Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
Dwight’s young Americans can be read as model Romantic rule-breakers, but the sentiment
could just as well have been invoked in the service of wealth. (Around the same time,
the Reverend Darius Mead of New York could rationalize the country’s expanding trade
as an aid in the conversion of distant heathens: “The love of lucre—the adventurous
spirit of Discovery and Commerce—these agencies, supported and strengthened by rapid
improvements in the arts and sciences of civilized and christianized society, have
already brought the ends of the earth together, and
the valleys
are indeed ‘exalted.’ ”
30
Prophetic character, indeed.)
Dwight goes on:
It is because Beethoven is, to speak by correspondence, like the seventh note in the
musical scale. His music is full of that deep, aspiring passion, which in its false
exercise we call ambition, but which at bottom is most generous, most reverent, and
yearns for perfect harmony and order. The demands of the human soul are insatiable—infinite.
31
Dwight recycles his customary cross-breeding of Fourierism and Swedenborgianism with
the Hoffmann image of Beethoven. But note the cautious qualification of the Fourierist
passion of ambition. And, exported outside the old, specific
Harbinger
contexts, the rhetoric can seem to manifest any number of destinies: “So long as
anything
is not ours, we are poor. So long as
any
sympathy is denied us, we are bereft and solitary. We are to have all and realize
all by a true state of harmony
with
all. Is not this the meaning of Beethoven’s music?”
32
Ambition is generosity; possession (“to have all”) is harmony. (One can imagine a
stereotypical plutocrat gravely nodding in agreement.) The heroic Beethoven becomes
a transfer point between rarefied Transcendentalism and the American pursuit of wealth.
It took George Ripley some fifteen years to pay off the debt
of Brook Farm, but he would die a rich man, having made a fortune in royalties from
co-editing
The New American Cyclopedia
. In its entry on the composer, the
Cyclopedia
evoked both the Transcendentalist-Romantic Beethoven and public monuments to civic
wherewithal:
As Gothic architecture is the artistic record of the aspirations of the ages during
which it grew to perfection, so the orchestral works of Beethoven are the musical
record of the great ideas of his time in the form and likeness which they assumed
in his mind. Haydn and Mozart perfected instrumental music in its form—Beethoven touched
it, and it became a living soul.
33
LIKE MANY
a hippie after him, Dwight took his youthful enthusiasms for eternal verities. The
Fifth Symphony made its impression on him once and indelibly; eschewing any reassessment,
Dwight would reprint the salient portion of his review of the Academy of Music’s 1842
performance in both
The Harbinger
and
Dwight’s Journal of Music
,
34
and subsequently, whenever the subject of the Fifth came up, direct the reader’s
attention back to the reprints. Dwight was a man eager to make up his mind, and dedicated
to keeping it that way.
By standing still as the world shifted around him, Dwight changed from radical to
conservative. He admitted as much in the last issue of
Dwight’s Journal
, published in 1881. “Lacking the genius to make the old seem new, we candidly confess
that what now challenges the world as new in music fails to stir us to the depths
of soul and feeling that the old masters did and doubtless always will,” he wrote.
35
But Dwight’s indefatigable promotion of Beethoven’s music as a path to personal and
societal progress would bear fruit in the accumulated wealth of post–Civil War America.
To follow Dwight’s career is to watch the foundation of the classical-music canon
being poured and then gradually hardening. Dwight had only ever heard Beethoven interpreted
by either amateur or essentially freelance groups (even the New York Philharmonic,
who had performed Beethoven’s Fifth on their inaugural concert in 1842, operated as
a cooperative until 1909), but toward the end of his career, Dwight evangelized for
permanent orchestras. If Beethoven’s symphonies offered the prospect of moral uplift,
the proselytization required professional institutions, “musicians who play and rehearse
together from one end of the season to the other.” (Beethoven, who premiered his symphonies
with pickup groups, would have been envious.) “The question is: Can our moneyed men,
our merchant princes and millionaires, be got to give their money, and give it freely
for this object?”
