The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (33 page)

Immortal Beloved
’s
MORTAL BEGINNING
echoes a variant of Schindler’s story of Fate knocking at the door, one that replaces
Fate with Death.
The Musical Times
used it in 1911, for instance, mocking the new fad of adapting classical themes into
popular songs with a most inappropriate hypothetical: “We would not, for instance,
like to hear the low comedian chanting his quips, say, to the ‘death-knocking-at-the-door’
theme in Beethoven’s C minor.”
¹⁷

It’s possible the knock of Death was appropriated from a work that Romantic opinion
often heard as a direct precursor to Beethoven: Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, in which death (in the form of the Commendatore’s statue) really does knock at the
door. But the notion is an old one, going back to the Roman poet Horace:

As translated by Christopher Smart in 1767:

The image made its way into the repertoire of English allusion, and thereafter nudged
its way into the lore surrounding the Fifth Symphony. There are even translations
that hint at the crossover, such as that by Philip Francis, first published in 1742:
“With equal pace, impartial Fate / Knocks at the palace as the cottage gate.”
¹⁹

With the
Fate/gate
rhyme foreshadowing Schindler and/or
Beethoven’s
Schicksal
and
Pforte
, one can almost imagine some product of an English education, somewhere along the
line, making the unconscious transfer from Horace to the Fifth. (It’s tempting to
make the connection between Horace and Beethoven himself—the poet was one of Beethoven’s
favorites from among antiquity—but the German translations Beethoven would have read
are nowhere near as close to the Schindler/Beethoven formulation.
²⁰
)

The Death-at-the-door interpretation gained traction around the turn of the twentieth
century, a reflection of the heightened emotional stakes of art and music in the wake
of the Romantic era. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen salted his Sixth Symphony, premiered
in 1925, with versions of Beethoven’s motive; in the final movement, a theme-and-variations,
a near-quotation is thwacked out by a large drum. Nielsen told a friend that this
particular variation was, indeed, meant to symbolize “Death knocking at the gate.”
²¹
(Nielsen had suffered a series of heart attacks after completing his own Fifth Symphony;
the Sixth would be his last. In a bit of defiance, Nielsen followed his Death-knocking
Variation IX with a brash, concluding Fanfare.)

Replacing Fate with Death also brought Beethoven’s Fifth into the fold of old-time,
fire-and-brimstone religion. The image had long been a favorite of preachers (such
as seventeenth-century Presbyterian William Jenkyn: “Death may knock next and remember
he will easily break into thy body, though thy Minister could not get into thy soul”
²²
); as Schindler’s tale became commonly known, enterprising proselytizers seized on
the resemblance. Edmund S. Lorenz, composer of such favorite revivalist hymns as “There’s
Power in Jesus’ Blood” and “Tell It to Jesus,” provided this exhortation in 1909,
illustrating “Why a Minister Should Study Music”:

A good example of the Death-at-the-door variant is found in Pat Conroy’s
The Water Is Wide
, his memoir of a year spent teaching on an isolated island off the coast of South
Carolina. One day, Conroy decides to play for his poor, undereducated Gullah students—descendants
of freed slaves—a record of Beethoven, whom the students promptly dub “Bay-Cloven.”

The scene touches on every aspect of the Death story that made it particularly resonant
in America. There are the religious overtones, the revivalist style that Lorenz promoted,
and also the call-and-response traditions of the African-American church. The repertoire
of Negro spirituals often opts for similar imagery; Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a
cousin of the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) recorded one such spiritual
during his Civil War days as the colonel of a black regiment:

There’s also the point that Horace was trying to make: death’s universality. That,
too, would have taken on special meaning in the United States, a country where the
ideal of democracy was perpetually celebrated, if only intermittently realized. If
the fate knocking at the door was to be specified, Americans might well imagine it
as death, the most democratic fate of all.

