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

by Matthew Guerrieri

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  THE SIMILARITY of the Fifth’s earliest sketches to its final iteration—one of the few instances in the sketchbooks where a bolt-of-inspiration interpretation could apply—lends at least passing credence to the earliest musical creation story of Beethoven and his four notes: a little bird told him.

  The most-cited source for this story is Beethoven’s student, the pianist and composer Carl Czerny. Beethoven heard the ten-year-old Czerny play in 1801 and was impressed enough to give the child lessons. Czerny in turn would become perhaps the nineteenth century’s greatest piano teacher, training a host of performers and pedagogues more important than famous—Sigismond Thalberg, Stephen Heller, Theodor Leschetizky—as well as one whose importance and fame seemingly knew no bounds: Franz Liszt. Unlike almost everyone else who ever knew the composer, the sober and industrious Czerny never sought to cash in on his relationship with Beethoven; in turn, Beethoven stayed friends with Czerny, trusting him to edit proofs of his works for publication, recruiting him to give lessons to his nephew Karl.

  “Many of Beethoven’s motives resulted from passing outside impressions and events,” Czerny recalled. “The song of a forest-bird (the yellowhammer) gave him the theme of the C-minor symphony, and those who heard him fantasize on it know what he was able to develop from the most insignificant few tones.”46 (Czerny reported that the theme of the Scherzo from the Ninth Symphony was also inspired by a bird.)

  Beethoven, a lover of nature, probably would not have considered such a source trivial. It might have carried an echo of Naturphilosophie, a then-popular concept that the natural world was the manifestation of a single, ideal, dynamic process, an order that would be revealed once all of creation was arranged in a sufficiently intricate hierarchy. A foreshadowing of Naturphilosophie can be found in a book Beethoven particularly enjoyed, Christoph Christian Sturm’s 1784 Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur (Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature):

  How bountifully has God provided for the gratification of our senses! For instance, he has chosen the softest and most proper colours to please and refresh the sight. Experience proves that blue and green surfaces reflect those rays only which are least injurious to the eyes, and which they can contemplate the longest without being fatigued. Hence it is the Divine goodness has clothed the heavens with blue, and the earth with green.… The ear also is not unemployed: it is delighted with the songs of birds, which fill the air with their melodious concerts.47

  Naturphilosophie would become more sophisticated after it was taken up by one of the era’s leading philosophical celebrities, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. A later exponent of the style, Lorenz Oken (whose work Beethoven had at least a passing familiarity with48), would place the senses at the center of his conception, a fanciful taxonomy of nested five-part divisions; at its highest level, birds, representing hearing, ranked just behind mammals, representing sight.49

  The tale of the yellowhammer and the Fifth seems to have been current during Beethoven’s lifetime; Wilhelm Christian Müller, a music teacher and acquaintance of Beethoven, mentioned it in a remembrance he wrote shortly after Beethoven’s death: “During [Beethoven’s] walks he composed and often took his themes from birds, for example, the G-G-G-E-flat, F-F-F-D in the Fifth Symphony.”50 And the yellowhammer’s song does bear at least some resemblance to the motive, a rapid-fire repetition of short notes followed by one or two longer tones.51

  In other words, this is an unusually well-sourced and plausible Beethoven myth, and yet, its provenance notwithstanding, the yellowhammer’s authorship gradually became a footnote, usually mentioned only in passing alongside more-well-known stories—including one that will occupy the entire next chapter of this book, the characterization of the Fifth’s opening as “fate knocking at the door.” In English-speaking countries, the bird story suffered a bit of guilt by association after Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s onetime secretary and, later, his notoriously inaccurate biographer, related that Beethoven had told him that a completely different figure in the Sixth Symphony, a quick upward arpeggio, was also inspired by a yellowhammer. The discrepancy cast doubt on all Beethovenian birdcalls; most thought that the composer was merely pulling Schindler’s leg. (Schindler may actually have been right for once, the victim of German-English dictionaries that translated his Goldammer and Czerny’s Ammerling as the same bird, but Schindler was referring to a goldfinch, not a yellowhammer.)52

