The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination

by Matthew Guerrieri

  If the onset of hearing loss fed into Beethoven’s penchant for isolation, his penchant for isolation may have, in turn, fed an exaggerated sense of the extent of his deafness. Recent proposed guidelines for tinnitus diagnosis include the reminder that “it has become clear in recent years that the ‘problem’ of tinnitus relates far more to the individual’s psychological response to the abnormal tinnitus signal than to the signal itself.… [I]n some cases the altered mood state predates tinnitus onset … making it difficult to know whether tinnitus causes psychological disturbance, or whether psychological disturbance facilitates the emergence of tinnitus.”20

  Nevertheless, the adaptability of so much of Beethoven’s middle-period “heroic” output to narratives of crisis and triumph has contributed to a popular sense that his deafness was sudden and total, rather than gradual. One finds it in an entry from an American music-lover’s diary, published in Dwight’s Journal of Music in 1853: “[Beethoven] was deaf, poor man, when he wrote the 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Symphonies. Deaf when he composed ‘Fidelio,’ ‘The Ruins of Athens,’ the two Masses, &c.”21

  The unidentified diarist was actually Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who would later undertake extensive research in Germany and Austria and produce a pioneering Beethoven biography, the first volume of which appeared in 1866; based on Thayer’s findings, most critics and scholars would adopt a more nuanced view of Beethoven’s deafness. But the story of a stone-deaf Beethoven and his dauntless musical response was too good, too inspirational, not to survive. The American composer Frances McCollin, for example, blind from the age of five, took powerful inspiration from the story, starting when she attended a dress rehearsal for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s inaugural concert in 1900: “[S]he heard the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which made her think of the deaf Beethoven and she burst into tears.”22 McCollin’s story echoes one from the six-year-old Clara Schumann—who, for reasons similar to Beethoven’s, was so withdrawn as a child that her parents thought she, too, might be deaf—noting in her diary, “I heard a grand symphony by Beethoven which excited me greatly.”23

  The image of a young, completely deaf Beethoven gained a foothold in children’s literature, offering an educational example of human perseverance (and, maybe, playing on a child’s delight in paradox: a composer who can’t hear). McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader included an excerpt from Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys, in which young Hugh Proctor’s mother tries to console him after he has had his foot amputated:

  “Did you ever hear of Beethoven? He was one of the greatest musical composers that ever lived. His great, his sole delight was in music. It was the passion of his life. When all his time and all his mind were given to music, he suddenly became deaf, perfectly deaf; so that he never more heard one single note from the loudest orchestra. While crowds were moved and delighted with his compositions, it was all silence to him.” Hugh said nothing.24

  Even today, one can still find the myth perpetuated here and there.25

  As an up-and-coming composer and performer, Beethoven probably feared that common knowledge of his encroaching deafness would have hindered his career prospects. The opposite occurred, as it turned out: within his own lifetime, Beethoven’s deafness became a celebrated element in the reputations of both the composer and his music. A snippet of that celebrity is preserved in the conversation books, the trove of one-sided table talk from Beethoven’s later years, when guests would jot down their share of the discussion on paper. During one chat, Beethoven’s nephew Karl informs his uncle of popular perception: “Precisely because of [your deafness] you are famous. Everyone is astonished, not just that you can compose so well, but particularly that you can do it in spite of this affliction. If you ask me, I believe that it even contributes to the originality of your compositions.”26

  On this occasion, Beethoven seems to have taken his nephew slightly to task for overdetermining the nature of his genius, but there is some evidence that it was Beethoven himself who planted the seed of that astonishment and fame. By the time of the Fifth’s premiere, Beethoven had come to terms with his deafness enough to stop concealing it and to start even subtly advertising it, writing a note to himself in one of his sketchbooks to “let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.” The musicologist Owen Jander went so far as to reinterpret the Fifth Symphony in light of this self-admonition, making it not just a metaphorical struggle with infirmity, but, at least in the slow march that permeates the third and part of the fourth movements—a march built out of the symphony’s opening motive—a musical re-creation of the experience of deafness. The third movement’s translation of its theme into a desaturated skeleton of pizzicato strings, Jander suggested, was meant to simulate the composer’s increasingly hazy sense of hearing.27

  If the Fifth Symphony is about Beethoven’s deafness, then what could we read into its opening rest? A brief jolt of the experience of deafness, perhaps—a deployment of great energy that remains bereft of sound. Or maybe a remembrance and a reminder: a moment of silence for Beethoven’s hearing.

