The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (4 page)

The trick still works. In the 1970s, the music education researcher Edwin Gordon was
trying to sort basic building blocks of music by how easy or hard they were for students
to learn. For one study, Gordon developed a taxonomy of 533 different rhythmic cells,
then had more than four thousand fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders listen to tapes
of the cells.
⁴⁴
Each cell was played, then repeated, and the students were tested as to whether or
not they perceived the repetition as identical with the original. Gordon then sorted
the cells by both difficulty (the more the students identified the repetition of a
cell, the “easier” that cell was considered to be) and progression—whether a given
cell was “easier” for older students.

The perception of the 2/4, three-eighth-note pickup of the Fifth Symphony’s opening
was classified as both “Difficult” (fewer than half the listeners heard the motive’s
repetition as a repetition) and “Static-Regressive” (the age of the student made no
difference in their perception).
⁴⁵
It was, in fact, the only rhythmic cell in Gordon’s “Usual Duple” category—symmetrical
divisions of individual beats and measures—to rank as
both
difficult to perceive and age-neutral. By design or by accident, Beethoven made an
ideal choice for an all-pervasive motive, one whose obsessive repetition doesn’t come
across as repetition—the exact intended effect of the paeon.

• • •

THE SIMILARITY
of the Fifth’s earliest sketches to its final iteration—one of the few instances
in the sketchbooks where a bolt-of-inspiration interpretation could apply—lends at
least passing credence to the earliest musical creation story of Beethoven and his
four notes: a little bird told him.

The most-cited source for this story is Beethoven’s student, the pianist and composer
Carl Czerny. Beethoven heard the ten-year-old Czerny play in 1801 and was impressed
enough to give the child lessons. Czerny in turn would become perhaps the nineteenth
century’s greatest piano teacher, training a host of performers and pedagogues more
important than famous—Sigismond Thalberg, Stephen Heller, Theodor Leschetizky—as well
as one whose importance
and
fame seemingly knew no bounds: Franz Liszt. Unlike almost everyone else who ever
knew the composer, the sober and industrious Czerny never sought to cash in on his
relationship with Beethoven; in turn, Beethoven stayed friends with Czerny, trusting
him to edit proofs of his works for publication, recruiting him to give lessons to
his nephew Karl.

“Many of Beethoven’s motives resulted from passing outside impressions and events,”
Czerny recalled. “The song of a forest-bird (the yellowhammer) gave him the theme
of the C-minor symphony, and those who heard him fantasize on it know what he was
able to develop from the most insignificant few tones.”
⁴⁶
(Czerny reported that the theme of the Scherzo from the Ninth Symphony was also inspired
by a bird.)

Beethoven, a lover of nature, probably would not have considered such a source trivial.
It might have carried an echo of
Naturphilosophie
, a then-popular concept that the natural world was the manifestation of a single,
ideal, dynamic process, an order that would be revealed once all of creation was arranged
in a sufficiently intricate hierarchy. A foreshadowing of
Naturphilosophie
can be found in a book Beethoven particularly enjoyed, Christoph Christian Sturm’s
1784
Betrachtungen über die Werke
Gottes im Reiche der Natur
(
Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature
):

Naturphilosophie
would become more sophisticated after it was taken up by one of the era’s leading
philosophical celebrities, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. A later exponent of
the style, Lorenz Oken (whose work Beethoven had at least a passing familiarity with
⁴⁸
), would place the senses at the center of his conception, a fanciful taxonomy of
nested five-part divisions; at its highest level, birds, representing hearing, ranked
just behind mammals, representing sight.
⁴⁹

The tale of the yellowhammer and the Fifth seems to have been current during Beethoven’s
lifetime; Wilhelm Christian Müller, a music teacher and acquaintance of Beethoven,
mentioned it in a remembrance he wrote shortly after Beethoven’s death: “During [Beethoven’s]
walks he composed and often took his themes from birds, for example, the G-G-G-E-flat,
F-F-F-D in the Fifth Symphony.”
⁵⁰
And the yellowhammer’s song does bear at least some resemblance to the motive, a
rapid-fire repetition of short notes followed by one or two longer tones.
⁵¹

In other words, this is an unusually well-sourced and plausible Beethoven myth, and
yet, its provenance notwithstanding, the yellowhammer’s authorship gradually became
a footnote,
usually mentioned only in passing alongside more-well-known stories—including one
that will occupy the entire next chapter of this book, the characterization of the
Fifth’s opening as “fate knocking at the door.” In English-speaking countries, the
bird story suffered a bit of guilt by association after Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s
onetime secretary and, later, his notoriously inaccurate biographer, related that
Beethoven had told
him
that a completely different figure in the Sixth Symphony, a quick upward arpeggio,
was also inspired by a yellowhammer. The discrepancy cast doubt on all Beethovenian
birdcalls; most thought that the composer was merely pulling Schindler’s leg. (Schindler
may actually have been right for once, the victim of German-English dictionaries that
translated his
Goldammer
and Czerny’s
Ammerling
as the same bird, but Schindler was referring to a goldfinch, not a yellowhammer.)
⁵²

Mostly, Czerny’s story faded to footnote status because the symphony’s accumulating
philosophical baggage crowded it out—a chance avian dictation of the famous theme
came to be considered too insignificant a source for the Fifth’s increasingly portentous
reputation. Harvey Grace, an English organist and writer, put it thus in 1920:

THE OPENING EIGHTH-REST IS
B
EETHOVEN
’
S
first bit of misdirection—combined with the quick, in-one 2/4 meter, it
produces the triplet-or-straight-eighth rhythmic uncertainty of the first three notes.
The C-minor/E-flat major ambiguity is Beethoven’s second bit of misdirection. Either
uncertainty would be so brief as to be unworthy of mention, except that they’re compounded
by Beethoven’s
third
bit of misdirection: fermatas over the fourth and eighth notes of the symphony, dramatic
pauses punctuating the two statements of the four-note motive.