  Mostly, Czerny’s story faded to footnote status because the symphony’s accumulating philosophical baggage crowded it out—a chance avian dictation of the famous theme came to be considered too insignificant a source for the Fifth’s increasingly portentous reputation. Harvey Grace, an English organist and writer, put it thus in 1920:

  But how many hearers think of the yellow-hammer? They are all Werthers for a brief spell, and invest the music with a significance far more profound than the composer ever gave it. What verbal commonplace can ever come to mean so much as this trivial birdcall? It is as if such an expression as “I’ll trouble you for the salt” suddenly became so charged with tremendous and shattering import that on hearing it people would fall into an agony of remorse.53

  THE OPENING EIGHTH-REST IS BEETHOVEN’S first bit of misdirection—combined with the quick, in-one 2/4 meter, it produces the triplet-or-straight-eighth rhythmic uncertainty of the first three notes. The C-minor/E-flat major ambiguity is Beethoven’s second bit of misdirection. Either uncertainty would be so brief as to be unworthy of mention, except that they’re compounded by Beethoven’s third bit of misdirection: fermatas over the fourth and eighth notes of the symphony, dramatic pauses punctuating the two statements of the four-note motive.

  Throwing up such rhythmic roadblocks, holding the notes out for as long as the conductor sees fit, might seem like an avant-garde touch—a Beckettesque frustration, stopping the clock just as it’s getting started. But beginning a piece with dramatic pauses had become something of a commonplace toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, a piece Beethoven especially admired, opens with three grand chords interspersed with temporally generous space, fermatas over the intervening rests. And Beethoven’s onetime teacher Haydn, as his career went on, was more and more likely to start his symphonies with similarly grand fermatas.54

  The Classical-era music theorist Heinrich Koch had equated the fermata with an “expression of surprise or astonishment, a feeling whereby the movements of the spirit itself appear to come to a brief standstill.”55 Fermatas right at the start were an attempt to create that surprise and astonishment immediately, a proto-Romantic goal of jolting the audience into a heightened emotional state.

  Mozart and Haydn, though, placed their fermatas in slow introductions (Adagio markings in both cases), set off from the thematic argument of the piece. Beethoven pushes the envelope by starting off at the movement’s main, fast pace, then dropping his fermatas, in quick succession, into his main theme. (After the premiere, Beethoven added an extra bar before the second fermata, making it slightly longer than the first, and the whole opening that much more off-balance and edgy.)

  In performance, the fermatas rather quickly became repositories of applied importance, with conductors stretching the emphases into extravagant flourishes. The most immoderate of such conductors was Richard Wagner, who, in a famous passage, prescribed overwrought fermatas, in prose to match:

  Now let us suppose the voice of Beethoven to have cried from the grave to a conductor: “Hold thou my fermata long and terribly! I wrote no fermata for jest or from bepuzzlement, haply to think out my further move; but the same full tone I mean to be squeezed dry in my Adagio for utterance of sweltering emotion, I cast among the rushing figures of my passionate Allegro, if need be, a paroxysm of joy or horror. Then shall its life be drained to the last blood-drop; then do I part the waters of my ocean, and bare the depths of its abyss.…”56

  That image of conductors casting down the fermatas like Char
lton Heston as Moses contributed to an increasingly DeMille-like aura around the Fifth as the Romantic era hit its stride, the sort of reputation that marginalized Czerny’s yellow-hammer source as simply too trifling.

  But Beethoven might have intended the fermatas to exaggerate a feeling of forward motion. The symphony shows off its power by only hinting at its speed—a couple of fearsome revs of the engine before Beethoven finally lets out the clutch—but the trip is already under way, leaving the listener scrambling to catch up. And almost from the beginning, Beethoven’s combination of rebellion and haste rather fittingly engendered the question of whether it was too fast.

  Nearly a decade after the Fifth’s premiere, Beethoven augmented the first movement’s Allegro con brio tempo with a metronome marking: 108 half notes per minute. Beethoven hadn’t initially indicated a metronome marking for the Fifth for the simple reason that, in 1808, the metronome didn’t exist yet. It was only in 1812 that Dietrich Winkel invented the device; not until 1816 that Johann Mälzel, having stolen Winkel’s invention, began to manufacture it.

