Read The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Online
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
But that is to assume that a connection between business and art is something that
Forster himself wants, and not just his characters.
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To take the ending at face value is to suppose that the reader is not supposed to
hear its rattling skeletons. The novel’s real truth-teller is Beethoven and the Fifth.
Forster’s ending is Beethoven’s ending: nominally happy, but undermined by the violence
and darkness that has preceded it, darkness that even explicitly returns to invade
it. “Beethoven chose to make all right in the end,” Forster writes, just as the fag-end
Victorians chose whatever myth offered the comfort of jubilee, be it England, Progress,
Commerce, or even the notion that Beethoven and his music could express the ideals
and aspirations of nineteenth-century Britain. Schlegels and Wilcoxes alike settle
on the myth of Howards End, but Forster’s language gives the game away—Howards End
is ending; Helen’s concluding announcement of “such a crop of hay as never” casts
the whole place and story into the realm of fairy tale with its final word. The “red
rust” is creeping across the meadows from London, and both the substance and the color
are notable. The goblins are there.
That the characters don’t notice is typical of the novel, which makes the overarching
presence of Beethoven even more rueful. Beethoven was literally exceptional, in Forster’s
opinion, in being able to size up a larger conception of Fate in whole. “[T]his musician
excited by immensities is unique in the annals of art,” Forster once wrote. “No one
has ever been so thrilled by things so huge, for the vast masses of doom crush the
rest of us before we can hope to measure them. Fate knocks at our door; but before
the final tap can sound, the flimsy door flies into pieces, and we never learn the
sublime rhythm of destruction.”
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Beethoven is a double-edged sword, his singular glimpse of the
infinite so celebrated that, coupled with the era’s inclination to blithe confidence,
it inspired lesser men to think they, too, could square the immeasurable circle of
fate. In
Howards End
, the Schlegels’ German-English father—a veteran of Sedan, disillusioned “when he
saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey”—is introduced, in flashback, warning
his native and adopted races: “No … your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than
is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness,
to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one
square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.”
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As if to drive home the inadequacy of mere mortals to comprehend Beethoven’s vision,
Forster seasons his narrative with dashes of the accrued nineteenth-century imagery
surrounding the Fifth—dropped music-appreciation hints that the characters utterly
fail to pick up on. Reunited at Howards End, Margaret and Helen fall into reminiscence,
but Helen—always the transmitter for Romantic impulses—mixes present and past in the
house’s garden, via a familiar avian messenger:
“Ah, that greengage tree,” cried Helen, as if the garden was also part of their childhood.
“Why do I connect it with the dumbbells? And there come the chickens. The grass wants
cutting. I love yellow-hammers—”
Margaret interrupted her.
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And, at the novel’s denouement, when Margaret finally comes into possession of Howards
End, it is Paul Wilcox—whose impetuous kiss of Helen Schlegel set the plot in motion,
who has disappeared to Nigeria to make his fortune for the bulk of the story, and
who appears again now, hostile to Margaret’s presence, “manly and cynical” with the
habitual intolerance of empire—it is Paul who provides the well-known signal, not
with a knock, but a desultory kick: “Clumsy of movement—for he had
spent all his life in the saddle—Paul drove his foot against the paint of the front
door. Mrs. Wilcox gave a little cry of annoyance. She did not like anything scratched.”
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Writing on the eve of the Great War, Forster’s little detail is prophetic: Fate as
the uncoordinated by-product of imperial ambition. Margaret, again, misses its significance.
But in her own way, Margaret has fulfilled the symphonic structure, in quintessentially
Romantic terms. That Margaret has achieved the novel’s final, forced connection within
the walls of the novel’s titular property is the ultimate mirror of the Fifth Symphony:
the opening motive—Howards End itself—becomes the means for realizing organic unity.
It just turns out not to be the cure-all everybody thought it would be.
Thus we assist at a show that would appear comic, if not for the tremendous tragedy
it involves.
—H
ERMANN
K
EYSERLING
,
“A Philosopher’s View of the War”
THE ROMANTICISM
that made Beethoven an honorary Victorian would be mercilessly exposed as a placebo
by the war. In the introduction to his play
Heartbreak House
, George Bernard Shaw took both the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes of prewar society to
task, scolding the latter as incompetent and the former as too polite to point it
out. “Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud,” Shaw looked back, “England showed
no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness.”
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It was a consequence of the unfavorable intellectual economics of politics: “Nature’s
way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us
to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis.”
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Heartbreak House
brings all the strains of prewar society together for a country weekend where, under
Shaw’s richly bleak administration, they show themselves incapable of managing their
own fates. The industrial machinery of history has made the characters its servants.
Mangan, the pompous businessman, is goaded into admitting that he only runs the factories
he has pretended to own; Mazzini, the hapless intellectual, having expected revolution,
finds that “nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink
that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It’s amazing how well we get along,
all things considered.” The roaring, doddering Captain Shotover casts his gimlet eye
on fate. “Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence,” he pronounces. “But one of
the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.”
When the bombs start falling, the party’s female poles, the overbearing Mrs. Hushabye
and the dreamy Ellie Dunn, claim the drama as their familiar, feminine birthright:
MRS. HUSHABYE
… Did you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it’s splendid: it’s like
an orchestra: it’s like Beethoven.
ELLIE
By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.
