Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
Perhaps because he knew it so well, Nietzsche regarded music as particularly fertile
ground for this sort of con game; music’s “primeval union with poetry has deposited
so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of
musical sounds, that we now
suppose
it to speak directly
to
the inner world and to come
from
the inner world.” Listening “for the
reason
” in music is a modern habit; music “does not speak of the ‘will’ or of the ‘thing
in itself’; the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered
for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life.”
92
That is, an age that has distorted music from a sensual pleasure into a repository
for the Absolute—which is exactly what had happened to Beethoven’s music, the Fifth
Symphony especially.
Unusually susceptible to music’s power, Nietzsche was also unusually sensitive to
how explanations of its “meaning” could deflect that power. It was a pattern he sensed
in other areas of human endeavor as well. One of Nietzsche’s essays in his collection
Untimely Meditations
was a discussion of history and how it is written, a polemic he called
On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life
. Nietzsche’s main target in his
History
essay is alleged historical objectivity, “a condition in the historian which permits
him to observe an event in all its motivations and consequences so purely that it
has no effect at all on his own subjectivity”
93
—which had become the goal of “scientific” historians in the nineteenth century, taking
their cue from the German historian Leopold von Ranke and his famous (if somewhat
ambiguous) call for a history that “wants only to show what actually happened.”
94
Nietzsche calls such objectivity “mythology, and bad mythology at that”
95
—not only impossible but also liable to distort history into something closer to the
artificiality of drama, the competing needs of narrative cohesion and disinterested
viewpoint finding patterns in historical events where no patterns exist. Such patterns,
Nietzsche makes clear, are usually more than a little Hegelian, be it Right or Left:
“But what is one to make of this assertion, hovering as it does between tautology
and nonsense, by one celebrated historical virtuoso: ‘the fact of the matter is that
all human actions are subject to the mighty and irresistible direction of the course
of things, though it may often not be apparent’?”
96
The “virtuoso” in question is none other than Leopold von Ranke,
97
but the target is Hegel’s Spirit of History, all its subsequent elaborations and/or
simplifications, and its oppressive pressure on the individual will. “If every success
is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the ‘idea,’ ”
Nietzsche mocks, “then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder
of ‘success’!”
98
The problem, as Nietzsche sees it, is that “history is held in greater honour than
life”—dominating and enervating everything that makes life worth living, music included.
It is “an injustice against the most vigorous part of our culture” that “such men
as Mozart and Beethoven [are] already engulfed by all the learned dust of biography
and compelled by the torture-instruments of historical criticism to answer a thousand
impertinent questions.”
99
Maybe this is why, when Nietzsche does get around to prescribing his ideal history,
the description sounds more than a little like Beethoven’s Fifth: “[I]ts value will
be seen to consist in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday
melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensive
symbol, and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power
and beauty.”
100
IN
Human, All Too Human
, Nietzsche imagined exhuming Beethoven and asking what he thought of how subsequent
generations had used his music:
[H]e would probably for a long time stay dumb, undecided whether to raise his hand
in a blessing or a curse, but at length say perhaps: “Well, yes! That is neither I
nor not-I but some third thing—and if it is not exactly right, it is nonetheless right
in its own way. But you had better take care what you’re doing, since it’s you who
have to listen to it—and, as our Schiller says, the living are always in the right.
So be in the right and let me depart again.”
101
The story of Fate knocking at the door, which might charitably be described as neither
Beethoven nor not-Beethoven, but some third thing, only became more so as the century
went
on. Whatever the origin of Schindler’s anecdote—a Beethovenian jest, a garbled memory,
an out-and-out fiction—it ended up enhancing the Fifth’s stature probably even more
than the “friend of Beethoven” could have anticipated. From a personal destiny, malleable
with enough effort, the notion of Fate would gradually acquire greater and greater
significance: Hegel’s historical engine, Marx’s revolutionary sustenance, Nietzsche’s
all-pervasive force. Originally interpreted as a vivid portrait of an individual trajectory,
by the end of the nineteenth century, the Fifth Symphony could plausibly be said to
be about, well, everything.