  Mälzel and Beethoven were friends—Mälzel provided the composer with custom ear trumpets57 and, having built a massive mechanical organ called a panharmonicon, commissioned for it Beethoven’s op. 91 novelty Wellington’s Victory (a commission that led to a characteristically Beethovenian falling-out over money). Beethoven became the metronome’s most famous early adopter. With his nephew Karl, Beethoven went back over his catalog, retroactively quantifying his tempo markings with the new gadget, then published a table of such markings, covering the first eight symphonies, in a leading German music magazine, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in December 1817.

  And, since December 1817, conductors and performers have been ignoring those markings. Anecdotal evidence hints that nineteenth-century performances customarily eased Beethoven’s 108 marking to something a bit more manageable. The ever-unreliable Anton Schindler even insisted that Beethoven took the opening five bars (up until the second fermata) at a tempo of quarter-note-equals-126, or half-note-equals-63—almost twice as slow as indicated.58 That was too much liberty for at least one famous colleague; Felix Weingartner tells the story: “Liszt told me that the ‘ignorant’ and furthermore ‘mischievous fellow’ Schindler turned up one fine day at Mendelssohn’s and tried to stuff him that Beethoven wished the opening to be andante—pom, pom, pom, pom. ‘Mendelssohn, who was usually so amiable,’ said Liszt laughingly, ‘got so enraged that he threw Schindler out—pom, pom, pom, pom!’ ”59 (But even Weingartner, an early stickler for textual fidelity, advised dialing back the first movement to 100 beats per minute.60)

  With the advent of the gramophone, parameters of performance practice—at least those inherited from late Romanticism—could be pinned down exactly. Conductor Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic made a complete recording of the Fifth in 1913; Nikisch’s reading of the first movement coalesces around 88, albeit through a heightened haze of flexible speed. Weingartner lived long enough to record the Fifth four times in the 1920s and ’30s, by which time his tempo had slowed from his earlier recommendation (his 1933 recording with the London Philharmonic settles in at around 92, for instance). In 1998, Gunther Schuller tabulated tempi for sixty-six different recordings of the Fifth; the average speed was just under 92 bpm.61

  Nikisch’s is sometimes cited as the first complete Fifth on record, but Friedrich Kark, a German conductor whose range extended from opera to popular dance music, had already led a cheerfully rough-and-ready recording with the Odeon-Orchester, a studio group, in 1910—with a first movement that does, indeed, reach the 108 mark here and there, albeit in somewhat runaway fashion. Kark aside, for many years, the only conductor to match Beethoven’s markings (and not always) was the fiery taskmaster Arturo Toscanini. But Toscanini’s fleetness was at least as much a sign of its own time as an effort to re-create the sound of Beethoven’s era. Composer Lazare Saminsky called Toscanini “entirely a musician of our day.… His very aversion to adorning music, for inflating it with meaning, with extra-musical content, emotionalizing what is but pure line and form, is the aversion of today’s musician.”62

  Even this approach was subject to its own modernist reaction, as when the quintessential avant-gardist, Pierre Boulez, conducted a recording of the Fifth in which the first movement clocked in at an astonishingly deliberate 74 beats per minute. “At the time it seemed to me people generally took off like bats out of hell in the first movement,” he later explained. “I probably overcompensated. Certain things set one off.”63 (Another provocateur, Leopold Stokowski, even managed to out-Schindler Schindler in one recording, taking the opening at a geologic 40 beats per minute.) Alternately obeying and ignoring Beethoven’s tempi has created its own historical rhythm, the present’s undulating dance with the past. (The controversy has even crossed over into other planes of existence. Attending a table-rapping séance, Robert Schumann asked the spirit to knock the first two bars of the Fifth. After a pause, the familiar rhythm commenced—“only slightly too slow,” as Schumann told it. “The tempo is faster, dear table,” Schumann chided; the table duly sped up.64)

