The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (6 page)

It wasn’t that the young and the restless hadn’t pursued fame before, but that fame
had been a means to a cushy end. As historian Henri Brunschwig put it, referring to
young writers in late-eighteenth-century Prussia: “To become famous is a short cut
to the heights of a career in politics or the civil service. It means gaining an embassy
or a university chair without the heat of the fray; it means invitations from princes
aspiring to be Maecenases.”
⁸⁷
But as the repercussions of revolution dried up those channels, ambition became diffuse
and unfocused. Napoléon offered a case study in a new career path, one in which fame
became an end in itself.

In Beethoven’s case, the fame of both the composer and his music reinforced each other.
The
Eroica
story burnished Beethoven’s antiauthoritarian credentials, which in turn encouraged
democratically “spun” interpretations of the rest of his music, which in turn further
solidified the composer’s radical reputation, and so on. The Landsberg 6 triumvirate
—Eroica, Fidelio
, the Fifth—had the biographical effect of making tales of Beethoven more believable
the more they seemed to reveal a sympathy with revolutionary ideals.

And in Beethoven’s relationship with Bettina Brentano—and Bettina’s subsequent reportage
of that relationship—one can clearly see the image being built.

In her own life, Bettina Brentano—later Bettina von Arnim—showed how the new rules
of fame could be leveraged for feminine empowerment. Beethoven fell into the circle
of the Brentanos sometime after the family moved into the wonderfully cluttered Vienna
house of Joseph Melchior von Birkenstock, Bettina’s half brother Franz having married
Birkenstock’s daughter Antonie. The Brentano sisters—Sophie, one-eyed and doomed to
an untimely death; Antonie, the link between old and new Viennese aristocracy; and
Bettina, confident and self-assured—were everything that Beethoven found attractive:
lovely, intelligent, talented, and, for all practical purposes, maritally unattainable.
At one time or another Beethoven found himself pulled toward all three. (Antonie,
her marriage notwithstanding, has been not implausibly suggested as the mysterious
“Immortal Beloved” to whom Beethoven wrote a series of impassioned love letters.
⁸⁸
)

It was in May 1810 that Bettina stole up behind Beethoven at his pianoforte and put
her hands on his shoulders; when the misanthropic composer realized it was a pretty
girl, and a Brentano to boot, he softened and sang to her a newly written setting
of Goethe’s
“Kennst du das Land?”
That, at least, is how Bettina told the story—and Bettina was quite a storyteller.
The
young woman had already made the acquaintance of Goethe himself, but when, later in
life, she published her letters to Goethe, they were embellished, recombined, and
otherwise literarily enhanced. Bettina was an unusually skillful mythologist, lively-minded
and keenly observant, and the stories she is suspected of having invented nonetheless
feel like they
ought
to be true. She had a knack for taking an anecdote and lightly fictionalizing it
into something considerably more memorable.

So it was that one of Bettina’s tales became Exhibit A in the transformation of Beethoven
into a democratic hero. A kind of impresario of celebrity, she encouraged Goethe and
Beethoven to meet in person; by the time they did meet, at Teplice in the summer of
1812, Bettina had been banished from the Goethe circle over a disparaging comment
she made to Goethe’s wife.
⁸⁹
Nevertheless, Bettina recorded a letter from Beethoven describing a stroll taken
by the two great men:

The letter is almost certainly an invention by Bettina. (The same week the letter
is purportedly dated, Beethoven also displayed his own talents as a courtier in a
letter to Archduke
Rudolph: “Your Imperial Highness!” he begins, “It has long been my duty to recall
myself to your memory, but partly my occupations in behalf of my health and partly
my insignificance made me hesitate.…”
⁹¹
) But the story became permanently enshrined in Beethovenian lore, along with the
Eroica
story, along with the letter Beethoven supposedly wrote to a patron, Prince Lichnowsky,
admonishing: “Prince, what you are you are by accident of birth; what I am I am through
myself. There have been and will be thousands of princes; there is only one Beethoven.”
⁹²

Deliberately or instinctively, Beethoven (and his celebrants) again and again went
out of the way to advertise his singular nature: an outsider, divorced from the hierarchical
role-playing of class and status. In the wake of both the Revolution and Napoléon,
that pose fueled his fame and his republican aura: a thoroughly nineteenth-century
modern man.

A YELLOWHAMMER
might have seemed too bucolic for the Fifth’s revolutionary airs, but another bird
puts Beethoven back in more weighty company: Coco the parrot, the ad hoc mascot of
the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s and
’80s. The seven-story dive (by all accounts) was the primary home for Western journalists
covering the conflict, a hub for sources and spin. The Commodore remained relatively
unscathed by the conflict for fifteen years, but in February 1987, Druze and Shiite
militias staged a seven-hour gun battle throughout the hotel, leaving it a looted
shell. In the melee, Coco the parrot was kidnapped. Coco’s owner, British journalist
Chris Drake, had fled to Cyprus to avoid the increasingly common fate of journalist
abductions in Beirut, but left the bird, at the insistence of hotel staff. “I have
to accept that Coco may have been killed, but if he was, I’m sure he went down fighting,”
Drake eulogized. “He has a vicious beak,
and it wouldn’t be too difficult to recognize the gunman who stole him. He’ll be the
one with his trigger finger missing.”
⁹³

Coco could do uncanny re-creations of the sound of incoming artillery shells. He could
also whistle “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem—and the opening of the
Fifth Symphony.

The similarities between the two songs in Coco’s repertoire raises the question of
whether Beethoven was consciously alluding to “La Marseillaise” when he wrote the
Fifth. Like the Fifth, “La Marseillaise” opens with a prominent, repeated-note
quartus paeon
. The Revolution rang with the meter, in fact: both of its rhetorical features—its
blending of a prosaic air of conversational directness with the rhythmic force of
poetry, and its ability to withstand repetition—served the Revolution’s propagandists
well. The triple-note upbeat into a strong downbeat—

      short-short-short |
long

—turns up often enough in French revolutionary
chansons
that a listener might consider it a stylistic feature.
“Les Voyages du bonnet rouge”
(“The Voyages of the Red Cap,” referring to the official headgear of the revolution),
a 1792 chanson, starts with a three-note pickup:

As does
“L’Heureuse décade”
(“The Happy Decade”), from
1793
:

Similarly, an abolitionist plea from
1794
,
“La Liberté des Nègres”
(“The Freedom of the Negroes”):

The national anthem of the First Empire,
“Le Chant du départ”
(“Song of Departure”), also dates from 1794; the chorus starts in familiar rhythm:

A 1795 anti-Jacobin chanson,
“Le Réveil du peuple”
(“The awakening of the people”):

And, lest we forget, Coco’s favorite, Charles Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s
1792
hit, originally called
“Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin, dédié au maréchal Lukner”:

Indeed, like “La Marseillaise,” both
“Le Chant du départ”
and
“Le Réveil du peuple”
were sung to specifically composed tunes, making the three-note pickup a deliberate
revolutionary touch, not just a conveniently borrowed one. (The music for
“Le Réveil du peuple”
was by Pierre Gaveaux, who also composed the 1798 opera
Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal;
the libretto, by Jean-Louis Bouilly, would later serve as the basis for Beethoven’s
Fidelio
.)

“La Marseillaise” alone would almost guarantee that any subsequent triple upbeat would
carry a revolutionary echo. Gaveaux’s was probably intentional. Was Beethoven’s? The
Finale of the Fifth Symphony has often been linked to both specific
revolutionary songs and the general French Revolutionary musical style—martial, strongly
rhythmic, almost aggressively major-mode triadic. But the Fifth’s opening movement,
especially the omnipresence of its opening motive—terse, direct, and incessant—could
have just as easily found a place in the great
Fêtes
of the Revolution, those giant celebrations, part political rally and part revue,
designed to periodically fire the public’s republican enthusiasm.

Beethoven almost certainly was familiar with the musical portion of those celebrations.
A series of volumes dedicated to music composed for the
Fêtes
was part of the library of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, then the French ambassador to
Vienna, whom Beethoven frequently visited; Rodolphe Kreutzer, whose name became attached
to one of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, was part of Bernadotte’s retinue, and had music
of his own published in the
Fêtes
collection.
⁹⁵
(Bernadotte’s ambassadorship ended abruptly, after a riot sparked by his raising
of the tricolor over the embassy; years later, unlikely political maneuvering made
the French-born Bernadotte King Carl XIV Johan of Sweden and Norway.) In 1927, German
musicologist Arnold Schmitz pointed out a passage in Luigi Cherubini’s 1794
L’Hymne du Panthéon
strikingly reminiscent of the Fifth’s first movement, with short-short-short-long
fragments cascading through the chorus.
⁹⁶
An even better candidate for Beethoven’s inspiration might be a massive, four-choir-and-orchestra
piece written for the celebration of September 23, 1800, the Revolutionary calendar’s
New Year’s Day.
“Chant du 1er Vendémiaire An IX”
(“Song for the First of Vendémiaire, Year Nine”) bears an uncanny resemblance to
the Fifth, a C-minor canvas that becomes positively saturated with the familiar rhythm
once the touchstone of Classical antiquity is summoned:

The
“Chant”
was commissioned by the Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte—Napoléon’s younger
brother, who later fell out with the Emperor.
⁹⁸
The words were by Joseph Esménard, who, some years later, provided the libretto for
Gaspare Spontini’s opera
Fernand Cortez
, portraying the title character as a heroic, decidedly Napoleonic figure. And the
music was by none other than Jean-François Le Sueur, Berlioz’s future teacher, who
would be so discomfited by the Fifth. So we can see how the shifts from Republic to
Consulate to Empire complicated the Revolution’s legacy, and made any association
with that legacy an equivocal matter.

And nowhere is the line between musical and political influence more blurry than in
the case of a symphony obviously indebted to the Revolutionary musical tradition,
full of the sort of instrumental effects common to the
Fêtes
, and fetishizing the three-note pickup that rhythmically propelled the songs of the
Revolution—not the Fifth, but the Symphony no. 1 in G minor by Étienne-Nicolas Méhul.
Even the timing is parallel: Méhul’s Symphony was first performed no later than March
of 1809, and some vague references in the French press indicate a possible performance
in November 1808, making the premiere nearly simultaneous with that of the Fifth.
⁹⁹

Méhul, for a time Napoléon’s favorite composer, had made his name in opera just as
the Revolution took hold; though his intense musical energy and audacious orchestration
were ideally suited to the Revolutionary style—he wrote the tune for the national
anthem,
“Le Chant du départ
”—it was still too wild for some. (Le Sueur, for instance, hated him.) Something of
that audacity carried over into Méhul’s G-minor Symphony. The Minuet, like the Scherzo
of Beethoven’s Fifth, includes an arresting
passage of pizzicato strings, and its
Allegro agitato
Finale seems to echo the Fifth’s opening, riveted with repeated eighth notes, working
a
quartus paeon
into nearly every bar.