Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
Music at the Crystal Palace likewise served both God and Mammon. Victorian cleric
and commentator Hugh Reginald Haweis thought that the type of programs that Manns
and Grove put on were indicative of the “immense advance of the popular mind”
19
because, though the Palace’s shareholders were tempted to “sacrifice everything to
attract a paying mob anyhow and anywhen,” Grove “stood firm, and he took his stand
on music.”
20
Grove himself, on the other hand, appreciated the way Beethoven nourished both soul
and box office. When he collected his program notes on the Beethoven symphonies into
a popular book, Grove introduced the Fifth at the nexus of meaning and fame:
The C minor Symphony is not only the best known, and therefore the most generally
enjoyed, of Beethoven’s nine Symphonies, but it is a more universal favourite than
any other work of the same class—“the C minor Symphony always fills the room.” And
this not only among amateurs who have some practical familiarity with music, but among
the large mass of persons who go to hear music
pour passer le temps
.
21
The Fifth most often appeared at the end of Crystal Palace concerts, the better to
keep the room filled through any prior novelties. An audience survey during the 1879–80
season put three of Beethoven’s symphonies (nos. 3, 5, and 6) in the top five, along
with Mendelssohn’s
Italian
Symphony and Schubert’s
Unfinished
.
22
(And not just at the Crystal Palace: the Fifth was already the preferred symphony
of the Royal Philharmonic Society, with thirty-four performances by 1850; from 1858
to 1895, Charles Hallé’s orchestra in Manchester played the Fifth eighteen times.
23
)
Grove regarded his musical endeavors, and the Victorian promotion of “noble music”
in general, as part and parcel with the Industrial Revolution. “It is the division
of labour,” he wrote, “the spread of machinery” and the concomitant changes in transport
and education—“it is these characteristic achievements of the reign of Victoria which
have effected so much in literature and music that it is a mere commonplace to us,
but which to our fathers and grandfathers was unknown, unexpected, impossible.”
24
Something was needed to elevate the newly desirous masses, and something was needed
to get them in the door; Beethoven fit the bill on both counts. “[I]n London, in Paris,
everywhere else,” Grove wrote, “the C minor Symphony has been the harbinger of the
Beethoven religion.”
25
Such religions were a growth industry at the time. As industry re-created more and
more of the world in its mechanistic image, Victorians began to fear a supplanting
of the infinite. As a result, Victorian life was defensively saturated with a hollow
exaltation of religion. Reformer and novelist the Rev. Charles Kingsley wrote of his
fellow Anglicans “losing most fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of Christianity,
and … for that very reason, clinging all the more convulsively—and who can blame them?—to
the outward letter of it.” In the meantime, “the more thoughtful” searched for a substitute,
be it Catholicism, commerce, or, most insidiously, art: “an unchristian and unphilosophic
spiritualist Epicurism which, in my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely
because it looks at first sight most like an angel of light.”
26
(Kingsley once filled out a literary questionnaire: “Favourite composer? Beethoven … The
character you most dislike? Myself.”
27
)
In an 1878 issue of
Punch
, “Our Representative Man” reported hearing Beethoven’s Fifth at Covent Garden in
the company of a “Stupendous Musical Amateur,” one of Kingsley’s spiritualist epicures
in excelsis
:
As the
Allegro
finished, my Stupendous Friend rose from his seat, and, frowning upon me as though
challenging, or defying contradiction, addressed me thus. “The
Allegro
,” he said, firmly and authoritatively, “is the point where Human Genius has reached
its uttermost limits,”—and with this he strode grandly from the box, in so ethereally
transcendental a manner that, had any one met me immediately afterwards, and told
me “Your friend has gone straight up through the roof into the sky above, all among
the angels,” I should not have been surprised: indeed, I should rather have expected
it.
28
The zeal with which George Grove evangelized on Beethoven’s behalf was the result
of a relatively late conversion; well into his thirties, he had remained puzzled by
the symphonies. In spite of his later devotion, researching and writing both his program
notes and the lengthy “Beethoven” entry in the first edition of his
Dictionary
, Grove again felt a twinge of anxious heresy late in his life. In poor health, taking
the waters at the Swiss resort of Ragatz, he was suddenly seized with trepidation.
“In the dead of night it came into my mind,” he wrote his brother-in-law. “Had Beethoven
written anything sublime?” Grove elaborated in a letter to his brother. “The sublime,
as I take it, must have a supernatural element in poetry or music. I don’t find the
C minor symphony has any of the sublime,” he wrote. “
Personal
and
terrible
it is in the first movement, mystical in the Scherzo and connection with the Finale;
and triumphantly magnificent in the Finale itself. But I find nothing which … makes
me silent with awe.” To another correspondent, Grove disclosed, “It quite frightens
me to admit that there is anything which Beethoven had not, and yet, as I see at present,
I must admit he had not
this
.”
29
Even mortal gods fell hard.
B
EETHOVEN
’
S MUSIC
at the Crystal Palace, perhaps, was fulfilling the same function in Victorian life
as the manufactures that had filled the hall in 1851—talismans of the spiritual validation
of earthly goods. The Great Exhibition was not primarily about advancing technology,
but about justifying the societal pressure toward consumption that technology created.
Scholar Thomas Richards, surveying Victorian “commodity culture,” seizes on the Great
Exhibition as that culture’s inaugural liturgy, a glorification of manufactured goods
as self-warranting objects. Richards points out that the Exhibition’s most prominent
exhibits were not practical machinery, but gadgets, mechanical devices “so specialized
as to be practically useless.”
30
Just as Beethoven’s symphonies had risen to the pinnacle of musical value by exalting
pure, unadulterated expression, the gadget could better declare for industry the more
it avoided actual function. Absolute music; absolute manufacture.
