Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
• • •
BUT EVEN
on its own, the Fifth’s heroic mettle, its corporeal, visceral presence and apparent
narrative of struggle in
this
world, complicates Hoffmann’s sense of unnameable longing. (As one critic has put
it, the Fifth “would seem to provide one of the least convincing examples of a music
that [in Hoffmann’s words] ‘has nothing in common with the outer sensory world.’ ”
21
) When Hoffmann describes the ultimate effect of the Andante as calling back “the
frightful spirit” of the opening movement “to step forth and threaten every moment
from the storm clouds into which it had disappeared,” when he ignores the obvious
march and martial overtones of the Finale, when he is so intent on demonstrating the
symphony’s unity that he asserts that the entirety “holds the listener’s soul firmly
in a
single
mood” (and that the orchestra playing it must be “inspired by a
single
spirit”), it is hard not to surmise that Hoffmann is letting his aesthetic concerns
guide his ears, and not the other way around.
22
His review, which did so much to establish Beethoven and Beethoven’s Fifth as the
benchmark for artistic achievement, also established the Fifth’s tabula rasa potential,
its ability to be bent to a variety of philosophical and artistic agendas.
Hoffmann’s agenda—to promote Romanticism—was not one that had previously made much
use of music, Romanticism having been primarily a literary phenomenon. What makes
Hoffmann’s choice of the Fifth so provocative as an object of Romantic advertising
is that it was simultaneously troublesome and ingenious. As easy as it is to point
out the rickety parts of Hoffmann’s scaffolding, his use of the Fifth to promote music
to a Romantic status above and beyond literature was wildly successful. Music was
an experience both concrete enough to require explanation and vague enough to admit
of a certain latitude in the explaining, a willful running up against the limits of
language.
Of course, Hoffmann may have had another agenda; after all,
he wrote in German, not French. In his review of the Fifth, written, as it was, during
French occupation, Hoffmann’s criticism of French music and the Enlightenment’s cultural
progeny was circumspect—limited to the disparaging mention of the French vogue for
literalistic battle symphonies (ironically, the sort of thing Beethoven would himself
produce with
Wellington’s Victory
).
23
Nevertheless, Hoffmann’s review of the Fifth could easily be tied to the movement
for German nationalist renewal in the wake of Napoléon’s invasion. And it starts at
the beginning; as Stephen Rumph has noted, the use of the first four notes of the
Fifth as the basis for the symphony’s overall unity paralleled a crucial feature of
German nationalistic thought, the unity that “lies at the heart of Romantic political
thought”: “The Romantics repudiated the mechanistic, atomizing, and utilitarian tendencies
of Western liberalism.… They upheld instead a vision of the state in which each individual
interest was subordinated to the articulated—and hence, hierarchical—structure of
the total organism.”
24
(Compare Hoffmann, on Beethoven: “Separating what is merely himself from the innermost
kingdom of notes, he is thus able to rule over it as an absolute lord.”) How much
Hoffmann intended his review of the Fifth to be a coded shot across the bow of Napoleonic
occupation is unknowable, but he was attuned to the Romantic jargon that would lend
itself so well to German nationalistic aspirations.
And the jargon mattered: the wellspring of the patriotism behind that vocabulary,
eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, was a man fascinated by language.
Herder was a scrupulous thinker (he studied with both Kant and Hamann; each held him
in high enough regard to later feel betrayed whenever Herder tried to philosophically
mediate between their two extremes) whose posthumous reputation was somewhat hijacked
by his advocacy of the all-too-easily simplified idea of German nationalism. However,
Herder’s nationalism
was based not around geography or misty conceptions of the medieval Teutonic soul,
but around language—German unity was a unification of everyone who spoke German.
While Herder could disparage the French with the best of them—“Spew out the ugly slime
of the Seine!” read one poem, “Speak German, O you German!”
