The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (42 page)

  1
. William E. Channing,
The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. Eleventh Complete Edition, with an Introduction
(Boston: George G. Channing, 1849), vol. 5, p. 308.

  2
. John Sullivan Dwight, “Academy of Music—Beethoven’s Symphonies,”
The Pioneer
1, no. 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1843): 57.

  3
. Lindsay Swift,
Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1900), p. 154.

  4
. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Life and Letters in New England,” in
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 10 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903–04), p. 340.

  5
. Ibid., p. 343.

  6
. James Clarke Freeman, quoted in James Elliot Cabot,
A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1888), p. 249.

  7
. Swift,
Brook Farm
, p. 156.

  8
. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,”
The Dial
1, no. 2 (October 1840): 149.

  9
. As related by Emerson in
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli
, vol. 1 (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852), p. 234.

 10
. Margaret Fuller, “Lives of the Great Composers, Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven,”
The Dial
2, no. 2 (Oct. 1841): 202.

 11
. A. Bronson Alcott, “Orphic Sayings,”
The Dial
1, no. 1 (July, 1840): 93.

 12
. Octavius Brooks Frothingham,
George Ripley
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886), pp. 84–85.

 13
. Ibid., p. 9.

 14
. George Willis Cooke,
Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis to John S. Dwight
(New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1898), pp. 58–59.

 15
. Quoted in Frothingham,
George Ripley
, p. 124.

 16
. Ibid., p. 613.

 17
. Emerson, “The Conduct of Life,” in
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 6, pp. 276–77.

 18
. Emmanuel Swedenborg,
The True Christian Religion; Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church
(New York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1855), pp. 376, 388.

 19
. Ibid., p. 804.

 20
. John Sullivan Dwight, “Musical Review: Music in Boston During the Last Winter,”
The Harbinger
1, no. 8 (Aug. 2, 1845): 124.

 21
. John Sullivan Dwight, “Review:
Festus, a Poem
,”
The Harbinger
2, no. 2 (Dec. 20, 1845): 27. “Festus” was a long philosophical poem by the English
poet Philip James Bailey which had some currency in nineteenth-century America (Tennyson,
for example, admired it). Dwight concluded his Swedenborg-Fourier-Beethoven thought
by asking, “and shall we not say, in poetry, ‘Festus?’ ” He had at least enough critical
perspicacity to include the qualifying question mark.

 22
. Frothingham,
George Ripley
, p. 192.

 23
. A. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane to A. Brooke, August 1843, in Clara Endicott
Sears,
Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), p. 50.

 24
. Louisa M. Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” in Sears,
Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands
, p. 169.

 25
. Quoted in Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Part of a Man’s Life
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905), p. 12.

 26
. D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature
(Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 112.

 27
. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, September 3, 1841, in Hawthorne,
The Letters, 1813–1843
, Thomas Woodson et al., eds. (Ohio State University Press, 1984), p. 566.

 28
. Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe
(Ohio State University Press, 1964), pp. 165, 162.

 29
. John Sullivan Dwight, “The Sentiment of Various Musical Composers,”
Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art
VIII, no. 2 (Feb., 1851): 133.

 30
. Rev. Darius Mead, “Part of a Speech on ‘Divine Electricity,’ ” in Mead, ed.,
The American Literary Emporium or Friendship’s Gift
(New York: C. H. Camp, 1848), p. 15.

 31
. John Sullivan Dwight, “The Sentiment of Various Musical Composers,” p. 133.

 32
. Ibid.

 33
. George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, eds.,
The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1861), vol. 3, p. 71.

 34
. See John Sullivan Dwight, “Musical Review: Music in Boston During the Last Winter.—No.
III,”
The Harbinger
1, no. 10 (Aug. 16, 1845): 154–57, and his “Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor,”
Dwight’s Journal of Music
IV (Oct. 8, 1853): 1–3.

 35
. Dwight, “Valedictory,”
Dwight’s Journal of Music
XLI (Sept. 3, 1881): 123.

 36
. Dwight, “What Lack We Yet?”
Dwight’s Journal of Music
XL (Sept. 11, 1880): 150.

 37
. George P. Upton, ed.,
Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography
, vol. 1 (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1905), p. 310.

 38
. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
(New York: Dover Publications, 1993), p. 49.

 39
. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in
Leaves of Grass
(New York: Modern Library, 1921), p. 67.

 40
. Quoted in Herbert Bergman, “Whitman on Beethoven and Music,”
Modern Language Notes
66, no. 8 (Dec. 1951): 557.

 41
. Allan Sutherland,
Famous Hymns of the World: Their Origin and Their Romance
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1906), p. 22.