36
They could be got—1881 also saw the debut of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, funded
by banker and music lover Henry Lee Higginson; the inaugural season featured no fewer
than nineteen Beethoven works, including all nine symphonies.
Dwight’s professionalizing crusade had been sparked by the polished performances of
German-born conductor Theodore Thomas and his touring orchestra. When Chicago businessman
Charles Norman Fay asked Thomas over dinner at Delmonico’s if he would move to Chicago
to head up a permanent orchestra—for which fifty local barons had contributed $1,000
each—Thomas, the story goes, replied, “I would go to hell if they gave me a permanent
orchestra.” Thomas pushed for the construction of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall; to inaugurate
the Hall in 1904, he programmed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. When Thomas suddenly died
a month later, the directors of the Chicago Auditorium Association, another collection
of wealthy businessmen, adopted a memorial resolution, calling Thomas “the great missionary—in
our country—of the ‘music of the brain,’ ” music which “elevates, refines, ennobles,
inspires, stirs, and impassions the mysterious weft of the human mind.”
37
The
Transcendentalists’ Beethoven had been fully assimilated into the Gilded Age.
The concentration of patronage in large cities paralleled the dilution of the Transcendental
focus on nature, which had been so crucial to the original generation. Compare Thoreau—“I
wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted
with a Freedom and Culture merely civil”
38
—with the town
-and
-country Transcendentalism of Walt Whitman: “This is the city and I am one of the
citizens, / Whatever interests the rest interests me.”
39
Whitman’s Beethoven likewise seems far from the Concord woods: “Beethoven had the
vision of the new need. He interpreted in tones his own environment. What a tone-picture
he could have given of our seething, glowing times of great promise! He was the forerunner
of the American musician of the modern that will one day appear.”
40
In a similar way, Dr. Henry T. McEwen, a Presbyterian minister in Amsterdam, New York,
soft-pedaled nature’s obvious effects in telling of how one of his parishioners, a
traveling singing teacher and sometime composer named Simeon B. Marsh, was inspired
to write his best-known piece. Marsh, in McEwen’s telling, was riding through the
countryside one autumn morning in 1834 when inspiration struck—but not through the
intercession of nature. “The beautiful scenery, because familiar, had nothing new
to attract him,” McEwen insists; inspiration rather “burned within him.” Marsh sat
down under an elm—“which then stood,” McEwen notes, “where now the four tracks of
the New York Central Railway bear a mighty commerce to the sea”—and wrote down his
tune on a scrap of paper.
41
Marsh’s tune, which he named “Martyn,” would be matched with Charles Wesley’s poem
“Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” after which the song became one of the best-known hymns
of the nineteenth century. “Martyn” opens with three repeated notes followed by a
descending interval of a third, a contour identical to the opening of Beethoven’s
Fifth. The resemblance was not lost on an
insurance executive, political gadfly, and singular composer—an “American musician
of the modern”—Charles Ives.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.
—R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON
, “The American Scholar”
IN
1837—thirty-seven years before Charles Ives was born—an abolitionist activist and
newspaper editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was shot to death by a pro-slavery mob in Alton,
Illinois. A month later, at a protest rally in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, twenty-six-year-old
lawyer Wendell Phillips galvanized the abolitionist movement with a speech that made
him famous. Phillips himself would perpetuate the myth that “The Murder of Lovejoy”
was a spur-of-the-moment oration, recalling how “I suddenly felt myself inspired,
and tearing off my overcoat, started for the platform. My wife seized me by the arm,
half terrified, and said, ‘Wendell, what are you going to do?’ I replied, ‘I am going
to
speak
, if I can make myself heard.’ ”
42
Charles Ives borrowed Beethoven’s rhetoric to memorialize Wendell Phillips in a piano
study called “The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830’s and 1840’s”
43
; in keeping with his penchant for saturating his music with quotations from other
tunes, Ives gave over the climax of the piece to clanging iterations of the opening
motive from the Fifth Symphony. The use of the Fifth’s theme was a common thread in
Ives’s musical tributes to New England Transcendentalism—Beethoven’s first four notes
would ring over and over throughout Ives’s most encyclopedic realization of his Transcendentalist
sympathies, his
Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., 1840–60
, probably composed between 1916 and 1919, but drawing on a previous decade’s worth
of works and sketches, and subsequently tinkered with for nearly another thirty years.