Richards views the Great Exhibition through the lens of Guy Debord’s 1967 Situationist
classic,
The Society of the Spectacle
. The radical pranksters of the Situationist International, fomenting revolutionary
attitude in 1960s France, might seem far away from nineteenth-century Britain, but
their targets were those Victorian novelties, consumption and advertising. “In societies
dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation
of
spectacles
,” Debord
wrote. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
31
Such spectacles, in Debord’s reckoning, are elaborate reinforcements of the ruling
order, “its never-ending monologue of self-praise.”
32
His analysis drew on Karl Marx (it
is
French theory, after all),
33
but also Hegel—and Hegel by way of Nietzsche. Where Nietzsche posited history itself
as an impersonal agent, Debord said that Hegelian “progress” has replaced that historical
force with the commodity itself—stuff we manufacture, stuff we consume, turning back
on us and controlling our lives. “The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity
has succeeded in
totally
colonizing social life,” Debord noted. “Commodification is not only visible, we no
longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.”
34
Many of Debord’s aphorisms seem to provocatively glance off both the Victorian predicament
and the prominence that Beethoven and the Fifth Symphony accumulated throughout the
burgeoning industrial age. The popular programmatic narrative of the symphony’s “struggle,”
for instance, and its status as an exemplar of organic unity: “Although the struggles
between different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially
presented as irreconcilable antagonisms, they actually reflect that system’s fundamental
unity, both internationally and within each nation.”
35
Debord’s analysis of movie and television stars might well speak to Beethoven’s Victorian
celebrity: “As specialists of
apparent life
, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate
for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live.”
36
And when Debord moves on to culture as a whole, he finds that capitalism has renewed
the alienation that first agitated the early Romantics, echoing the young Hegel’s
line in the sand between Fichte and Schelling; again, as Hegel had put it, “The entire
system of relations constituting life has become detached from art, and thus the concept
of art’s all-embracing coherence has been lost, and transformed into the concept either
of superstition or
of entertainment.”
37
Thus, in Debord’s words, culture “detached itself from the unity of myth-based society”:
The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of culture, and to the ideological
illusions regarding that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And
this whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation
of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture
is the terrain of the quest for lost unity. In the course of this quest, culture as
a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.
38
The alienation and negation Debord saw so clearly in the society of the 1960s was
just beginning to be sensed in the 1860s. It would be an oversimplification to regard
the Victorian veneration of Beethoven as a deliberate or even unwitting scheme to
reinforce the nascent power structure of the Industrial Revolution—even at the remove
of a century, the Situationists were still not sure what to make of Beethoven. British
playwright Howard Brenton could admire how “the situationists showed how all of them,
the dead greats, are corpses on our backs—Goethe, Beethoven—how gigantic the fraud
is”;
39
but another group of British Situationists could write of how, in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution, art “changed from a celebration of society and its ideologies
to a project of total subversion.… [I]n Beethoven … one can see the change from celebrant
to subversive within the space of a lifetime.”
40
But Raoul Vaneigem, one of the group’s leading theoreticians, sensed the Victorians’
Beethovenian sea-change in more primal terms in his 1967 book
The Revolution of Everyday Life
. “Nobody seems worried that
joy
has been absent from European music for nearly two centuries; which says everything,”
he wrote. “Consume, consume: the ashes have consumed the fire.”
41
Indeed, the era confirmed the growing tendency—subterranean
but significant—to underline the Fifth’s sense of struggle, rather than triumph. The
most striking example is surely the reaction of Fanny Kemble, the celebrated English
actress and writer. Kemble temporarily retired from the stage in 1834 to marry the
American planter Pierce Butler, but her horror at the treatment of slaves on Butler’s
plantations, coupled with Butler’s infidelities, resulted in their separation. Upon
Kemble’s discovery of his affairs, Butler had offered a deal: she could retain access
to her children on the condition that she forswear the stage and not publish anything
in support of abolition; Kemble, trapped, agreed on account of the children.
42
But the arrangement collapsed, Butler took the children, and Kemble returned to Europe.
She chronicled a recuperative trip to Italy in
A Year of Consolation
, interspersing the narrative with poems, including this one:
ON A SYMPHONY OF BEETHOVEN
.
Terrible music, whose strange utterance
Seem’d like the spell of some dread conscious trance;
Impotent misery, helpless despair,
With far-off visions of things dear and fair;
Restless desire, sharp poignant agonies;
Soft, thrilling, melting, tender memories;
Struggle and tempest, and around it all,
The heavy muffling folds of some black pall
Stifling it slowly; a wild wail for life,
Sinking in darkness—a short passionate strife
With hideous fate, crushing the soul to earth;
Sweet snatches of some melancholy mirth;
A creeping fear, a shuddering dismay,
Like the cold dawning of some fatal day:
Dim faces growing pale in distant lands;
Departing feet, and slowly severing hands;
Voices of love, speaking the words of hate,—
The mockery of a blessing come too late;
Loveless and hopeless life, with memory,—
This curse that music seem’d to speak to me.
43
Kemble published several volumes of her letters, all scrupulously edited to avoid
explicit mention of her marital difficulties. But the fragility and disquiet so vigilantly
tamped down in her epistolary memoirs is palpable in her poetry. If the symphony in
question was indeed the Fifth—a likely notion—then the balance has been decisively
shifted away from the Finale (“a blessing come too late”) and toward the first movement’s
turmoil. Cosima Wagner’s joke, that the Fifth’s climax was a lot of celebrating over
nothing, turns serious, a shout over the abyss lurking under the shifting ground of
Victorian society. Kemble had fame, success, and influential friends, but also learned
that, in crucial ways, she was performing without a net.