 42
. Stearns,
Sketches from Concord and Appledore
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), p. 187. See also Louis Ruchames, “Wendell
Phillips’ Lovejoy Address,”
The New England Quarterly
47, no. 1 (March 1974): 108–17.

 43
. In a memo, Ives considered including the study in a set of pieces, with the reminder
“Wendell Philips [
sic
]—Faneuil Hall.” See James B. Sinclair,
A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives
(Yale University Press, 1999), p. 613. Ives also apparently began to orchestrate
the study for his
Three Places in New England:
“There was another movement started but never completed, about the Wendell Phillips
row and the mob in Faneuil Hall.” Ives,
Charles E. Ives: Memos
, John Kirkpatrick, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. 87.

 44
. Vivian Perlis,
Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History
(Yale University Press, 1974), p. 16.

 45
. Charles Ives, “Some ‘Quarter-Tone’ Impressions,” in
Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings
, Howard Boatwright, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1970), p. 111.

 46
. Ives,
Charles E. Ives: Memos
, p. 132.

 47
. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation,” in
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 2, p. 102.

 48
. Ives, “The Amount to Carry—Measuring the Prospect,” in
Essays Before a Sonata
, pp. 240, 236.

 49
. Emerson, “Compensation,” in
The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
, vol. 2, p. 101.

 50
. Robert M. Crunden,
Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920
(University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 124.

 51
. Charles Ives, “Concerning a Twentieth Amendment,” in
Essays Before a Sonata
, pp. 206–07. (“Williams Curtis” in original.)

 52
. Ives,
Essays Before a Sonata
, p. 40.

 53
. Compare the left hand in measure 3—

—with the left hand in measures 6–7:

 54
. Ives,
Essays Before a Sonata
, p. 47. (Beth Alcott, who, like her
Little Women
counterpart, died young, was also the only Alcott daughter to share a name with her
fictional characterization.)

 55
. Ibid., p. 45.

 56
. A. F. Winnemore, “Stop Dat Knocking at De Door” (Boston: Geo. F. Reed, 1847). As
Ives quotes it:

 57
. Ives,
Essays Before a Sonata
, pp. 47–48.

 58
. Perlis,
Charles Ives Remembered
, p. 161.

 59
. Steven C. Smith,
A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann
(University of California Press, 1991), p. 180.

 60
.
Charles E. Ives: Memos
, p. 44.

 61
. Thomas Clarke Owens,
Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives
(University of California Press, 2007), p. 126.

 62
. Harmony Ives to Nicolas Slonimsky, July 6, 1936, in Owens,
Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives
, p. 128.

 63
. Ives,
Essays Before a Sonata
, p. 73.

 64
. J. Peter Burkholder, “Ives and the Four Musical Traditions,” in
Charles Ives and His World
(Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 5.

 65
. Thoreau,
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906), vol. 2, p. 492 (Nov. 9, 1853).

 66
. Ibid., p. 379 (Aug. 6, 1851).

 67
. Thoreau,
Walden
, vol. 2, p. 421.

 68
. Ives,
Essays Before a Sonata
, p. 51.

 69
. Ibid., p. 58.

 70
. Philip Corner, “Thoreau, Charles Ives, and Contemporary Music,” in Walter Harding
et al., eds.,
Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), p. 68.

 71
. Ibid., p. 54.

 72
. James B. Sinclair,
A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives
(Yale University Press, 1999), p. 197.

  1
. Alan Walker,
Hans von Bülow: A Life and Times
(Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267.

  2
. Walter E. Houghton,
The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870
(Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 1–2.

  3
. Rev. John Blakely,
The Theology of Inventions, or, Manifestations of Deity in the Works of Art
(New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1856), pp. 138–39, 141.

  4
.
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. Official Descriptive
and Illustrated Catalogue
, vol. 4 (London: Spicer Brothers, Wholesale Stationers; W. Clowes and Sons, Printers,
1851), p. 1067.

  5
. Ibid., pp. 1053, 1047, 1054.

  6
. Charles L. Graves,
The Life & Letters of George Grove, C.B
. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), p. 9.

  7
. Ibid., p. 10.

  8
. Ibid., p. 28.

  9
. See Henry Saxe Wyndham,
August Manns and the Saturday Concerts: A Memoir and a Retrospect
(London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1909), pp. 21–32.

 10
. Manns had been singled out as a bandmaster by Albrecht von Roon, later the Prussian
Minister of War during Bismarck’s tenure, but soured on army life after a junior officer
opined that the buttons on his band’s uniforms were insufficiently polished. See Saxe
Wyndham,
August Manns and the Saturday Concerts
, pp. 14–15.

 11
. Complete lists of Prince Albert’s programs for both the Antient Concerts and the
Philharmonic Society are in Theodore Martin,
The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875), pp. 494–501.