  Those rare performances that adopt Beethoven’s metronome marking can still sound almost cartoonishly fast. Such a reaction demonstrates either a) the extent to which two centuries of overdoses of injected Romantic gravitas have distorted Beethoven’s original conception, or, b) that somehow or other Beethoven got his own tempo wrong. But the seemingly simple task of confirming Beethoven’s metronome markings can quickly turn into a game of point/counterpoint. The Vienna of Beethoven’s time apparently favored faster tempi—Carl Czerny, for instance, published tables of metronome markings for works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven indicating such.65 On the other hand, both Czerny and Beethoven were setting tempi at the piano, not in rehearsal with a full orchestra, and the sharper attack and quicker decay of the piano might have encouraged faster tempi.66

  And then, there is the tricky business of Beethoven’s advancing deafness. A Beethoven relying more on the sight of the metronome’s swinging pendulum than its sound might have experienced a psychological phenomenon called saccadic chronostasis: watching a clock tick can produce the illusion that it’s ticking ever so slightly slower than it actually is.67 Another toss-up: musical training improves accurate tempo perception, but deafness inhibits it.68

  Possibly the first person to notice that the ears were better than the eyes at judging intervals of time was a German physician named Karl von Vierordt, whose main claim to fame was figuring out how to measure blood pressure; he invented the forerunner of the modern sphygmomanometer. He was also curious about how the brain makes sense of time, publishing a book about it in 1868. Out of his experiments (performed mainly on himself), he formulated Vierordt’s Law, a fairly robust rule of thumb that says that humans almost universally underestimate long periods of time, while overestimating short ones. This logically implied the existence of an “indifference point,” where our perception crosses the line between under- and overestimation: one spot on the continuum where our perception of an interval of time is exact.69

  The indifference point is not an uncontroversial subject (experimental parameters seem to affect it to a somewhat unruly degree, scientifically speaking), but—and here’s where it gets interesting vis-à-vis Beethoven—the most commonly cited figures for the indifference point are between 625 and 700 milliseconds.70 On a metronome, that would correspond to between 86 and 96 beats per minute—almost exactly the range of Romantic and post-Romantic performances of the first movement of the Fifth. Also, the 550-millisecond beat that Beethoven’s 108-bpm marking prescribes is right in the middle of the range in which people are most sensitive to tempo discrimination.71 In other words, in psychological terms, Beethoven’s marking for the Fifth is too fast—perhaps deliberately too fast. Based on Vierordt’s Law, 108 bpm will always feel like it’s running away from us, the next beat always falling just before our overestimation wants to place it; and, what’s more, 1
08 is right where that’s liable to discombobulate us the most. All those plodding conductors might have been in search of rhetorical importance—or they might merely have been instinctively nudging the Fifth’s tempo back toward the indifference point, each successive downbeat coming where they expect. Consciously or not, Beethoven gave the Fifth a tempo marking that exacerbated the symphony’s sense of disorientation; consciously or not, ever since they got their hands on it, conductors have been trying to ameliorate it.

  The 108 threshold reentered the musical world with the early-music movement, once its practitioners gained the confidence to classify Beethoven as a candidate for historically informed performance.72 The early-music philosophy, with its focus on period instruments, textual fidelity, and “letting the music speak for itself” (as one sometime skeptic put it),73 nonetheless, like Toscanini’s machine-like clarity, reflected contemporary needs as much as Beethoven’s; it was both a construct made possible by modern scholarship and an assertion of authenticity in an increasingly manufactured, consumerist culture.

  The whole concept of “authenticity” fascinated the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, as a symptom of modernity and its discontent; Sartre wrote of “that deep desire, that fear and anguish at the heart of all authenticity—which are apprehensions before life.… This fear is due to the fact that the situations envisaged are on the horizon, out of reach[.]”74

  One is almost tempted to plot the fluctuations in the speed of performances of the Fifth as a kind of index of alienation over time, with instances of Beethoven’s perceptually out-of-reach 108 beats per minute indicating, paradoxically, the most insistent need for an authentic experience.

  SARTRE ONCE LIKENED Beethoven’s music to a historical moment of unusual possibility: