The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (9 page)

It should be emphasized that such a connection with the Fifth is without any biographical
basis (though still less far-fetched than much of the conspiratorial speculation that
Freemasonry has attracted over the years).

Accepting that Beethoven and/or Schindler may have come up with the fate/door image
as an ex post facto interpretation allows another possible Masonic source: August
von Kotzebue’s 1818 one-act comedy
Der Freimaurer
(
The Freemasons
). The play’s Count von Pecht is obsessed with Freemasonry, sending his hapless servant
to spy on lodge meetings, and finally trying to get himself initiated just to satisfy
his curiosity. But the Baron, the head of the local lodge, is suspicious:

Kotzebue, a cheerfully arrogant man of letters, was far and away the most successful
German playwright of his time. That was enough to interest Beethoven; in 1812, he
approached Kotzebue about writing an opera libretto, something “romantic, serious,
heroic-comic, or sentimental, as you please,” showing that he was familiar with Kotzebue’s
wide (if not particularly deep) range.
²⁶
Nothing came of the opera (Attila the Hun had been a suggested subject), but Beethoven
did compose incidental music for two of Kotzebue’s plays,
King Stephen
and
The Ruins of Athens
. The latter yielded the famous “Turkish March,” the familiar tune of which is, upon
closer examination, a cousin of the Fifth’s opening, flipped around: a drop of a third,
then
three repeated notes. The march supplied exotic color for the plot: Minerva, put
to sleep by Jupiter for two millennia for letting Socrates die, wakes up to find Athens
under Islamic rule.

GIVEN
B
EETHOVEN
’
S
fascination with all things Eastern, it is not surprising that Schindler’s tale would
have gained immediate currency as an expression of individual fate, one not dissimilar
from Eastern ideas of kismet or karma. Indeed, it is at the very least a pointed coincidence
that what is quite possibly the first piece to purposefully quote the Fifth’s germinal
motive carries the unmistakably Eastern title of
Nirwana
, Hans von Bülow’s op. 20 tone poem. Though today an obscure curiosity (and Bülow
now largely remembered as a conducting pioneer, famous for his championing of Richard
Wagner),
Nirwana
was the best known of Bülow’s compositions during his lifetime. The piece unfolds
with full Romantic drama (some of
Nirwana’s
harmonies would influence Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
) until, just before the piece reaches its close, the strings suddenly unleash a barrage,
sempre forte e distaccato
, of Beethovenian short-short-short-long rhythmic volleys, the bassoons and timpani
soon joining in, driving the orchestra to a
con tutta la forza
climax.

The title,
Nirwana
, was a late change; originally Bülow called the piece an
Overture to Byron’s “Cain.”
²⁷
Byron had published his three-act play-for-reading in 1821, portraying the biblical
fratricide as motivated less by jealousy than by existential despair: Cain finds himself
unable to worship a God who has burdened him with the knowledge of his own mortality.

Cain’s fate is to survive, after an angel marks “upon thy brow / Exemption from such
deeds as thou hast done”
²⁹
—history’s first murderer, cursed with the knowledge of his act and cast into the
wilderness.

Bülow’s change of title might indicate a change of heart about the nature and acceptance
of one’s fate. Had the Byronic context survived, Bülow’s use of the Fate motive would
have seemed more fatalistic: humans as actors in immutable, divinely ordered plays
of which they can only perceive dim outlines. But under the title of
Nirwana
, the same quotation becomes, maybe, an individual fate that enlightenment reveals
to be merely transient. And Bülow’s individual fate during the gestation of
Nirwana
was sufficiently scandalous that he may well have wished to regard it as fleeting.

Bülow had already written the piece in 1854, to judge from a letter from Wagner in
which he discusses it.
³⁰
By the time
Nirwana
was published, in 1866, Bülow’s wife Cosima had become Wagner’s mistress, and had
already given birth to one of Wagner’s children. Even after an eventual divorce, Bülow’s
admiration for Wagner’s music persisted, but one can imagine how an
abandonment of the world and a peaceful indifference to its ups and downs of pride
and fall, need and frustration, must have interested him. Ironically, the same 1854
letter in which Wagner talks of the then-untitled
Nirwana
also finds Wagner enthusiastically recommending to Bülow the works of the philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer. It was from Schopenhauer that Bülow learned the Buddhist concepts
of Samsara and Nirvana: the cycle of birth and death and the understanding that allows
one to escape its oppression. (As we shall see, Schopenhauer’s philosophy would also
shade Wagner’s own relationship to Beethoven.)

Bülow would liken Beethoven’s op. 111 Piano Sonata, another C-minor work that begins
in struggle and ends in transcendence, to the Samsara-Nirvana dialectic. But Bülow’s
own
Nirwana
is hardly triumphant, forcefully recapitulating the same gloomy B minor in which
it starts. Bülow admitted it was a conclusion “which optimism might regard as a so-called
tragical one, but the last sigh of the vanishing ‘Nirvána’ is not intended by the
author in this sense.”
³¹
Bülow, like so many after him, was expanding Schindler’s poetic morsel into a larger
web of meaning: emerging from its stew of Cain and Buddha and Beethoven and Bülow
himself,
Nirwana
’s quotation of the Fifth leaves one wondering just whose fate it is doing the knocking.

EVEN AS
Bülow was writing
Nirwana
, the European conception of Fate was metastasizing from something individual to something
more external and cosmic. The process finds its origin in a single sentence in the
Philosophy of Right
by that most formidable of nineteenth-century German thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel:

Hegel wrote this in 1820, but he had been espousing variations of the idea for a while.
Hegel’s correspondence between the actual and the rational—an unusually direct formulation
for him—would actually muddy the interpretive waters around another of his ideas,
that of historical progress. Hegel believed that history learned from its mistakes,
continually evolving toward more freedom, fairness, and philosophical soundness.

