin jotted down a quote from Pierre Larousse’s 1872 Grand dictionnaire universel, which, in defining the flâneur, opted for a foreign exemplar:

  In the first years of this century, a man was seen walking each and every day—regardless of the weather, be it sunshine or snow—around the ramparts of the city of Vienna. This man was Beethoven, who, in the midst of his wanderings, would work out his magnificent symphonies in his head before putting them down on paper.14

  Adolphe Boschot, a critic who also wrote a biography of Berlioz, noted in 1908 how the image of Beethoven had become a standard trope in French art: “In every salon [painters] exhibit for us several canvases showing the author of the nine symphonies. For this has now become the fashion. Once upon a time they manufactured Bonapartes or the ‘Temptations of St. Anthony,’ now they manufacture Beethovens.”15

  The identification with Beethoven would reach an apotheosis with French sculptor Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, who, as a teenager, perceived a strong resemblance between his own features and an engraving of the composer: “He thought he was seeing himself,” Bourdelle’s widow surmised, “and it was perhaps this fact, in the first instance, that attracted him.”16 Bourdelle would produce nearly eighty portraits of Beethoven—sketches, finished drawings, sculptures—returning to the subject at periodic intervals between the late 1880s and his death, in 1929. At the very least, Bourdelle’s obsession with Beethoven as a subject was indicative of a congruence of artistic intent (“It is my task,” Bourdelle wrote, “to construct my own silent orchestra in which the sounds are expressed in terms of planes and of light”17); but the progression of his images—Beethoven’s head increasingly distorted, craggy, expressionistic—hints at something deeper, what one critic called “a kind of involuntary confession.”18 One of Bourdelle’s last essays on the subject, produced shortly before he died, shows Beethoven, his face set in a stoic scowl, leaning against a massive cross.

  THE IMAGE of Beethoven as a poet was, nonetheless, also adopted by German writers—and, depending on who was doing the writing, could be read as either sustaining or undermining the crescendo of German nationalism kick-started by the 1870 defeat of France. One notorious poeticization came at the hands of musicologist Arnold Schering. In 1920, on the occasion of Beethoven’s 150th birthday, Schering sought to rally post-Armistice Germany, now, in comparison with the glory days of 1870, “a small broken people … once again about to celebrate Beethoven.” To be great again, Schering advocated a dose of Beethoven’s heroism, as inspired by poets:

  The heroic in the highest sense drew him to the heroes of Homer and Plutarch, to Coriolan, to Egmont, to Fidelio, where even a woman embodies male heroism. He felt in his own blood something of this heroism. When the furor teutonicus came over him, sparks sprayed his imagination and shook the boundaries of what was then possible: in the C-minor Symphony, the Eroica, in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, which in the weak race of 1850 had inspired secret horror.19

  Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe: Schering would go on to make those literary sparks profoundly literal. Starting with his 1934 book Beethoven in neuer Deutung (Beethoven in a New Interpretation), Schering set out to demonstrate that Beethoven had actually patterned specific works of music after specific works of literature. The Eroica drew on the Iliad. The Seventh Symphony followed Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The Appassionata Sonata was, in reality, scenes from Macbeth. The C-sharp minor Piano Sonata, already saddled with the sobriquet Moonlight, now became the mirror of act 4 of King Lear. In the words of one reviewer, Schering’s speculative hermeneutics stood “in the same relation to true musical research as modern astrology stands to physical astronomy.”20

  Berlin critic Paul Bekker also characterized Beethoven as a kind of tone poet, a “Tondichter,” in his popular book on Beethoven, first published in 1911. At first glance, Bekker’s description of the Fifth seems to be the standard programmatic boilerplate:

  The work deals with the awful powers of Fate and ends with a triumph song of the human will. Underlying the whole is Beethoven’s great idea of the freedom of man.… The struggle is to be to the death, involving not the fate of one ideal hero (as in the Eroica) but of all humanity. In the first movement of the Eroica the hero wrestles with the limitations and crippling emotionalism of his own being in order that his powers may have full scope, but in the fifth symphony humanity wrestles with all these hindrances expressed in the mysterious idea of Fate.21

  The difference is that Bekker distills that contrast between the Eroica’s individual hero and the Fifth’s collective protagonist out of the music itself. In the Eroica, for instance, Beethoven included extra horns, their more prominent tone symbolic of the hero’s presence. In the Fifth’s opening, however, “where there is no question of a personal hero, he is content with the traditional complement of instruments.” In the Finale, Beethoven reinforces the sound with trombones, “which (in his system) symbolize majestic greatness.” Bekker concludes: “It will thus be seen that again in the C-minor symphony the orchestra was recreated in accordance with the underlying ‘poetic idea’ of the work.”22