  THE PITCHES of the opening phrase produce their own ambiguity, albeit one that, given the symphony’s familiarity, is, again, well-nigh impossible to recapture. The Fifth is in C minor, a key forever associated with Beethoven in his most heaven-storming moods. But, strictly speaking, C minor is not actually established until the seventh measure of the first movement. Beethoven exploits a quirk of music theory concerning the triad, one of the basic building blocks of Western music: a stack of three notes, the first, third, and fifth notes of the major or minor scale. If you take away one of the notes of a triad, it starts to, in effect, gesture in two directions at once. So the first two pitches of the Fifth Symphony, G and E-flat, might be two-thirds of a C-minor triad, or they might be two-thirds of an E-flat major triad. The second pair of pitches, F and D, could be part of a dominant-seventh chord built on G (the most basic harmonic antecedent of C minor), or part of one built on B-flat (the most basic harmonic antecedent of E-flat major). From a music theory standpoint, the opening passage is playing fast and loose with the symphony’s key: until the cellos and bassoons anchor the motive with a sustained middle C in the seventh bar, there’s no way to tell whether the piece is in a major or minor key.

  Modern ears might reflexively assign more dramatic weight to minor keys than to major, but that wasn’t necessarily the case in Beethoven’s time. Italian theorist Francesco Galeazzi, writing in 1796, called E-flat major “a heroic key, extremely majestic, grave and serious.”28 Not so for C minor. In 1713, German composer and theorist Johann Mattheson wrote, “An extremely lovely, but also sad key. Because the first quality is too prevalent and one can easily get tired of too much sweetness, no harm is done when the attempt is made to enliven the key a little by a somewhat cheerful or regular tempo.”29

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1749 Encyclopédie opined that C minor “brings tenderness into the soul.” Writing in 1783, Johann J. H. Ribock, an accomplished amateur flutist, compared the key “to the colour of a pale rose and also to the aroma of the same.”30 Late-eighteenth-century composers created a somewhat more Gothic atmosphere with C minor—as in Mozart’s K. 491 Piano Concerto, a brooding piece that Beethoven particularly admired. (“We shall never be able to do anything like that!” he once told a friend.31) But for heroism, Mozart opted for E-flat major—in the opening scene of Die Zauberflöte, Prince Tamino finds himself set upon by a slithery C-minor monster that the Three Ladies vanquish with a timely modulation to E-flat: “Triumph!”

  In the concert hall, though, the sheer gravity of the Fifth’s opening makes the vague tonality moot. The major-minor uncertainty in the opening of the Fifth Symphony engendered next to no contemporary comment—only E. T. A. Hoffmann mentioned it, in his seminal 1810 review of the symphony (“the listener surmises E-flat major,” he surmised32), and he was working from the score, not from a performance. And, harmonically rooted or not, the sound of the Fifth’s opening was actually s
omewhat traditional for C minor: many C-minor works of Haydn and Mozart (K. 491 included) also start out with passages in bare unisons or octaves.33 Beethoven adopted that stylistic tic; his largest C-minor essay prior to the Fifth, the Third Piano Concerto, opens in ominous octaves (and with a theme strongly foreshadowing the Fifth Symphony’s Finale), as does his Violin Sonata op. 30, no. 2.

  But those openings were all quiet in their foreboding. The Fifth imbues the C-minor dialect with rhetorical force. Beethoven’s orchestration of the opening is optimized toward weight: all the strings, in their lowest, heaviest registers, plus clarinets, which round and burnish the strings’ tone. In the original manuscript, Beethoven initially had the flutes doubling the opening line an octave higher, then thought better of it and scratched those notes out. No double reeds—oboes, bassoons—and no brass: any hint of instrumental brightness has been banished. In place of an all-for-one tutti opening, Beethoven opts for only those instruments that can combine power with overcast gloom. The feminine overtones of contemporary C-minor impressions are absent—Leonard Bernstein heard the orchestration as gender-specific: “Beethoven clearly wanted these notes to be a strong, masculine utterance, and he therefore orchestrated entirely with instruments that play normally in the register of the male singing voice.”34 At the very least, Beethoven deliberately avoided Mattheson’s advice to leaven C minor with a bit of cheer.