Hegel insisted on regarding anything in existence as not just
being
, but constantly
becoming
, evolving, changing. Hegel’s favorite Greek philosopher was another connoisseur of
change, Heraclitus. (“Here we see land,” Hegel complimented.
³³
) The surviving fragments of Heraclitus’s writings sound like the aphorist Hegel never
became:

Such statements hint at how a dynamic, change-encompassing point of view could relieve
another of Hegel’s philosophical hallmarks, his horror of contradiction. (If one recognizes
the whole road, the divergence in travel direction goes from an inconsistency to a
totality.) But what Heraclitus merely observed, Hegel would attempt to demonstrate
logically. Hegel gave history a direction, and with it, a dose of Fate. And as the
idea of Fate became more broad and all-encompassing, the perceived importance of the
Fifth Symphony and its opening—now permanently labeled “Fate”—followed suit.

Born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven, Hegel was a late bloomer: studious and bookish
almost from the start, but taking some time to find his place. Having graduated from
the
Stüttgart
Gymnasium
at the top of his class (he gave a graduation address critiquing educational opportunities
in Turkey), Hegel’s initial thought was to study theology and then become a “popular”
philosopher, using his learning and the authority of his degree to explain up-to-date,
Enlightenment philosophical ideas for a general audience—a little bit ironic, given
his eventual reputation for near incomprehensibility.

Hegel drew a line in the sand with his first published work, a long essay called
The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy
.
³⁵
Fichte was the leading disciple of the great Enlightenment sage Immanuel Kant; Schelling
had become the undisputed star of the younger generation of German philosophers. Both
had taken on one of the leading chin-scratchers of the day—what happened when the
human intellect took
itself
as a subject? If the mechanisms of the intellect were consistent, the result would
be a rabbit hole of self-regard—but Enlightenment thinkers were loath to conclude
that the mind had different mechanisms depending on what it was pondering. Fichte
had decided that self-consciousness cannot be realized without at the same time discovering
that the self is finite, that there is a limit to the intellect. (You can only notice
your own distinct identity, for example, if you allow for the existence of other rational
subjects who are not you.)

For Hegel, any such limit verged on blasphemy. The solution, as he saw it, was to
move forward from
reflective
philosophy—stuck in the mind’s perception of itself, and in the limitations of language—into
speculative
philosophy. Speculation makes philosophy into a mirror (a
speculum
) of the Absolute by jumping over the boundary that Fichte ran up against: “Only by
recognizing this boundary and being able to suspend itself and the boundary—and that,
too, scientifically—does [philosophy] raise itself to the science of the Absolute.”
³⁶
If that sounds like a leap of faith, it’s because it is. The Absolute is another
in a long line of philosophical terms—Unity, the One, the Prime
Mover—that philosophers have used to talk about God without calling him/her/it God.
Hegel was less coy about its divinity than some.

Hegel’s goal was to philosophically clear a path all the way to the divine. His method
was the dialectic, resolving contradictions by expanding understanding—zooming out
from individual lanes to the whole road. Hegel’s dialectic, the progressive leaps
past the boundaries that philosophies and political systems carry within themselves,
would be the engine driving his conception of history. Time might reveal the inherent
contradictions within any endeavor—the “glorious mental dawn”
³⁷
of the French Revolution, for example, giving way to the dark night of the Reign
of Terror, the historical situation still too burdened with mistrust and corruption.
But rational thought could reconceptualize the world so that such conflicts were rendered
meaningless. One dissolved contradiction at a time, Hegel’s dialectic would get us
to the Absolute.

Like most philosophers at the time, Hegel made a distinction between logic and aesthetics,
between the discipline of discourse and the realm of art. Music appeared in Hegel’s
logic (as opposed to his aesthetics) only in analogies. Actually trying to put music
through Hegel’s logical paces is more problematic. If we try to follow a bit of musical
information—the Fifth’s first four notes, for example—through Hegel’s outline of logic,
we can get a better sense of why, in his aesthetics, Hegel was suspicious of music.
We can also start to understand why the subsequent Hegelization of Beethoven and his
music, perhaps, short-circuited the progress of musical history as much as it advanced
it.

The mechanism by which Hegel imagined an idea becoming an Idea is a three-step process:
Being, Essence, and the Notion. It’s the second step, Essence, where musical ideas
seem to go off the rails. Hegel’s discussion of Essence is one of those places where
he really earns his reputation for obscurity. (When Hegel
warns that “The theory of Essence is the most difficult branch of Logic,”
³⁸
it’s kind of like hearing Evel Knievel say that the ride is about to get particularly
bumpy.) But one can think about it this way: if Being is all about recognizing that
the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth
are
, Essence is all about the discussion of what they
mean
—how we start to relate those first four notes to other concepts.

Hegel subdivides the realization of Essence into (of course) another three parts.
Reflection
is where everybody, say, tries out different interpretive concepts for the first
four notes—Fate, or birds, or the French Revolution, or whatever. This will, inevitably,
produce contradictory interpretations of the opening motive—differing opinions as
to just who is knocking at the door.
Appearance
is the complement of Reflection; if Reflection is about clearing away unnecessary
differences
between
interpretations of the first four notes, Appearance is about finding the interpretation
best able to clear away differences
within
it. For the particular interpretation of the opening motive as a representation of
Fate, for instance, the stage of Appearance is when both what we hear in the motive
and what we think about Fate will adjust and grow to encompass each other. The Essence
of the motive will begin to “shine forth” at this point.