  Again, Bekker’s analysis might not seem much more than a particularly clever justification of the usual claims of universality made on the Fifth’s behalf. But it was the cleverness that so irritated the advocates of German greatness. To reduce Beethoven’s works to poetic programs was bad enough, but to analyze such poetry not as something Beethoven musically illustrated, but rather as part and parcel of the musical materials themselves, was to deny music’s unique aesthetic status—and, by extension, to deny the supposedly unique German privilege toward all things musical. As conductor and scholar Leon Botstein put it:

  Bekker and his allies were concealing the absence of the requisite predisposition—the spontaneous, aesthetic gift and their lack of true talent for music—behind rational arguments. It was a travesty to think that the greatest of all composers, and certainly of all German composers of instrumental music, had been inspired and guided by ordinary thinking and musings easily described in language.23

>   The idea that Beethoven’s secrets could be so democratically available, without the intercession of elite, specifically German insight into music’s mysteries, bore all the hallmarks of pernicious cosmopolitan (i.e., Jewish) thinking. Thus the question of the extent of poetic inspiration in Beethoven’s music became a political wedge. Indeed, at the same time Arnold Schering was working his literary way through Beethoven’s catalog, he also characterized “the vague sense of per aspera ad astra in the Fifth Symphony” as the “fight for existence waged by a Volk that looks for its Führer and finally finds it.”24

  At the outset of the First World War, the “Culture Pope,” German critic Alfred Kerr, had mused on the uneasy place of art during wartime. “The theaters also want to live,” he wrote. “The question is what can be played.” His solution idealistically combined Germany’s greatest cultural hero with a naïve optimism that Germans could avoid discussing him:

  Play, henceforth, the best that we have. Play that which reminds us of our proudest pride [stolzesten Stolz].

  And if you know no pieces, then take fifty musicians.

  And speak no word.

  And every evening play Beethoven. Beethoven. Beethoven.25

  INDY: Everybody’s lost but me.

  —Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

  IN 1921, Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker began to publish a series of pamphlets collectively called Der Tonwille, “The Will of Tones,” subtitled “Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music.” Schenker, who had trained as a lawyer before casting his lot with music, had already written manuals of harmony and counterpoint. Having thus set down music’s statutory law, as it were, Der Tonwille continued as an exercise in case law: detailed analyses of musical works, demonstrating their adherence to Schenker’s criteria of musical excellence.

  The inaugural study of Der Tonwille was the first installment of a multipart examination of Beethoven’s Fifth. But before that, Schenker had some things to get off his chest, in a prefatory essay called “The Mission of German Genius,” such as it stood in “these grave times, in these most grievous of times.… Once the artist, in such times, sees how the political parties vying with one another for power sin against art in general, and against his own art in particular, through ignorance and ineptitude, then he must be inflamed.”26

  And Schenker is off on a fevered, incantatory tear, a detailed indictment of the degeneration of German culture. “Shameless betrayal has been perpetrated during the World War on the genius of Germanity”: by capitalists (“a spiritually and morally venal fringe group”); by communists (“that trouble-making megalomaniac wage-church of Karl Marx”); by “certain so-called pacifists and professors, their mouths rank with filth”; by commentators who “snored their way loudly” through previous wars “but who, when the Germans had to defend themselves against an invasion long premeditated by nations whose virulent envy of it exceeded their incompetence, suddenly woke up to discover, oh-so-smugly, the spiritual and moral truth that peace was more humane than war”;27 and, most of all, by the siren song of democracy:

  [I]f democracy is really what was exemplified by those Western nations before, during, and after Versailles, then let the German democrat simply take a good look at democracy and do exactly what he sees Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, Poles, Czechs, etc. doing. Let him break promises, violate treaties, infringe international law, steal private property, falsify maps, deface monuments, desecrate war-graves, lie, and commit murder as they do, and use words most pleasing unto man and God in the process, just as they do.28

  And so on, page after page—until Schenker circles back around to his underlying point: “The task of these pamphlets will thus be to show what constitutes German genius in music.”29

  Few people embodied the tensions running through early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa as thoroughly as Schenker. From his Viennese vantage, Schenker saw the rise of fin-de-siècle modernism, cosmopolitan sophistication, and democratic ferment—and hated it all. He created a style of music theory specifically designed to prove the superiority of the classic Austro-Germanic repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. And yet the theory’s mechanism—analytical, legalistic, pointedly devoid of poetic imagery—seemed to breathe a coolly scientific air in curious counterpoint to its creator’s Kantian notions of genius and his extremely Right-Hegelian conservatism. One senses he realized the rift, hoping to compensate with a fiercely argumentative style gleaned from his legal studies: a two-pronged attack, evidential logic buttressed by emotional appeals to the jury.