Ives was a Transcendentalist born too late and a modernist composer born too soon,
and both traits were family legacies. The Transcendentalism grew from location—the
Ives family was venerable New England stock—and connection, Emerson having been a
family friend. The modernism came directly from his father, George, a free-thinking
bandleader who seems to have been regarded as the local eccentric of Danbury, Connecticut.
(“George Ives was a kind of original creature,” recalled one of Charles’s boyhood
acquaintances.
44
) Charles Ives would recall his father
standing without hat or coat in the back garden; the church bell next door was ringing.
He would rush into the house to the piano, and then back again. “I’ve heard a chord
I’ve never heard before—it comes over and over but I can’t seem to catch it.” He stayed
up most of the night trying to find it in the piano.
45
Both father and son would strive sonically to realize such Romantic images, earnestly
blurring the line more-buttoned-down listeners might draw between music and noise.
“You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds,” George instructed.
46
Ives graduated from Yale with a degree in music, and worked for a time as a church
organist in New York City, but after the 1902 premiere of his cantata
The Celestial Country
, he decided that the prospective path of a professional composer in turn-of-the-century
America was not for him, and turned his career energies to his day job: selling life
insurance. Ives and a friend, Julian Myrick, went into business together, and the
Ives & Myrick firm was soon selling close to $2,000,000 in policies a year. Ives trained
agents during the day and composed at night. He would always insist that his vocations
reinforced each other.
If there were unacknowledged conflicts in Ives’s double
life, Transcendentalism helped smooth them over, providing a perspective from which
the duality might turn out to be complementary forces. One of his favorite essays
was Emerson’s “Compensation,” an assertion of faith in a self-equalizing, organic
nature. “The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation,
which, turn it how you will, balances itself,” Emerson wrote. “Take what figure you
will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.”
47
The “exact value” was Ives’s goal in all his varied pursuits, the common thread around
which he organized his clamorous life.
“Truth always finds a natural way of telling her story,” Ives preached, “and a natural
way is an effective way, simple or not.” The preaching in this case was not to musicians,
but to insurance agents, in a pamphlet entitled “The Amount to Carry—Measuring the
Prospect,” originally written as an article for
The Eastern Underwriter
. Ives’s guide went through several reprints and established him as a pioneer of the
modern practice of estate planning. Much of “The Amount to Carry” could easily be
read as a Transcendentalist tract. “[T]he influence of science will continue to help
mankind realize more fully, the greater moral and spiritual values,” Ives wrote. “Life
insurance is doing its part in the progress of the greater life values.”
48
Then again, Emerson’s “Compensation” could just as easily be read as a prophetic
description of Ives’s music—or, perhaps, his life:
Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all
the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of
every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world,
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its
good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow
accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
49
Historian Robert M. Crunden notes, “The computations of the actuaries, to Ives and
to other progressives, were scientific versions of Walt Whitman’s lists of democratic
events and objects. Once enumerated, they could be of assistance in realizing Transcendental
ideals.”
50
But it was the enumeration that drove Ives, the adding up, the cumulative force of
multiplicity. He spent much of his later life advocating for direct democracy, pushing
a constitutional amendment that would enshrine a mechanism for popular referendum
at the federal level, promoting—even mandating—that every citizen stand up and be
counted. Ives sold his proposed amendment with a testimonial: “Wendell Phillips, a
student of history and a close observer of men, as George William Curtis says, rejected
the fear of the multitude which springs from the timid feeling that many are ignorant
and the few are wise; he believed the saying, too profound for Talleyrand, that EVERYBODY
KNOWS MORE THAN ANYBODY.”
51