ON NEW YEAR
’
S DAY
, 1863, a jubilant crowd of Boston abolitionists celebrated the arrival of Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation with a concert featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
²⁶
Ralph Waldo Emerson read a new poem, called “Boston Hymn”:

The novelist Ralph Ellison was named for Emerson. In a 1955 article for
High Fidelity
magazine, Ellison recalled his days as an aspiring writer living in a noisy apartment.
The Basie fan next door and the singing barflies who would stumble into the backyard
court were profound annoyances, but there was another musical intrusion that provoked
“feelings of guilt and responsibility”: an opera singer, practicing hour after hour.
This “more intimate source of noise … got beneath the skin and worked into the very
structure of one’s consciousness—like the ‘fate’ motif in Beethoven’s Fifth or the
knocking-at-the-gates scene in
Macbeth
.”
²⁸

The feelings were rooted in the past. Before turning to writing, Ellison had aspired
to music. A budding trumpeter, he hung around Oklahoma City’s vital jazz scene, yearning
for entry. At the same time, he nurtured a desire to be a great Negro composer, bringing
black American vernacular sounds into the temples of European high art. “[H]ere I
was with a dream of myself writing the symphony at twenty-six which would equal anything
Wagner had done at twenty-six,” he recalled. “This is where my ambitions were.”
²⁹
Ellison took lessons in trumpet, analysis, and composition from Ludwig Hebestreit,
a German immigrant, music educator, and conductor, who founded the Oklahoma City Junior
Symphony Orchestra. (Since Hebestreit taught at a segregated high school, Ellison’s
lessons were, by necessity, private; he got a break on the fees by mowing Hebestreit’s
lawn.)
³⁰
He enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute as a music major, to study with the conductor
and composer William L. Dawson, whom Ellison ranked as “the greatest classical musician
in that part of the country.”
³¹

Ellison may have imagined that he would satisfy mind and soul by pursuing both jazz
and classical music; instead, all he felt was tension. Hence the unease that his opera-singer
neighbor brought flooding back, along with Ellison’s recollection of his own obsessive
practicing (and of the discomfort it caused his own neighbors) in pursuit of a troublesome
goal: “For while our singer was concerned basically with a single tradition and style,
I had been caught actively between two: that of Negro folk music, both sacred and
profane, slave song and jazz, and that of Western classical music. It was most confusing.”
³²

It is at a point of acute confusion that Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony enter Ellison’s
most famous piece of writing, his 1954 novel
Invisible Man
. The protagonist, once a favored standout at a black college, is working at a paint
factory after a series of disillusioning setbacks; after causing a boiler explosion,
he wakes up in a hospital, in the middle of shock treatment.

The Beethoven reference is not just a throwaway; as in the symphony, Ellison builds
his gambit into a whole movement, the entire experience itself echoing the opening
of the Fifth. The opening rest (
“Be quiet now,” one of them said firmly
); the initial attack (
I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound
); the repetitive anacrusis (
A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning
); and then the held note, the fermata, delivered with the drawn-out excess recommended
by Wagner:
I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling.… My lungs were compressed like
a bellows
(Wagner: “Then shall life be drained to the last blood-drop”). Eventually, though,
the fermata yields (
We’re trying to get you started again
).

The symbolism, too, becomes more nuanced on closer inspection. At first, it seems
a wedge, a bit of white, European culture meant to torture a black man into docility,
for his own good. But in bringing in the Fifth, Ellison also brings in all of the
symphony’s encrusted narratives: fate, struggle, defiance.

Ellison’s idea of art was decidedly Beethovenian. In one famous description of another
musical touchstone, the blues, Ellison’s language might have come directly from a
description of the Fifth Symphony: “Their attraction lies in this, that they at once
express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer
toughness of spirit.”
³⁴
As the civil rights movement picked up steam, Ellison stood outside it, defending
his Beethoven-like retreat into his art; the social impact of
Invisible Man
was “the result of hard work undertaken in the belief that the work of art is important
in itself, that it is a social action in itself.”
³⁵
Critic Jerry Gafio Watts writes of Ellison in a way that recalls Beethoven’s complicated
pas de deux with Napoléon: “Heroic individualists, like most ambitious fine artists,
are not fundamentally democratically minded. They may espouse democratic ideology,
but they tend to view themselves as a select group, select by virtue of talent but
more importantly by virtue of their sheer artistic willpower and bravery.”
³⁶

Ellison once wrote that “being a Negro American involves a
willed
(who wills to be a Negro?
I
do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures.”
³⁷
(
Muss es sein? Es muss sein!
) In that sense, Beethoven’s cameo in
Invisible Man
echoes Ellison’s individualism, echoes his protagonist’s need to find an identity
that transcends the preexisting roles in which both blacks and whites would cast him.