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The women’s admiration is topically accurate. (And Shavian—a not insignificant part
of Shaw’s literary output was music criticism.) Beethoven’s prewar universality was
such that, even in the midst of subsequent wartime anti-German indignation, the indignant
could still occasionally forget where Beethoven was from—take Sir Arthur Markham,
for instance. In 1915, Markham (a grandson of Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal
Palace) rose in the House of Commons to denounce Sir Edgar Speyer, Baronet, Privy
Councillor, and a patron of music who had personally funded the Promenade Concerts
at Queen’s Hall for a number of years. Speyer had been born in America to
German-Jewish immigrants, and was made a British subject in 1892; but he remained
connected to Germany through his family’s banking concern. Anti-German activism targeted
Speyer early in the war, and after the Armistice, he would be stricken from the Privy
Council—a rare occurrence—and lose his British citizenship. For now, though, Markham
seized on Speyer’s musical activities:
I suppose it is because he is of German origin that we in this country are to be treated
during the next few weeks by Sir Henry Wood to a series of concerts entirely composed
of German music. I have the whole of the programmes here, from which it will be seen
that some of the concerts are to be devoted entirely to Wagner’s music.… I cannot
understand how people can go to listen to German music, when every people in the world,
except ourselves, would not tolerate during a time of war that they should be entertained
by German music. But as the Queen’s Hall belongs to him, I suppose we in this country
are to be instilled with German virtues.
For Markham, however, there was German and then there was German. Markham’s rebuke
prompted an exchange:
MR. R. MCNEILL
: Is there no Beethoven in the programme?
SIR A. MARKHAM
: No, the whole of the programme at some of these concerts contains no music except
German.
SIR F. BANBURY
: Beethoven was a German.
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Edward Goldbeck was less inclined to neutralize Beethoven’s Germanic soul. A Berlin
native and a German Army veteran, Goldbeck emigrated to the United States, where he
wrote theater criticism and cultural commentary. In the shadow of war,
Goldbeck took seriously Beethoven’s boast that, had he a military rather than musical
mind, he could have defeated Napoléon; the music hovered pointedly between imperious
and imperial. The Fifth’s opening portrayed a Fate to be overcome through a superior
musical offensive: “It is one of his most beautiful and impressive ideas that the
‘motive of Fate,’ thundering at first, grows more and more muffled, until we hear
it only far off and drowned by the trumpets of triumph.” No wonder Germany so proudly
claimed him as its own. “I doubt very much, however … that Beethoven would be a pacifist
today.… Beethoven had the temperament of a warrior, and music is nothing but architectural
and dynamic ‘organization’ ”—the stereotypical wellspring of Prussian military prowess.
“The Germany of today is not separated by an abyss from the Germany of the classics,”
Goldbeck concluded, “the spirit is the same, only the material on which it works is
different: it was imagination once, now it is reality.”
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It was in America that anti-German sentiment would most translate into cultural chauvinism,
as German music, operas, and theater—not to mention German names, words, and accents—were
cleansed from American life. One of those leading the charge against German repertoire
was the New York socialite Mrs. William Jay. (Her husband, a great-grandson of the
first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was a lawyer and the founder
of the New York Coaching Club, which, according to his 1915 obituary, “gave a great
impetus to the breeding of harness horses in this country, and kept alive a sport
which even the automobile has not yet succeeded in killing.”
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) Mrs. Jay, a member of the New York Philharmonic’s Board of Directors, headed a wartime
group called the Intimate Committee for the Severance of All Social and Professional
Relations with Enemy Sympathizers, which advocated the elimination of German repertoire
from concert halls and opera houses, “part of a movement directed toward the complete
extinction of German
influence in this country.”
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The Metropolitan Opera did eliminate German-language repertoire during the war, having
decided that productions “might enable Germany, by garbling and patching, to print
‘news’ dispatches for home consumption which would tend to put heart in the German
people.”
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Even in Boston, the American port of entry for German Romanticism and the birthplace
of the American Beethoven cult, German repertoire would nearly vanish during the war.
German and Austrian composers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra’s programming in the 1916–17 season; in the 1918–19 season, the proportion
was less than half that.
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Along the way, Mrs. Jay and her ilk claimed a particularly valuable scalp: Karl Muck,
the orchestra’s conductor.
Henry Lee Higginson, still running the orchestra as his personal fiefdom, had first
hired Muck, a veteran of Bayreuth and the Royal Opera in Berlin, to lead the group
in 1906; Muck opened his tenure with a “brilliant and effective” rendition of Beethoven’s
Fifth.
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Higginson convinced him to return for a second tenure in 1912. Muck conducted with
an almost stereotypically Prussian demeanor, sober and disinclined to interpretive
fantasy, but his authority and discipline raised the Boston Symphony to the pinnacle
of American orchestras. Hearing Muck conduct Beethoven’s Fifth at Carnegie Hall, critic
Frederic Dean pronounced him “the Wendell Phillips of the orchestra—willing to sacrifice
sonority to sentiment.… He weighs the meaning of a musical phrase as he chooses the
exact word for his sentence.”
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But after the opening concert of the BSO’s 1917–18 season—once again featuring the
Fifth Symphony—Higginson and the orchestra came under criticism after the American
flag was inadvertently left off the Symphony Hall stage. “Until lately my loyalty
has never been questioned,” Higginson grumbled.
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The incident may have exacerbated his intransigence when, prior to
an October 1917 performance in Providence, Rhode Island, a coterie of local women’s
and musical clubs sent a telegram to BSO management insisting that the group preface
its concert with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Higginson—not about to let anybody tell
him how to run his concern—ignored the demand; but the press painted Karl Muck as
the villain, a German interloper arrogantly insulting American pride, and the story
blossomed into a full-blown scandal. As the orchestra’s publicity manager remembered,
“The fat was in the fire and blazing high.”
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