The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (32 page)

But the
Ode
is not really tonal: rather, it is taking the vocabulary of tonality and turning
it into disorienting, churning rhetoric; the music runs away from tonal grammar, shifting
through harmonies too quickly to allow any sort of anchor. And that may be part of
the work’s satiric intent—the
Ode
does to familiar musical sounds what the Nazis did to language.

Victor Klemperer was a professor and philologist in Dresden up until 1935, when he
was dismissed on account of his Jewish heritage. Since his wife was not Jewish, Klemperer
avoided the camps, but spent the rest of the war shuffled between factory jobs. All
the while, he kept notes on the Nazis’ gradual appropriation of the German language;
after the war, he compiled a book on what he called
LTI
—“Lingua Tertii Imperii,” the language of the Third Reich. It was a language of distortion,
not invention. “The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its
language, perhaps—indeed probably—none at all,” Klemperer wrote. “But it changes the
value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out
of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers
for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps
words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison.”
⁹⁶

If Klemperer analyzed a twisted language, Schoenberg’s
Ode to Napoleon
critiques a twisted cultural heritage. Since coming to America, Schoenberg had written
a handful of works in a traditionally tonal style (a neo-Baroque Suite in G for strings,
a modernistic but tonally anchored “Kol Nidre” setting), and many of his dodecaphonic
works of the 1930s and ’40s hinted at tonal centers. But the
Ode to Napoleon
is different, a funhouse mirror of tonality, a familiar language after a breakdown.
It is at the original peroration of Byron’s poem, when Napoléon’s
once-proud image is rendered most brittle—when Byron most mercilessly dismantles “That
spirit pour’d so widely forth— / So long obey’d—so little worth!”—that Schoenberg
suddenly wrings a stream of triads from his row: G major, E-flat minor, C-sharp minor,
F major, G-flat major, D minor, and so on, the sequence divesting the familiar chords
of their familiar meaning. The great inheritance of musical tradition, bequeathed
from the Fifth Symphony through the Romantics, through Wagner, through Schenker, had,
in the end, done nothing to forestall the conflagration of war. When it came to improving
human nature, the edicts of music, so long obeyed, showed, ultimately, little worth.

The allusions to Beethoven in the
Ode
are similarly double-edged. The opening of the Fifth is clearly echoing V-themed
Allied propaganda—but the poetic “voice of Victory” it underlines is Napoléon’s. The
E-flat major ending makes reference to the
Eroica
Symphony, but the piece it completes is a thorough dismantling of a heroic image.
After the war, a generation of European composers would take Schoenberg’s twelve-tone
method to extremes, eager to flush from their music any vestige of the nineteenth-century
tradition that, in their estimation, had paved the way for war. A piece like the
Ode to Napoleon
would have been regarded as old-fashioned, but, in a way, the
Ode
was designed to engineer its own obsolescence. In the
Ode
, Schoenberg came not to praise the nineteenth century, but to bury it.
⁹⁷

WHEN
S
CHOENBERG
died, in 1951, Pierre Boulez published a famous left-handed eulogy titled “
Schoenberg est mort
” (“Schoenberg Is Dead”). Boulez sought polemically to rescue Schoenberg’s fundamental
innovation—the twelve-tone method—from Schoenberg’s late-Romantic habits and allusions.
Schoenberg’s American period, in Boulez’s opinion, was marked by “utter disarray and
the most wretched disorientation”;
⁹⁸
the technique
needed to be claimed by a superseding, progressive aesthetic (one, naturally, corresponding
to Boulez’s own). Schoenberg would have recognized the gambit; it’s what he himself
was trying to do to an earlier master in the
Ode
. From his expatriate vantage point, Schoenberg was proclaiming that Beethoven—or,
at the very least, the truculent nationalism that deified him—was dead.

Sometimes, when Germans had bristled at using the Italian term
Eroica
, the equivalent word,
Heldenhafte
, was instead applied to Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In the 1880s, the composer and
historian Wilhelm Langhans had used the term to rate the Fifth Symphony higher than
the Third: the Fifth described “the heroic [
heldenhafte
] struggle of man with an overpowering destiny, and victory over it, in even more
poignant way than the
Eroica
.”
⁹⁹

Victor Klemperer later recorded the Nazi destiny of
heldenhaft:

The German army’s defeat at Stalingrad, in February of 1943, was too great even to
euphemize. German radio announced that “all theatres, cinemas, and variety halls in
the Reich were to close for three days.” The announcement was followed by a broadcast
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
¹⁰¹

IT TOOK
the Second World War to find a steady movie role for the Fifth Symphony. It had not
been used very often, possibly being already too much of a cliché even for Hollywood.
But the success of the “V-for-Victory” meme gave the Fifth its big break: war movies.
The four-note motive, along with the Marseillaise and “Rule Britannia,” became an
essential tool for cinematic pro-Allied sentiment. (It even worked its way into the
plot on occasion: in Universal’s 1942
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror
,
which brought the Victorian detective forward thirty years to battle the Nazis, Holmes
[Basil Rathbone] analyzes radio broadcasts of the Fifth with an oscilloscope in order
to unmask a Lord Haw-Haw–like propagandist.)
²

