Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
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 Code
67
—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.)
The “V” signal became one of the most effective propaganda memes of all time. The
Nazis tried to counter it—for a time, Joseph Goebbels pushed a
V-für-Viktoria
campaign of his own—but to no avail. The seeming irony of the Allied appropriation
of a monument of German culture was actually a crucial ingredient in the success of
the symbol. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika touted the Fifth as a devilishly effective
double agent, a mole in the midst of the Third Reich. “This British ‘V’ Blitz will
drive the enemy mad by weapons he is unable to match or even account for,” she wrote.
“Nazi concentration camps will hammer ‘V’ rhythm into minds of their slave drivers,
and the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth will be sung by children on their way to
Nazi schools, whistled in Nazi-dominated factories, played by
orchestras tuning their instruments for the Nazi hymn.”
69
(The BBC eventually began preceding the four notes with a warning to lower the volume—“This
transmission contains music”—a sign of how effectively the propaganda had rebounded
against German cultural pride: the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth coming over a radio
in Germany was now cause to suspect treason.)
70
In her memoir of the Girls’ Orchestra of Auschwitz, French singer Fania Fénelon recalled
performing the Fifth, gleefully noting that the players and the guards were, in essence,
hearing two different pieces; what was “a monument of German music” to the SS was
a message from the Resistance to the inmates.
71
In Europe, the code became a rallying cry; in America, it became something closer
to a brand name. A “Bundles for Britain” poster encouraged spreading the propaganda
“V” in all its iterations, with helpful illustrations: “use it as a greeting” (the
two-finger salute); “wear it on your coat” (a V-pin); and, of course, “whistle the
tune of it” (the first four notes of the Fifth). The “V-Club of America” printed the
opening of the Fifth on mail-in cards where one could list other prospective members.
72
Mail for the overseas troops became V-Mail (converted to microfilm, V-Mail saved
space when shipped—and also streamlined censorship); specially recorded music performances,
pressed onto vinyl for GI consumption, were labeled V-Discs.
For Armistice Day, 1943, the New York Philharmonic and conductor Bruno Walter added
a musical observation to their scheduled concert: “The ‘Victory’ theme of the Beethoven
Fifth Symphony” (the first nine measures) was followed by a minute of silence, then
“The Star-Spangled Banner.”
73
Beethoven had been fully conscripted into the Allied cause.
After the war, at least one Ally continued to use the brand. Winston Churchill was
not very musical; his onetime son-in-law, comedian and pianist Vic Oliver, recorded
a pall being cast over an impromptu wartime musicale at Chequers when Oliver began
to play the
Appassionata
Sonata, only to have Churchill confuse
it with Handel: “Nobody plays the
Dead March
in my house,” the bulldog growled.
74
Nevertheless, he made Beethoven’s four-note victory tattoo his personal calling card.
When, in 1954, the Houses of Parliament celebrated Churchill’s eightieth birthday,
the honoree’s climactic entrance into Westminster Hall was preceded by “an eerily
expectant silence broken only by a Guardsman thumping out a repetitive refrain on
his big drum: ‘da-da-da-DUM.’ ”
75
A good theme is a good theme.
Even decades later, the V-for-Victory association was still attached to the Fifth.
An advertisement from the early 1970s for the “Beethoven Bicentennial Edition,” a
mail-order series of LPs from Time-Life Records, used it to tout the music’s power:
The theme of one work alone—his immortal Fifth Symphony—was an inspiration to millions
in World War II who risked their lives in the name of freedom.
76
The performance of the Fifth in the “Beethoven Bicentennial Edition” was conducted
by Herbert von Karajan, a onetime member of the Nazi Party.
WHILE A SNIPPET
of Beethoven fueled the Resistance, performances of the full symphony continued throughout
the war. In 1939, Adolf Hitler requested a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth for a
“Party Conference on Peace,” a conference canceled because the Nazis invaded Poland
the day it was scheduled to take place.
77
Wilhelm Furtwängler, the German conductor, who had been specified by Hitler to lead
the concert, was probably relieved.
Furtwängler had stayed in Germany after the Nazis took over, his loyalty to the timeless,
Romantic Germany superseding his distaste for the new regime. Arnold Schoenberg once
called Furtwängler “one of those old-fashioned Deutschnationale”
from the nineteenth century, “when you were national because of those Western states
who went with Napoleon.”
78
The conductor saw his role as preserving German culture from the vagaries of politics,
writing in 1944: “I am one of the most convincing proofs that the real Germany is
alive and will remain alive. The will to live and work in me is, however critically
I view myself, that of a completely unbroken nation.”
79
Furtwängler used his status to do what he could for musicians whose careers and lives
were targeted by the Third Reich, calling in favors from the Nazi bureaucracy, sending
money to exiles. That status, though, was maintained by his being—and staying—Hitler’s
favorite conductor; Furtwängler’s own political sense, which tended toward the magisterially
blunt, left him unable to notice how effectively his image and music-making were drafted
into Nazi propaganda, how, from the Reich’s standpoint, his modest gestures of independence
were a small price to pay for the prestige his presence lent the regime. (“He is worth
the trouble,” Goebbels once said.
80
) Still, the conductor’s idiosyncratic loftiness galled some of Hitler’s associates,
Himmler in particular; near the end of the war, Furtwängler slipped into Switzerland,
fearing possible retribution.
81
The Nazis’ actual revenge on Furtwängler would end up being all the more effective
for being so subtle—they did nothing. Despite being cleared at his denazification
trial, Furtwängler was never able to shake the impression that he had cut some deal
with the Nazi regime.