25
—his linguistics were strikingly subtle and modern. According to Herder, one’s thoughts
are imperceptibly channeled in different directions based on what language one thinks
in; and languages are hardly universal, each evolving out of its own specific cultural
circumstances. Herder thought that the French language was geared too much toward
cosmopolitan niceties to get to the philosophical heart of things; as one scholar
has summarized it, “The French language suspends the mind above sense experience and
therefore refers to nothing but itself; German goes all the way down to brute sense
perception and, through it, goes all the way up to higher reason.”
26
Herder’s ideas actually undermined straightforward nationalism: any argument for national
exceptionalism was actually an argument for linguistic exceptionalism, an argument
necessarily expressed within the language one wished to promote, and so on down the
philosophical rabbit hole. The German Romantics’ introduction of instrumental music
into the equation provided an escape hatch: music was an expression beyond speech,
and the fact that the most celebrated instrumental composer of the day was German
seemed to indicate that there was something exceptional about the German soul that
likewise went beyond language.
Hoffmann’s exaltation of the Fifth thus lent itself to a self-buttressing argument:
only German is adequate to even begin to describe the philosophical striving that
he hears the Fifth translating into musical expression, a rhetorical stance that boosts
both the prospective nation unified around the German language and the German culture
that can uniquely surpass
any language, even German. Hoffmann’s description of the Fifth charts a treasure map
of national renewal. In what is, after all, a wartime review of a wartime piece, Hoffmann
rationalizes occupation by making the Fifth a stand-in for German glory, a kingdom
of latent power awaiting its realization.
THAT SEEMING PARADOX
of the Romantics—the simultaneous extolling of individual expressive prerogative
and of collective ethnic identity—hinges around freedom’s split personality, the divide
between positive and negative liberty most famously analyzed by Isaiah Berlin, the
British impresario of political philosophy. It is, basically, the divide between well-intentioned
interference and benign neglect.
“Positive” liberty implies a proactive process, springing from the need of individuals
to feel as if they are in control of their decisions. The dangerous irony is that
the means (for example, the participation in the democratic process) can lead to ends
in which individual choice is suppressed by majority rule, even as the individuals
are made to
feel
empowered—in Berlin’s opinion, making it that much easier to justify tyranny on the
grounds that people aren’t always aware of what’s best for them. (“Recent history
has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely academic,” he warned.
27
) “Negative” liberty is, by contrast, the absence of meddling in one’s individual
decisions. “By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others,”
Berlin put it.
28
The ideal Romantic artist might have embodied a heroic
individual
negative liberty. But outside the realm of aesthetics, while this concept of liberty
was prevalent among English thinkers—Hobbes, Bentham, Mill—after the French Revolution,
positive liberty held sway on the Continent.
It is easy to consider a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any classical repertoire—as
a notch in the belt of positive liberty, both in the way we agree to accept the authority
of the score
(those same first four notes, in the same order, will open every rendition) and the
all-too-common atmosphere of improvement, be it moral or aesthetic. It is a short
jump from the idea that Beethoven is good for us to the idea that Beethoven was asserting
what was good for us, whether we know it or not. Critiques of Western classical music
often echo Berlin’s critique of positive liberty—it causes us to fool ourselves into
thinking we are freer than we are. Bassist and sociologist Ortiz Walton (the first
African-American to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, incidentally) was
particularly scathing on this point:
The consumer, or concertgoer, like his counterpart in the world of commerce, has been
made into a passive recipient of various sounds. He either accepts the product or
rejects it, but never is he allowed to add his own creativity to it.… So even though
one has heard Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 for the hundredth time, he still keeps
listening to it, claiming falsely that he hears something new every time. His participation
is limited to applause after the finale or occasional coughing during the section
played loud enough to cover the sound.
29
But, then again, music, by its very incorporeal nature, has a tendency toward negative
liberty as well. The connection between music and listener brooks no restriction on
interpretation; each of us can hear music as each of us pleases. One is free to pick
and choose from two centuries of critical interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth—and,
possibly, reject it all—every time fate, as Schindler would have us believe, knocks
at the door. Positive liberty helpfully breaks in. Negative liberty peeks through
the drapes and decides if it wants to be home.