 12
. Adam Carse,
The Life of Jullien
(Cambridge: Heffer, 1951), p. 65.

 13
. See “Jullien, Louis Antoine,” in George Grove, ed.,
A Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1880), p. 45.

 14
. Jan Piggott,
Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 74.

 15
. Ibid., p. 47.

 16
. Ibid., p. 75.

 17
.
The Crystal Palace Penny Guide
(Sydenham: Crystal Palace Printing Office, 1863), p. 17.

 18
. “Delta,” “Home Correspondence: The Royal Commission and the Surplus,”
The Journal of the Society of Arts
, vol. 2 (London: George Bell, 1854), p. 343.

 19
. Hugh Reginald Haweis,
Music and Morals
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1872), p. 419.

 20
. Hugh Reginald Haweis,
Travel and Talk: 1885–93–95
, vol. 2 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897), p. 244.

 21
. George Grove,
Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies
(London and New York: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1896), p. 137.

 22
. Michael Musgrave,
The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 84, 120.

 23
. Cyril Erlich,
First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society
(Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 44; Peter Gay,
Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 81.

 24
.
A Short History of Cheap Music as Exemplified in the Record of the House of Novello,
Ewer & Co., with Especial Reference to the First Fifty Years of the Reign of Her Most
Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria with Three Portraits and a Preface by Sir George Grove,
D.C.L., &c
. (London and New York: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1887), pp. vi–vii.

 25
. Grove,
Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies
, p. 139.

 26
. Charles Kingsley,
Yeast: A Problem
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), pp. iii–iv.

 27
. [Frances] Kingsley,
Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life
, vol. 2 (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877), pp. 399–400.

 28
. “Our Representative Man,”
Punch
, Sept. 14, 1878, p. 117.

 29
. Graves,
The Life & Letters of George Grove
, pp. 399–401.

 30
. Thomas Richards,
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England
(Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 33.

 31
. Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle
, Ken Knabb, trans.,
http://​www.​bopsecrets.​org/​SI/​debord/
, p. 1.

 32
. Ibid., p. 5.

 33
. Explaining the Situationist concept of
détournement
, a kind of cultural hijacking, Debord and Gil Wolman offered as an example that “it
wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a final correction to the title of the ‘Eroica Symphony’
by changing it, for example, to ‘Lenin Symphony.’ ” See Debord and Wolman, “A User’s
Guide to Détournement,” Ken Knabb, trans.,
http://​www.​bopsecrets.​org/​SI/​detourn.​htm
. (Originally in
Les Lèvres Nues
, May 1956.)

 34
. Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle
, p. 10.

 35
. Ibid., p. 15.

 36
. Ibid., p. 16.

 37
. G. W. F. Hegel,
The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy
, Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris, trans. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 92.

 38
. Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle
, p. 57.

 39
. Howard Brenton, “Petrol Bombs Through the Proscenium Arch,” interview by Catherine
Itzen and Simon Trussler,
Theatre Quarterly
5, no. 17 (March–May 1975): 20.

 40
. Tim Clark, Christopher Gray, Charles Radcliffe, and Donald Nicholson-Smith, “The
Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution,” unpublished pamphlet,
1967,
http://​www.​notbored.​org/​english.​html
. Authors Clark, Gray, and Nicholson-Smith were formally excluded from the Situationist
International in 1969 (Charles Radcliffe had earlier resigned), exclusion having become
a main activity of the SI post-1968. See “The Latest Exclusions,”
Internationale Situationniste
#12 (Paris: Sept. 1969), Ken Knabb, trans.,
http://​www.​bopsecrets.​org/​SI/​12.​exclusions.​htm
.

 41
. Raoul Vaneigem,
The Revolution of Everyday Life
, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Welcombe: Rebel Press, 2001), p. 44.

 42
. See Dierdre David,
Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 202–7. Kemble’s
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839
became an abolitionist best-seller upon its publication in 1863.

 43
. Fanny Kemble,
A Year of Consolation
, vol. 2 (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1847), pp. 87–88.

 44
. Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
England and the English
(Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1836), p. 14.

 45
. Graves,
The Life & Letters of George Grove
, p. 337.

 46
. Roy Jenkins,
Gladstone
(New York: Random House, 1997), p. 191.

 47
. The exhortation has been widely attributed; Jowett’s claim comes courtesy of a eulogy
in the
Oxford Chronicle
, October 7, 1893, quoted in Cecil Day Lewis and Charles Fenby,
Anatomy of Oxford
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), p. 139.

 48
. Robert Bulwer-Lytton, “Beethoven,”
The Fortnightly Review
XII, no. LXVII (July 1, 1872): 32.

 49
. Karl Marx,
Capital
, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans.; Frederick Engels, ed., vol. 1 (Chicago:
Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1909), pp. 81–83.