  No biblical prophet was more convinced of his righteousness. In a codicil to his will, Schenker provided his own epitaph: “Here lies the body of one who perceived the soul of music and communicated its laws, as the great musicians understood them, and as no one before him had done.”30 He once wrote to a student about the fate of his “monotheistic music-teaching”: “[A]fter 2,000 years the successors to the Germanic people may disavow Schenker as they disavow Rabbi Jesus, but all along the teaching has made its effect and achieved propagation in the world.”31

  Schenkerian analysis did propagate—particularly in America, where his techniques became a standard part of academic music training—but it did so in the absence of his heated rhetoric: belligerent sections of his treatises were left untranslated, and missionaries of his ideas focused on the analysis, not the oratory. (Allen Forte’s article on Schenker for the 1980 edition of Grove’s Dictionary, for example, avoids any hint of Schenker’s combative prose, and doesn’t even mention his legal background.32) Smoothing over Schenker’s sharp edges makes him more palatably modern and universal, taking him out of the tumult of his own era. But it was the era that drove him, the chaos he sensed descending on civilization prompting both the escalating rationality of his theory and the emotional fury with which he shouted it into the whirlwind.

  IN HIS CLASSIC TEXT of analytic aesthetics, Languages of Art, American philosopher Nelson Goodman considered “the rather curious fact that in music, unlike painting, there is no such thing as a forgery of a known work.”33 This is because in music (unlike painting) there is a score. We consider a performance authentic if it follows the score, and it has to follow the score to be authentic: “If we allow the least deviation, all assurance of work-preservation and score-preservation is lost; for by a series of one-note errors of omission, addition, and modification, we can go all the way from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to Three Blind Mice.”34

  For Schenker, though, being able to get from Beethoven’s Fifth to “Three Blind Mice,” step by analytical step, was the sign of true musical understanding. Having commenced Der Tonwille with livid indignation, Schenker abruptly shifted into theoretical discourse: a short essay to introduce the Urlinie, the “fundamental line.” This was the concept that increasingly occupied Schenker’s thought for the rest of his life: a simple descending scale, sometimes eight notes, sometimes five, but in its most basic form, only three notes (i.e., the opening phrase of “Three Blind Mice”), ending on the tonic, the pole star and goal of any piece of tonal music. When a three-note Urlinie is combined with a do-sol-do bass line, the result is an Ursatz, a fundamental structure, the simple architecture at the core of all Schenker-approved great music.

  “The Urlinie bears in itself the seeds of all the forces that shape tonal life”; the Urlinie supersedes all other musical creation stories. Schenker’s goal is to demonstrate a work’s Austro-Germanic fitness by reverse-engineering its presented musical surface all the way back to the Urlinie. “With the cooperation of the harmonic degrees,” Schenker goes on, “the Urlinie indicates the paths to all elaboration and so also to the composition of the outer voices, in whose intervals the marriage of strict and free composition is so wonderfully and mysteriously consummated.”35 Beginning with the fundamental line and structure, great composers elaborate that structure, layer by layer, into musical monuments, every transition from simpler to more complex governed by the strict rules of counterpoint and voice-leading t
hat Schenker, thorough as he was, had already codified in his harmony and counterpoint guides. Background pattern to middle-ground expansion to foreground surface: the evolution of true music, that is, Austro-German music, as helpfully defined by Heinrich Schenker.

  It is only after the rant and the reason that Schenker is ready to pull back the curtain on Beethoven’s Fifth. The different channels actually are working in tandem, yoking together the emotion and logic of Schenker’s thinking—and hinting at that thinking’s legal origins. For Schenker’s framework paralleled a particular conservative-Hegelian, pro-German theory of law and civilization. It was a theory Schenker would have heard expounded by one of his law professors at the University of Vienna, Georg Jellinek, who happened also to be a rabbi’s son. And in the background of the theory was a goal that Schenker and Jellinek, both proud, highly educated German Jews, never lost sight of: assimilation.

  Georg Jellinek’s father, Adolf, head of the Leopoldstädter Tempel, Vienna’s largest synagogue, advocated Jewish assimilation, the better to be “true, loyal, and selfless sons of the father-land.”36 His sons epitomized it: Georg held law professorships in Vienna, Basel, and Heidelberg; Max, also a professor, specialized in German linguistics, and became a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; Emil moved to France and became, among other business-related things, a pioneering car dealer. (Emil’s daughter Mercédès lent her name to the cars being sold.) Georg fashioned himself into the very model of a Prussian academic.37 Yet assimilation only went so far: Georg Jellinek, despite having converted to Christianity, was never made a full professor in Vienna on account of his Jewish ancestry.