But Berlin’s two concepts of liberty actually admit a third, what Berlin calls “the
retreat to the inner citadel”: the carving out of some portion of one’s thought, persona,
soul, that is put out of
reach of the external world’s stress and strain. Berlin’s description of the conditions
that give rise to such a retreat might well apply to much of Hoffmann’s life: “I am
the possessor of reason and will; I conceive ends and I desire to pursue them; but
if I am prevented from attaining them I no longer feel master of the situation.”
30
And, in fact, in a telling postscript to his review of the Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann
would rework his kingdom of the infinite into such a retreat.
As with so many Europeans during the Napoleonic era, war seemed to follow Hoffmann
wherever he went. In 1813, he moved to Dresden; within a month, Napoléon was bombarding
the city. Hoffmann took refuge in writing, completing a long fictional dialogue called
“The Poet and the Composer”; it was published in the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
that December. The dialogue is mostly Hoffmann’s take on the venerable operatic contest
between music and poetry, as translated into Romantic terms (Hoffmann comes out in
favor of a proto-Wagnerian union of both jobs in a single creator). But “The Poet
and the Composer” opens with a story set in the midst of urban warfare: “The enemy
was at the gates, guns thundered all around, and grenades sizzled through the air
amid showers of sparks. The townsfolk, their faces white with fear, ran into their
houses; the deserted streets rang with the sound of horses’ hooves, as mounted patrols
galloped past and with curses drove the remaining soldiers into their redoubts.”
This is pure reportage on Hoffmann’s part, a glimpse of his own Dresden existence.
But then Hoffmann shifts into a fantasy that reflects the escapism of creative activity
(around this time, Hoffmann would note that writing “removes me from the pressures
of life outside”
31
). And we meet someone who seems more than a little familiar:
Ludwig sat in his little back room, completely absorbed and lost in the wonderful,
brightly coloured world of fantasy
that unfolded before him at the piano. He had just completed a symphony, in which
he had striven to capture in written notation all the resonances of his innermost
soul; the work sought, like Beethoven’s compositions of that type, to speak in heavenly
language of the glorious wonders of that far, romantic realm in which we swoon away
in inexpressible yearning.
Not Beethoven, but a name-sharing doppelgänger, one whose symphony, judging by a description
nearly self-plagiarized from Hoffmann’s 1810 review, is itself a double of the Fifth
Symphony. But reality intrudes:
Then his landlady came into the room, upbraiding him and asking how he could simply
play the piano through all that anguish and distress, and whether he wanted to get
himself shot dead in his garret. Ludwig did not quite follow the woman’s drift, until
with a sudden crash a shell carried away part of the roof and shattered the window
panes. Screaming and wailing the landlady ran down the stairs, while Ludwig seized
the dearest thing he now possessed, the score of his symphony, and hurried after her
down to the cellar.
Here the entire household was gathered. In a quite untypical fit of largesse, the
wine seller who lived downstairs had made available a few dozen bottles of his best
wine, and the women, fretting and fussing but as always anxiously concerned with physical
sustenance and comfort, filled their sewing baskets with tasty morsels from the pantry.
They ate, they drank, and their agitation and distress were soon transformed into
that agreeable state in which we seek and fancy we find security in neighbourly companionship;
that state in which all the petty airs and graces which propriety teaches are subsumed,
as it were,
into the great round danced to the irresistible beat of fate’s iron fist.
32
The irresistible beat of fate’s iron fist
. Hoffmann’s cellar might be the most tantalizingly plausible source of either Beethoven’s
post hoc explanation of the Fifth’s opening or Schindler’s invented poeticization
of it. Hoffmann, though, sets up the symphony in opposition to fate, a fate that nevertheless
is irresistibly omnipresent, something you can, at best, temporarily ignore. Choose
your illusion, he seems to say: either the “sublime siren voices” of art or the fancied
security of “neighbourly companionship.” If fate is at the door, the purpose of a
symphony might just be to drown out the knocking.