 50
. See Stuart Anderson and Peter Homan, “ ‘Best for me, best for you’—a history of
Beecham’s Pills 1842–1998,”
The Pharmaceutical Journal
269 (Dec. 21/28, 2002).

 51
. Etienne Van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne,
Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations
(University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 99.

 52
. “The Parliamentary Committee on Proprietary Remedies. Evidence Regarding Beecham’s
Pills,”
The British Medical Journal
1, no. 2718 (Feb. 1, 1913): 234. At the same hearing, Sir Joseph was asked whether
his father had known of any medical value in Beecham’s Pills before he started selling
them:

 53
. Neville Cardus,
Sir Thomas Beecham: A Memoir
(London: Collins, 1961), p. 12.

 54
. Sir Thomas Beecham,
A Mingled Chime
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943), pp. 51–52.

 55
. James C. Whorton,
Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society
(Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 51.

 56
. Robert Herrick, “To Enjoy the Time,” in
The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick
, F. W. Moorman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.

 57
. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,
The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), pp. 7, 46. Herrick punctuates his Beethoven
with a quotation from Virgil:
terque quaterque beati Queis ante ora patrum
—“three and four times blessed were those fated to die before their parents’ eyes.”
British homesickness could easily colonize Germany and Rome.

 58
. E. M. Forster, “The Challenge of Our Time,” in
Two Cheers for Democracy
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1951), p. 56.

 59
. E. M. Forster,
Howards End
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 21. The sentiment may be echoing Goldsworthy
Lowes Dickinson’s remedy for easing the tension of reconciling “the Western flight
down Time with the Eastern rest in eternity”: “When you feel dead you should go to
church; but not in a ‘sacred edifice.’ Beethoven, even in the Queen’s Hall, is better.”
Dickinson, a Cambridge historian and philosopher, was a longtime friend of Forster,
and his companion on his first trip to India (eventually yielding Forster’s final
novel,
A Passage to India
); Dickinson’s family was reportedly the inspiration for the Schlegel sisters and
their London house in
Howards End
. Forster speculated that Dickinson, a lifelong pacifist, may have been the one to
coin the term “League of Nations.” But toward the end of his life, Dickinson would
admit that the prospects for the League were dim, writing to an Indian correspondent
in 1931: “When one enters into politics one enters the region of passion, interest,
prejudice, and at last, fighting, which, however it begins, always ends in the destruction
of all that was best and most generous in those who perhaps inaugurated it.” (For
the Beethoven quote, see Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson,
Appearances
[New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915], pp. 134, 135; for the connection with
Howards End
, see Paul Cadmus’s letter to
The New York Times
, April 12, 1992; for the League of Nations and Dickinson’s disillusion, see E. M.
Forster,
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
[New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962], pp. 163 and 229–30.)

 60
. Forster,
Howards End
, pp. 22–23.

 61
. Ibid., p. 23.

 62
. Ibid., p. 31. Forster’s fellow Bloomsburyan Leonard Woolf had a friend, B. F. Dutton,
who reminded him of Leonard Bast: “He spent his evenings writing poetry about elves
and fairies, and playing, endlessly, an arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
the C Minor, on his out-of-tune piano.… The fascination of Dutton for Leonard was
that Dutton was a terrifyingly degraded version of himself.” See Victoria Glendinning,
Leonard Woolf: A Biography
(New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 77.

 63
. Mary Burgan, “Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,”
Victorian Studies
30, no, 1 (1986): 61.

 64
. Lucas Malet,
The Wages of Sin
, vol. 3 (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1891), pp. 31–32.

 65
. John Lane Ford,
Dower and Curse
, vol. 1 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), pp. 6, 167.

 66
. Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
Mount Royal
(London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1883), p. 282.

 67
. William Makepeace Thackeray,
Denis Duval: Lovel the Widower: and Other Stories
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), p. 237.

 68
. Ibid., p. 256.

 69
. Linda Allardt et al., eds.,
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 255.

 70
. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard,
Rumour
, vol. 3 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), p. 219. “Adelaída” combines aspects of
Louis-Napoléon’s empress, the Spanish-born Eugénie de Montijo, with a name borrowed
from both the Beethoven song and Queen Victoria’s niece, Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg,
to whom Louis-Napoléon had unsuccessfully proposed marriage.

 71
. Ibid., p. 227.

 72
. Ibid., p. 312.

 73
. Ibid., p. 347.

 74
. Grove,
Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies
, pp. 155–56.

 75
. See Michelle Fillion, “Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E.
M. Forster’s
A Room with a View
,”
19th-Century Music
25, no. 2/3 (Autumn 2001–Spring, 2002): 266–95.