Back to Münzer’s
Mademoiselle:
having, in the meantime, caught a glimpse of his governess naked, young Eduard is
understandably more pale and nervous—and less pianistically accurate—than usual when
instructed to again join her for their duet; Eduard’s mother wants to impress her
husband with Beethoven’s symphony, which, in her estimation, “seems so modern” with
its “spicy effects”:
Once again sounded the mysterious, stern, threatening motif. Unwritten dissonance
increased its foreboding.…
“I don’t know,” said her innocuous husband. “To me, it sounds more
wrong
than spicy, so to speak.”
“Adolf,” cried his wife indignantly, “that’s just the misfortune of your one-dimensional
legal training. You’ve never done anything for your musical education. Now comes the
payback: you cannot follow the artistic insight of your family.”
The conclusion of the first phrase surpassed the middle in its considerable unresolved
dissonance, because, while this time the young lady played correctly, Eduard was suddenly
in F-sharp major.
The lawyer twitched sensitively and moaned audibly, but
his wife squirmed, as it were, with delight, and said in a tone of contemptuous profundity:
“Richard Strauss!!”
102
The scandalous modernity of Richard Strauss—who did, after all, compose a tone poem
on
Zarathustra
—might well have sounded to contemporaries like Beethoven’s C-minor tonality overlaid
with Eduard’s F-sharp major, a tritone away, the height of dissonance. But the nineteenth-century
shape of history, an inexorable movement toward some inherently better future, demanded
it: composers were deemed profound only inasmuch as they pushed the envelope. Such
escalation is nowadays taken for granted, to judge by persistent vocabularies of “advance”
and “progress” from descendants of Left and Right alike; Beethoven was present at
the creation. The grafting of “fate knocking at the door” onto the Fifth’s iconic
opening might have been nothing more than a romanticized anecdote, but it did its
part to keep goal-oriented civilizations focused on destiny.
Perhaps inevitably,
Mademoiselle
ends with the governess paying a late-night visit to Eduard. No need to knock—Beethoven
has taken care of that already:
She smiled and, graciously and lovingly, quietly opened the unlocked door of the boy’s
room …
103
“The modern school of music, Janet, is like the romantic drama,” I added, with a forced
attempt at continuing the conversation, for I felt my sadness increasing beyond my
control. “I mean the music commencing with Beethoven; not the gay, joy-loving, Athenian
Mozart, but from Beethoven, the sad old giant, up to poor Schubert and Schumann and
Chopin. There is a whole lifetime of woe, sometimes, in one of their shortest creations.
I wonder, Janet, if the Greeks ever suffered and sorrowed as we moderns do? They seem
to have been exempt from our curse; they worshipped the beautiful, and raised it to
their altars,—made of it God.”
“Their drama, my friend, was the voice of their ideal, not of their real life. The
moderns have indeed bowed down before sorrow and pain, lifted them up to their most
holy of holies, and there they will remain so long as the quick pulse of anguish throbs
in man’s and woman’s heart.”
—A
NNE
M. H. B
REWSTER
,
St. Martin’s Summer
(1866)
AS A YOUNG MAN
just out of the University of Berlin, years before the materialist conception of
history crossed paths with Fate and the Fifth, Karl Marx had been briefly pulled into
the orbit of none other than Bettina von Arnim, the mythopoeicist of Goethe and Beethoven,
then nearing sixty and as provocative
as ever. But her spirit apparently proved too indefinable for Marx’s skeptical taste.
He wrote a poem mocking her:
The child, who, as you know, once wrote to Goethe,
In order to point out that he might love her,
The child was at the theater one day;
A Uniform advanced her way
And, with a smile, his eye on her did rest.
“Sir, Bettina wishes to suggest
Her curly head to lean upon
That choice supply of wondrous brawn.”