  Beethoven’s appropriation of E-flat major’s dark majesty for his favored C minor was a success, to judge by a subsequent spate of revised key impressions. While some writings, still reliant on older traditions, continued the theme of gentle lament, an 1827 musical dictionary by J. A. Schrader assigned to C minor “rigid, numb grief,” “fear and horror,” “bitter lamenting,” and “despair.” In 1830, the German organist G. F. Ebhardt heard in C minor “extreme misery, sometimes raving nonsense.”35 Part of the shift no doubt came from the Romantic era’s louder dramatic volume; descriptions of other keys also move toward more emotional extremes. But Beethoven’s own stormy reputation drove much of that Romantic amplification—and his stormiest key was C minor. The Fifth Symphony endured as a ready-made example of the new association.

  NO OTHER COMPOSER’S working habits have been analyzed as closely as Beethoven’s. It helped that Beethoven’s sketches survived to be analyzed. Most of Mozart’s sketches, by comparison, were destroyed after he died, which contributed to the popular impression that he worked out everything in his head before putting pen to paper.36 Whereas Beethoven’s sketchbooks, in all their messy, indecipherable glory, seemed tailor-made for his Romantic admirers, a chance to witness the familiar themes twist and struggle their way to the surface like Bloch’s Beethovenian trees. Unlike many of Beethoven’s themes, however, the opening of the Fifth seems to have sprung nearly fully grown from his head.

  The earliest sketches for the Fifth are found in a manuscript referred to as Landsberg 6, or, sometimes, the Eroica sketchbook—the bulk of the leaves are filled with workings-out of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Much of the rest is taken up with early work on Beethoven’s only completed opera, Leonore (later retitled Fidelio).37 Located at the creative locus of three of Beethoven’s most celebrated works—the Third and Fifth Symphonies and Fidelio—Landsberg 6 might be the most famous of Beethoven’s sketchbooks.

  Amazingly, it was lost for much of the twentieth century, having vanished from the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin at the end of World War II. The library had acquired it in 1861 from the estate of Ludwig Landsberg, a Prussian-born violinist and singer who ended up living in Rome. Landsberg amassed manuscripts and early editions of Renaissance and Baroque music during his more than twenty years in Italy; on trips between Rome and his native Breslau, he was apparently in the habit of stopping to buy manuscripts from Viennese dealers as well. When a catalog of his collection was published after his death (in preparation for its sale), Landsberg’s Beethoven trove—including eight of the sketchbooks—was listed first, the most obvious treasures.38 Breslau, now Wroclaw, became part of Poland after World War II. Landsberg, who died and was buried in Rome, didn’t make it back home, but the highlight of his collection did: after disappearing from Berlin, Landsberg 6 eventually turned up in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków—a souvenir of Beethoven’s heroic period appropriately transformed into a trophy of war.

  Sometime in early 1804, at the bottom of page 157, tucked into three extra staves under some scribbled ideas for Fidelio, Beethoven sketched out the opening section of the Fifth, in unusually well-developed embryo:

  The transcription—a bit of heroism in itself, given the illegibility of Beethoven’s handwriting—is by Gustav Nottebohm, a German academic who did the first serious work on Beethoven’s sketchbooks.39 (Johannes Brahms, a longtime friend, once pranked Nottebohm by fashioning a fake Beethoven sketch and then bribing Nottebohm’s favorite grocer to wrap up the scholar’s cheese and sausage in it.40) The structure and contour of the opening sentences are already there; the only difference is in those places where Beethoven softens the three-note repetition of the opening motive by walking the melody down the scale. Beethoven, perhaps, was already considering how the motive would make connections between the symphony’s movements; on pages just prior to this, he was jotting down ideas for the Fifth’s third movement, in which the motive returns in march form, and the three-note figure does break into a step-by-step melodic descent. In the context of the opening, though, such filling-in was far too fussy, the musical equivalent of making a bold claim and then immediately qualifying it with a lot of hemming and hawing. By the time the Fifth was completed, Beethoven had decided that the repeated notes made a better effect, that the motive’s rhythmic profile alone would be strong enough to tie the various movements together.

  The rhythmic foot the Fifth lays out—short-short-short-long—was known in Classical antiquity as a quartus paeon. (Any combination of one long syllable with three short ones is a paeon; putting the long syllable at the end makes it the fourth, or quartus, paeon.) Beethoven, who revered the Greek poet Homer, would have read of the paeon’s namesake, the Olympian physician, in Book V of the Iliad: “Thereon Hades went to the house of Jove on great Olympus, angry and full of pain; and the arrow in his brawny shoulder caused him great anguish till Pæëon healed him by spreading soothing herbs on the wound, for Hades was not of mortal mould.”41

  As the divine power of healing gravitated to Apollo, so did the name, and paeans became hymns to Apollo. Later, the paean also acquired a martial connotation, a name applied to songs sung by armies heading into battle or, afterward, giving thanks for victory. (Conveniently, paeans often used the paeon for a metrical basis.)

  Beethoven read Homer only in translation, and any connection he might have made between the Homeric healer and the rhythmic pattern he liberally applied to his most famous symphony is pure conjecture. But if the quartus paeon was a conscious choice on Beethoven’s part, he couldn’t have picked a more appropriate confirmation of the symphony’s popular perception: a battle cry and a plea for healing, all wrapped up in a concise motive.

  The ancient Greeks would have appreciated the quartus paeon as a source of the Fifth Symphony’s oft-cited rhetorical power. Aristotle didn’t discuss the paeon in his Poetics, but included it in the toolbox of his Rhetoric. After dismissing a host of poetic feet as unsuitable to oratory (“prose must be rhythmical, but not metrical, otherwise it will be a poem”), Aristotle allows for an exception:

  There remains the paeon, used by rhetoricians from the time of Thrasymachus, although they could not define it.

  The paeon is a third kind of rhythm closely related to those already mentioned; for its proportion is 3 to 2, that of the others 1 to 1 and 2 to 1, with both of which the paeon, whose proportion is 1½ to 1, is connected.

  In other words, the slightly off-balance three-versus-two of the paeon (three short syllables plus a double-length long syllable) relieves the singsong nature of other poetic rhythms. Thus “the paeon should be retained, be
cause it is the only one of the rhythms mentioned which is not adapted to a metrical system, so that it is most likely to be undetected.”42 The paeon gives prose the dramatic force of epic poetry without its sounding like poetry. The vague sense of rhetorical meaning that contemporary listeners found so novel about the Fifth may have been the by-product of an ancient Greek toastmasters’ trick. (The Roman rhetorician Quintilian was, in fact, downright snobbish about the paeon: “Why it pleased [other] writers so much I do not understand; but possibly most of those who liked it were men that fixed their attention rather on the language of common life than on that of oratory.”43)

  The trick still works. In the 1970s, the music education researcher Edwin Gordon was trying to sort basic building blocks of music by how easy or hard they were for students to learn. For one study, Gordon developed a taxonomy of 533 different rhythmic cells, then had more than four thousand fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders listen to tapes of the cells.44 Each cell was played, then repeated, and the students were tested as to whether or not they perceived the repetition as identical with the original. Gordon then sorted the cells by both difficulty (the more the students identified the repetition of a cell, the “easier” that cell was considered to be) and progression—whether a given cell was “easier” for older students.

  The perception of the 2/4, three-eighth-note pickup of the Fifth Symphony’s opening was classified as both “Difficult” (fewer than half the listeners heard the motive’s repetition as a repetition) and “Static-Regressive” (the age of the student made no difference in their perception).45 It was, in fact, the only rhythmic cell in Gordon’s “Usual Duple” category—symmetrical divisions of individual beats and measures—to rank as both difficult to perceive and age-neutral. By design or by accident, Beethoven made an ideal choice for an all-pervasive motive, one whose obsessive repetition doesn’t come across as repetition—the exact intended effect of the paeon.