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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Jellinek’s view of the law was shaped by the French Revolution—specifically, everything that he saw as being wrong with it—which put him in the nineteenth-century conservative mainstream. His thinking was in line with the historical school of jurisprudence, which predicted doom for any society that tried to impose theoretical “rights” and “laws” that weren’t rooted in that society’s own history and traditions. In other words: don’t do what the French did. The most widely read of Jellinek’s writings during his lifetime was a scholarly takedown of the French Revolutionary Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, showing what the declaration had borrowed from primarily English and colonial American constitutional sources; to give the French “rights of man” a specific genealogy was to undermine any claim of their universality. Jellinek instead advocated that laws and legal institutions evolved, country by country, out of specific national traits: societal structures, economic relationships, language.

  In his effort to refashion laws and institutions as if the Bastille had never been stormed, Jellinek even achieved the rare feat of making a Hegelian synthesis run in historical reverse—the real being rational only up to a certain historical point. The Scylla and Charybdis of Jellinek’s ideal state were the extremes of ancient Roman law—too much authoritarian order—and modern democratic law—too much unruly individual freedom and equality. The golden mean was, for Jellinek, the Teutonic law of medieval feudal German states: an aristocratic class structure, with limited individual freedoms not imposed on the state as a given right but cultivated within the boundaries provided by the weak nature of any central authority.38

  [L]iberty accordingly was not created but recognized, and recognized in the self-limitation of the state and in thus defining the intervening spaces which must necessarily remain between those rules with which the state surrounds the individual. What thus remains is not so much a right as it is a condition.39

  Liberty survives in the “intervening spaces”—the Zwischenräume—beyond the state’s purview. Freedom is not a right but rather a DMZ between the state and the individual.

  For Jellinek, the study of law was the study of the rules by which a society gradually evolved, step by complicating step, from basic values to fully functional institutions—a pattern recapitulated in Schenker’s music theory. And Schenker’s acknowledgment was often explicit, as in this passage from his posthumously published composition manual Der freie Satz (Free Composition):

  The origin of every life, whether of nation, clan, or individual, becomes its destiny.…

  The inner law of origin accompanies all development and is ultimately part of the present.

  Origin, development, and present I call background, middleground, and foreground; their union expresses the oneness of an individual, self-contained life.40

  Schenker even borrowed some of Jellinek’s terminology: Zwischenraum, for example, becomes the melodic mediation between the end of a trill and the subsequent note.41 Schenker also picked up Jellinek’s disdain for revolutionary arbitrariness; as the latter criticized imposed rights and freedoms, Schenker dismissed the autarky of Wagner and his followers, their self-consciously novel harmonic experiments, to say nothing of the conjectures of atonality. The parallels between Schenkerian theory and Jellinek’s historical jurisprudence go on and on, and in both directions; for, ultimately, Schenker’s aim is not just to explain musical greatness but to reinforce the politics he shared with his professor. To properly understand the music is to properly understand the world.42

  The pose of objectivity Schenker and Jellinek adopted was in large part just that, a pose. In his magnum opus, the multivolume Allgemeine Staatslehre (General Theory of the State), Jellinek insisted that historicism was a truly objective approach. “The doctrine of public laws,” he wrote, “is a science of standards. These standards sharply diverge from propositions about the state as a social phenomenon.”43 When the first part of Jellinek’s theory was published in France, however, the translator, Georges Fardis (“with the authorization of the author,” according to the title page), added an explanation to this section that flipped the scientific claim on its head. Fardis compared the disputed “natural” origin of laws and rights to the way a natural scientist would explain a symphony: as “a series of vibrations in the objective world,” or “the acousto-psychological processes that arise” during a performance. The historicist perspective was more, well, Romantic (and the symphony in question thus appropriately chosen):

  But if we are placed in the field of aesthetics? The view is completely different.… There is, in the world of artistic sensations, a truth that has nothing in common with that of the natural world of knowledge. Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor is, from the point of view of feeling and musical perception, the deepest reality, the most indubitable truth, the most powerful: all of natural science can do nothing against the consciousness of this reality.