Throwing up such rhythmic roadblocks, holding the notes out for as long as the conductor
sees fit, might seem like an avant-garde touch—a Beckettesque frustration, stopping
the clock just as it’s getting started. But beginning a piece with dramatic pauses
had become something of a commonplace toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mozart’s
Die Zauberflöte
, a piece Beethoven especially admired, opens with three grand chords interspersed
with temporally generous space, fermatas over the intervening rests. And Beethoven’s
onetime teacher Haydn, as his career went on, was more and more likely to start his
symphonies with similarly grand fermatas.
⁵⁴

The Classical-era music theorist Heinrich Koch had equated the fermata with an “expression
of surprise or astonishment, a feeling whereby the movements of the spirit itself
appear to come to a brief standstill.”
⁵⁵
Fermatas right at the start were an attempt to create that surprise and astonishment
immediately, a proto-Romantic goal of jolting the audience into a heightened emotional
state.

Mozart and Haydn, though, placed their fermatas in slow introductions (
Adagio
markings in both cases), set off from the thematic argument of the piece. Beethoven
pushes the envelope by starting off at the movement’s main, fast pace, then dropping
his fermatas, in quick succession, into his main theme. (After the premiere, Beethoven
added an extra bar before the second fermata, making it slightly longer than the first,
and the whole opening that much more off-balance and edgy.)

In performance, the fermatas rather quickly became repositories of applied importance,
with conductors stretching the emphases into extravagant flourishes. The most immoderate
of such conductors was Richard Wagner, who, in a famous passage, prescribed overwrought
fermatas, in prose to match:

That image of conductors casting down the fermatas like Charlton Heston as Moses contributed
to an increasingly DeMille-like aura around the Fifth as the Romantic era hit its
stride, the sort of reputation that marginalized Czerny’s yellow-hammer source as
simply too trifling.

But Beethoven might have intended the fermatas to exaggerate a feeling of forward
motion. The symphony shows off its power by only hinting at its speed—a couple of
fearsome revs of the engine before Beethoven finally lets out the clutch—but the trip
is already under way, leaving the listener scrambling to catch up. And almost from
the beginning, Beethoven’s combination of rebellion and haste rather fittingly engendered
the question of whether it was
too
fast.

Nearly a decade after the Fifth’s premiere, Beethoven augmented the first movement’s
Allegro con brio
tempo with a metronome marking: 108 half notes per minute. Beethoven hadn’t initially
indicated a metronome marking for the Fifth for the
simple reason that, in 1808, the metronome didn’t exist yet. It was only in 1812 that
Dietrich Winkel invented the device; not until 1816 that Johann Mälzel, having stolen
Winkel’s invention, began to manufacture it.

Mälzel and Beethoven were friends—Mälzel provided the composer with custom ear trumpets
⁵⁷
and, having built a massive mechanical organ called a panharmonicon, commissioned
for it Beethoven’s op. 91 novelty
Wellington’s Victory
(a commission that led to a characteristically Beethovenian falling-out over money).
Beethoven became the metronome’s most famous early adopter. With his nephew Karl,
Beethoven went back over his catalog, retroactively quantifying his tempo markings
with the new gadget, then published a table of such markings, covering the first eight
symphonies, in a leading German music magazine, the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
, in December 1817.

And, since December 1817, conductors and performers have been ignoring those markings.
Anecdotal evidence hints that nineteenth-century performances customarily eased Beethoven’s
108 marking to something a bit more manageable. The ever-unreliable Anton Schindler
even insisted that Beethoven took the opening five bars (up until the second fermata)
at a tempo of quarter-note-equals-126, or half-note-equals-63—almost twice as slow
as indicated.
⁵⁸
That was too much liberty for at least one famous colleague; Felix Weingartner tells
the story: “Liszt told me that the ‘ignorant’ and furthermore ‘mischievous fellow’
Schindler turned up one fine day at Mendelssohn’s and tried to stuff him that Beethoven
wished the opening to be
andante
—pom, pom, pom, pom. ‘Mendelssohn, who was usually so amiable,’ said Liszt laughingly,
‘got so enraged that he threw Schindler out—pom, pom, pom,
pom!
’ ”
⁵⁹
(But even Weingartner, an early stickler for textual fidelity, advised dialing back
the first movement to 100 beats per minute.
⁶⁰
)

With the advent of the gramophone, parameters of performance practice—at least those
inherited from late
Romanticism—could be pinned down exactly. Conductor Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin
Philharmonic made a complete recording of the Fifth in 1913; Nikisch’s reading of
the first movement coalesces around 88, albeit through a heightened haze of flexible
speed. Weingartner lived long enough to record the Fifth four times in the 1920s and
’30s, by which time his tempo had slowed from his earlier recommendation (his 1933
recording with the London Philharmonic settles in at around 92, for instance). In
1998, Gunther Schuller tabulated tempi for sixty-six different recordings of the Fifth;
the average speed was just under 92 bpm.
⁶¹