The Uniform, quite dryly, then replied:
“Bettina, let desire be your guide!”
“Fine,” she said, “you know, my little mouse,
On my head there’s not a single louse!”
The poem was called “Newfangled Romanticism.”
1
Marx’s doggerel, perhaps, marks the point where Romanticism became a fad, but, by
that point, Romanticism had already left its indelible mark. The Romantics were dedicated
to bringing back into art the inexplicably sublime, which they thought had been bled
out by the Enlightenment’s excessive rationality. They were anything but timid: for
a musical exemplar, the Romantics drafted the most singular and dynamic thing around—Beethoven’s
Fifth. Both symphony and school would benefit from the association, their fame and
influence boosted to ever new heights.
The Romantics heard in Beethoven’s music a representation of a limitless beyond; a
result, paradoxically, of Beethoven being in exactly the right place at exactly the
right time. Beethoven was already the greatest composer of an era in which it was
suddenly decided that composers were eligible for greatness; he was specializing in
instrumental music just when instrumental music made a worst-to-first leap in the
aesthetic standings. And, unusually for such shifts of intellectual ground, Beethoven’s
transformation from an heir of the Classical tradition to a godfather of the Romantic
tradition can be traced to a single source: a review of the Fifth Symphony in the
July 4 and 10, 1810, issues of the leading German-language music magazine of the time,
the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
. If Beethoven’s Fifth marks the birth of music as philosophical artifact, the midwife
was the reviewer, E. T. A. Hoffmann.
To reconnoiter the Romantic era, its progenitors and propagandists, its crusaders
and discontents, is not just an idle historical exercise; the Romantic era never really
ended. The free-for-all of individualism, mysticism, and nationalism we loosely gather
under the banner of the Romantic aesthetic became so ingrained in Western civilization’s
everyday assumptions about the relationship between art, creator, performer, and audience,
that we don’t even notice it anymore. Every time a singer-songwriter is praised for
projecting autobiographical authenticity; every time a movie star expresses the desire
for a project that’s “more personal”; every time a flop is subsequently recategorized
as a before-its-time masterpiece—all these are reverberations of the bombshell of
Romanticism, and one of its preeminent delivery systems was Beethoven’s Fifth.
B
EETHOVEN
’
S CURIOSITY
kept him current with the Romantics, with the likes of Schiller and Schlegel and
Fichte and Herder, but in his
Tagebuch
, alongside passages from Romantic literary efforts, the only contemporary philosophy
Beethoven saw fit to copy down was of the previous generation, that of Immanuel Kant:
“It is not the chance confluence of … atoms that has formed the world; innate powers
and laws that have their source in wisest Reason are the unchangeable basis of that
order.”
2
To be sure, Beethoven was quoting Kant the forerunner of
Naturphilosophie
, not Kant the defender of rationalism, but it’s still a reminder that Beethoven was
adopted by Romanticism,
and not the other way around. Beethoven’s reference was, maybe, partly nostalgic:
Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, the high point of the
Aufklärung
, the German Enlightenment, came out when Beethoven was eleven, and Beethoven’s early
education in Bonn included a healthy serving of Enlightenment zwieback.
Kant revamped his life and personality in order to write his trio of
Critiques
, turning from a gregarious wit (and sometime card sharp) to a man whose habits were
so particular and fixed that Königsberg housewives, it was said, set their clocks
by his daily walk. The
Critiques
made Kant famous, and an in-demand teacher, but by the time he died, in 1804—the
same year Beethoven sketched his first ideas for the Fifth Symphony—his philosophy
was already being autopsied by the next generation, the Romantics. Nevertheless, Kant
made the Romantic movement possible by his sheer competence; the
Critiques
pushed the rationalist program as far as it could go, and it was at that boundary
that the Romantics found their intellectual focus. Where Kant ran out of road was
exactly where Hoffmann and the rest of the Romantics would locate the greatness of
Beethoven’s Fifth.