  “Things are similar within the law,” Fardis continues. “The legal world is a world of ideas, it behaves vis-à-vis the tangible world as the world of art vis-à-vis the world of natural science.”44 Schenker’s style of analysis, despite its graphs and jargon and chains of evidence, was likewise more art than science.

  The intellectual manner of both Jellinek and Schenker could plausibly be called Talmudic—their close readings of sources, their marshaling of extensive evidence, their mistrust of surface truths, always drilling down, looking for deeper, holistic structure. (Nicholas Cook connects Schenker to another Jewish thinker, Sigmund Freud, given that both their styles of analysis were “predicated on suspicion of the obvious.”45) So—getting back to the Fifth, now—when Schenker insists that the fundamental motive of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth is the first eight notes, not the first four, it goes well past mere contrarian provocation. It is, in fact, the fundamental text of his theory of the Urlinie. The first four notes form but a generic first impression, while the first eight notes hint at the password to the inner sanctum of the true Austro-Germanic musical tradition. In Schenker’s analysis, the Fifth spells out the entrance requirements to German civilization.

  In looking at the first eight notes of the Fifth, one can see how it might have been this symphony that inspired Schenker to imagine the Urlinie. The fourth and eighth notes, the ones emphasized by the two fermatas—E-flat and D—give two-thirds of the Urlinie right at the outset, setting up a tension that will eventually require the line to descend one more step, down to C, the tonic. Much of Schenkerian analysis requires teasing the outlines of such structures out of the busy tapestry of the musical surface, but in the Fifth’s opening, Beethoven seems to be doing Schenker’s analytical job for him, placing the Urlinie in ready-made, obvious relief.

  Musicologist Scott Burnham has elegantly summed up the ties that bind the Fifth and the Urlinie:

  Either this piece was made to order for Schenker’s way of thinking, or Schenker’s way of thinking was made to order for this piece. Yet either/or misses the mark here, for this is clearly both: Beethoven’s compelling surface influences Schenker, while Schenker appropriates that selfsame quality for his Urlinie. Think what Schenker gains from this. His Urlinie is here made palpable, for it becomes identified with the inexorable thrust of Beethoven’s line. Thus Schenker attempts to validate his theoretical concepts by appropriating one of the most engaging openings in all of music as a direct demonstration and sounding confirmation of his ideas.46

  Schenker allowed that less-percipient listeners might be misled into a shallow hearing of the opening, grouping the first four notes into a theme rather than the first eight: how “the fermatas and the sequential formation in the adjoining bars” might fool “the untrained ear” into “the impression of a motive as early as the first fermata.”47 Untrained ears, it turns out, belonged to a fairly distinguished crowd—Schenker calls out a lengthy list of Romantics who were led down the road to a two-bar perdition. With their “dissemination of legends,” Czerny and Schindler obviously fell into this trap; him
self ensconced in legend, Richard Wagner, “a total stranger to absolute music, succumbed to the mysterious eloquence of note repetition in the same way.”48 It is the repetition that makes fools of so many: “[M]erely by taking pleasure in recognizing the motive as it recurs so many times, one imagines that one is actually hearing and feeling.”49

  Schenker painstakingly indicts every previous celebrated interpreter of the Fifth. Hoffmann? “One can see that Hoffmann’s ear is not ready for higher musical connections, which makes his presentation merely a hollow duplication in words of the musical events.”50 Schindler’s story of fate knocking at the door? “Pious nonsense!”51 Adolph Bernhard Marx is set up and knocked down. Sir George Grove “is nothing more than a windbag, and sounds so simple-minded.”52 Paul Bekker’s dramatic narratives are saved for last, epitomizing (to Schenker) the worst sort of hermeneutics, having the effrontery to look God in the face, as it were. “To be sure, the work of a Beethoven, being the work of man, addresses mankind. Should that itself be sufficient grounds to justify, conversely, mankind addressing the work?”53 (This from a man who, remember, once compared himself to Jesus.)

  There are times where Schenker seems so convinced of even the musicians’ lack of understanding that performance itself is still too great a distortion of musical truth: “For most people, a symphony by Beethoven has to be performed by an orchestra and a conductor or in the form of a piano reduction for two or four hands. But what the performers play—is it really the symphony by Beethoven? … [W]hat if one had to say that none of the known renditions even approximates what is to be expressed? That, indeed, is the truth of the matter!”54

  That was Schenker in the preface to the first volume of his counterpoint manual, published in 1910. The second volume didn’t appear until 1922, and the intervening war sharpened his pen:

  The World War resulted in a Germany which, although unvanquished in battle [!], has been betrayed by the democratic parties.… This Germany has taken over from the hostile nations of the West their lie of “liberty.” Thus the last stronghold of aristocracy has fallen, and culture is sold out to democracy, which, fundamentally and organically, is hostile to it—for culture is selection, the most profound synthesis based on miraculous achievements of the genius.55

  Against such democratic debasement of genius, Schenker imagines Germany, the true Germany, giving the dissolute Entente Powers a magnificently Teutonic kiss-off: “[T]he German bourgeois and worker should band together, become musicians, and, under the baton of a chosen one, thunder the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to the West with the force thirty million strong until the people there, deeply moved by the German genius, would gladly kiss any German hand in gratitude that a German man had opened his chamber to them.”56

  Though initially sympathetic to the Nazis’ nationalism, Schenker was too critically attuned to overlook their excesses, and his enthusiasm turned to skepticism within months of Hitler’s 1933 assumption of the chancellorship.57 But even as the Nazis consolidated their power, Schenker was still couching his theories in nationalist terms, as in this section from Der freie Satz (a section discreetly omitted from English translations):

  [T]he question of Beethoven’s nationality is incontrovertibly decided: he is not “only half a German,” as some have wished—and still wish—to have it. No, the creator of such linear progressions must be a German even if foreign blood perhaps flowed in his veins! In this regard, the bringing to fulfillment of extended tension-spans is better proof than any evidence from racial science.

  Strip away the historical context and the loaded vocabulary (“foreign blood,” “racial science”) and the statement expresses an assimilatory ideal: being German isn’t a matter of religion or bloodlines, but of a mastery of German culture, of the linear progressions and tension-plans that Schenker posited into his definition of German greatness. But, in this case, the context is inescapable. National Socialists had, early on, tackled the question of Beethoven’s racial makeup in order to bring the composer into the fold of a pure Germany, burnishing, rationalizing, and even outright ignoring the historical record along the way. (One article went so far as to deny that Beethoven’s father was alcoholic, instead giving him “a heroic fighting nature of Nordic essence.”58)

  The campaign culminated in an article in Volk und Rasse (the “Journal of the Reich Committee for the Volk’s Health Service and the German Society for Racial Hygiene”) giving Beethoven a clean bill of Aryan health—and doing so with logic not far off from Schenker’s: “Nordic are, above all, the heroic aspects of his works which often rise to titanic greatness. It is significant that today, in a time of national renovation, Beethoven’s works are played more often than any others, that one hears his works at almost all events of heroic tenor”59—therefore, Beethoven was an unalloyed German. Schenker’s argument is laced with a fierce irony: the Nazi powers would hardly apply the benchmark to Schenker himself.60 (Schenker would be posthumously derided in the Nazi-produced Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, his theories willfully caricatured as abstract “mathematical games”; his widow, Jeanette, would perish in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.) So sure of his musical perception, Schenker remained profoundly tone-deaf to the way Hitler and his followers cynically elaborated the basic Urlinie of German pride into a pervasive, racist virulence.

  Schenker died before Nazi anti-Semitism made it to his door. The assimilation he believed in (and built into his theoretical edifice), already severely eroded, was finally shattered in November of 1938, in a massive, Nazi-orchestrated outburst of anti-Jewish violence throughout Germany and Austria: Kristallnacht. Along with most of the rest of Vienna’s synagogues, the Leopoldstädter Tempel, where Adolf Jellinek had encouraged his fellow Jews to be selfless sons of the Fatherland, was destroyed.

  IN 1941, Victor de Laveleye was looking for a way for the Belgian resistance to be more efficient in their graffiti. “[T]he people of Belgium were chalking up the letters R.A.F. on walls, sidewalks, and even on Nazi vehicles,” he later remembered. De Laveleye, a former Belgian justice minister, now in charge of underground BBC broadcasts into his Nazi-occupied homeland, thought a one-letter tag more amenable to avoiding the Gestapo. “The problem was to find the one letter that would mean the same thing to those who spoke Flemish and French.”61 The solution: the letter V, symbolizing victory (victoire) in French and freedom (vrijheid) in Flemish.

  The BBC broadcast word of the new symbol on January 14, 1941, and the V sign soon spread throughout Belgium to France. De Laveleye’s British colleagues brainstormed how else to exploit the letter, out of which emerged the notion of using the Morse Code symbol for V—dot-dot-dot-dash—as an on-air signal. One story attributes the idea to C. E. Stevens, an archaeologist and Oxford don—according to one remembrance, “a grimy figure from a Hardy novel”62—then moonlighting as an assistant to John Lawrence (who had helped set up the BBC’s Foreign Service).63 Apart from his war work, Stevens had made time in 1941 to publish a lengthy critique of the sixth-century cleric Gildas and his historical sermon De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain), an important source for British history of the era following the Roman occupation; one suspects that, for all the scrupulously detached scholarship, the subject matter had taken on new resonance. In particular, Stevens was concerned with parsing Gildas’s use of oral histories and traditions: “They are the matter of history dramatized on the lips of men for whom changes of political relations came no longer from the invisible and almost mechanical activities of councils and cabinets but from the dramatic encounters of personalities.”64

  Another story divides the glory, telling of a meeting among Lawrence, Stevens, and Jonathan Griffin, the BBC’s European Intelligence Officer (later a distinguished poet and translator): Stevens, it is said, came up with the Morse Code symbol as an audible tag; Griffin noted its congruence with Beethoven’s motive.65

  The signal was initially thumped out on a drum in a BBC studio by the eminent percussionist
James Blades. “The experiments tried with woodwind, brass and stringed instruments proved unsatisfactory,” he recalled. “Among the numerous instruments assembled none equalled the arresting note obtained from an African drum.” Blades poetically likened the sound to that of Drake’s Drum, an instrument carried by Sir Francis Drake on his voyages and subsequently bequeathed to the nation; legend holds that its ghostly beat could be heard during times of British crisis or triumph.66 The Beethovenian drumbeat—and, later, the theme itself—was soon crisscrossing Europe by radio.

  (The namesake of Morse Code was, ironically, an isolationist. No one has ever been able to determine whether Samuel F. B. Morse—or Alfred Vail, Morse’s more technically adept assistant, who did the bulk of the work in developing what came to be called Morse Code67—had Beethoven in mind when the encoding of the alphabet reached V, the Roman numeral of the symphony it seems to echo. But, in becoming such successful propaganda for a cross-Atlantic alliance, the code became a posthumous riposte to Morse’s own politics.

  “Who among us,” Morse wrote, “is not aware that a mighty struggle of opinion is in our days agitating all the nations of Europe; that there is a war going on between despotism on one side, and liberty on the other.”68 Except that in Morse’s eyes, the threat was a conspiracy between Metternich and the Roman Catholic Church to undermine the American experiment through a combination of popery and dilution of the national stock. After the telegraph became a success, Morse divided his time between lawsuits—trying to establish himself as the sole inventor of the telegraph—and nativist, Know-Nothing activism and propaganda: running for mayor of New York, “editing” a purported tell-all called Confessions of a French Catholic Priest. Morse probably would have been horrified had he lived to see the advent of the Second World War: electronic communication shrinking the distance between Europe and America, his favored isolationism now most insistently preached—over the radio, no less—by the Catholic Father Coughlin.)