Animated cartoons, already a playground for free-floating semiotic bits of music,
seized on the association.
Fifth Column Mouse
(1943) brings in the theme to punctuate the war effort success of a group of mice,
shaving a Hitleresque cat’s fur into a dot-dot-dot-dash pattern.
³
In
Scrap Happy Daffy
(1943), newspaper reports of Daffy Duck’s Brobdingnagian pile of Allied-bound scrap
metal inspire a burst of the Fifth on the soundtrack, the combination driving a cartoon
Hitler into an unintelligible fury.
⁴
Carl Stalling, the longtime music director for the Warner Bros. animation department,
had the particularly apt idea of matching the Fifth’s incessant motivic rhythm to
modern, mechanized war production; both 1942’s
Ding Dog Daddy
(in which a none-too-bright dog falls for a bronze-sculpture counterpart, only to
see her carted off in a scrap drive) and 1943’s
The Home Front
(one of a series of cartoons produced for the U.S. Army starring the irrepressibly
irresponsible Private Snafu) featured factories that hummed to Beethoven’s beat.
⁵

Dramatic films about the war made
during
the war had a tendency to use the Fifth to send the audience out with a dose of Allied
resolve—as in Jules Dassin’s 1942
Reunion in France
, which ends with Michele de la Becque (Joan Crawford) and her double-agent fiancé
(Philip Dorn) gazing up as a defiant skywriter offers occupied France
COURAGE
, to the accompaniment of familiar, pealing Fate.
⁶
Postwar, Beethoven could be drafted for more casual purposes: Max Steiner’s score
for William Wellman’s 1958
Darby’s Rangers
reorchestrates the Fifth’s theme for flutes and muted trumpets, a comic sting for
an American lothario (Corey Allen) knocked out by a British soldier after trying to
steal his girl.
⁷
(Allen collapses under a poster reading “Be Kind to Our Allies.”)

Samuel Fuller’s 1959
Verboten!
uses the Fifth Symphony for dread rather than uplift, ominously setting the film’s
opening scene: a burned-out German town, an American platoon trying to flush out a
Nazi sniper.
⁸
(The sequence of the first few minutes is positively surreal: the Fifth’s opening
bars over the RKO logo, a fade-in to gunfire, then Paul Anka’s syrupy title song,
then back to the story and the Fifth.) Fuller builds the entire sequence around the
symphony’s first movement, and any intended sense of victory is undermined, as two
American soldiers are killed and a third wounded before the threat—and the music—is
over. (Fuller, a veteran of the U.S. Army, 16th Infantry, once told of billeting on
the floor of Beethoven’s house in Bonn; to Fuller, who idolized the composer, it was
like “finding an oasis in the desert.”
⁹
)

Producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 D-Day epic
The Longest Day
managed to be sparing yet unsubtle in its use of the Fifth, opening with a stark,
BBC-style drumbeat of the motive over a close-up shot of an army helmet upturned on
a Normandy beach.
¹⁰
Like one of the film’s roll call of big stars in small roles, Beethoven’s Fifth appears
fleetingly, and reduced to its most familiar essence, never getting any further than
the first eight notes.

And, like
Verboten!, The Longest Day
almost seems to give Beethoven’s Fifth back to the Germans, associating it more with
Nazi foreboding than Allied triumph. The motive only appears in full orchestral guise
twice: near the beginning, just after
Generalfeldmarschall
Erwin Rommel (played by Werner Hinz) promises the Allies, should they invade, the
titular ordeal; and then just before the German Major Werner Pluskat (Hans Christian
Blech) memorably spots the invading force itself (
“Auf mich zu direkt!”
).

Alan Sillitoe’s 1960 novel
The General
, about a traveling orchestra captured by an enemy during war, specified neither the
war nor the orchestra’s repertoire; but, as the enemy general, “dwelling on one of
the mass surprise attacks for which he
had become famous,” listens to the concert he forces the orchestra to play, the images
are familiar: “The music illuminated his vision, and its final symphonic beats synchronized
his resignation to the slow steps of advancing fate.”
¹¹

When
The General
was made into a movie, it became very specific indeed:
Counterpoint
(1967, directed by Ralph Nelson) takes place during World War II; the orchestra is
an American group on a USO tour; their captor is the German General Schiller (played
by Maximilian Schell), who engages in a battle of wills with his egotistical equal,
conductor Lionel Evans (Charlton Heston).
¹²
Evans’s conducting bona fides are established at the outset with a performance of
the Fifth; at movie’s end, with Evans left behind at the now-abandoned German headquarters,
Allied artillery coming ever closer, the four-note motive again emerges from Bronislau
Kaper’s score, eventually swelling into full, grim Beethovenian force.

Inevitably, though, memories of the war faded, and the Fifth would accompany situations
that could simultaneously utilize and satirize its distracting familiarity. Woody
Allen’s 1998
Celebrity
opened with a funhouse version of
Reunion in France:
the Fifth comes crashing in as a skywriter over New York spells out
HELP
.
¹³
(It turns out to be part of a movie shoot.) Playing a neurotic Californian in 1991’s
L.A. Story
, Steve Martin, showing an English journalist played by Victoria Tennant around the
city, takes her to the “Museum of Musicology,” which proudly displays Verdi’s baton,
Mozart’s quill, and (
da-da-da-dum
) “Beethoven’s balls,” a donation from “The Austrian School of Castration”—a common
allegorical Hollywood fate, one surmises.
¹⁴

The other place the Fifth Symphony turned up in movies was, of course, in movies about
Beethoven himself. Abel Gance’s
Un Grand Amour de Beethoven
(1936) plays it over the opening credits, almost as if to get it out of the way.
¹⁵
The 1994 biopic
Immortal Beloved
, directed by Bernard Rose, also opens with it, but under much more appropriately
fateful circumstances:
Beethoven (Gary Oldman), on his deathbed, expiring to an impeccably timed clap of
thunder—and the first five bars of the Fifth Symphony.
¹⁶