The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
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Rhetorical, moving, sometimes verbose, the art of Beethoven gives us, with some delay, the musical image of the Assemblies of the French Revolution. It is Barnave, Mirabeau, sometimes, alas, Lally-Tollendal. And I am not thinking here of the meanings he himself occasionally liked to give his works, but of their meaning which ultimately expressed his way of hurling himself into a chaotic and eloquent world.75
For Sartre, Beethoven’s exhortations were all too easily adaptable to revolution and reaction alike. (Hence the mention of Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, the Irish-born deputy to the Estates-General who defended Louis XVI and sought to preserve the ancien régime; whom the great French historian Jules Michelet described as “lachrymose Lally, who wrote only with tears, and lived with a handkerchief to his eyes.”76) No stranger to the discord between the personal pursuit of intellectual freedom and the more restricted menu of political positions available in the public sphere, Sartre might have envied Beethoven’s comparatively frictionless revolutionary reputation: energetically radical but politically elusive, embodying the passions of revolution without ever firmly coming down on any one side.
The French Revolution ended up being the great politico-intellectual winnowing of the subsequent century, as the boundaries of the European political and philosophical landscape were reconfigured around the poles of support for the Revolution’s rights-of-man intentions and horror at its reign-of-terror consequences. The young Beethoven’s sympathies with the ideals of the Revolution were sincere, as far as they went (“Liberty and fraternity—but not equality” is how Maynard Solomon aptly sums it up,77 a formula that could be applied to the German Enlightenment as a whole), but his advertisement of them was selective.
The most famous of Beethoven’s political statements would be his use of Friedrich von Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, premiered in 1824. But he was planning a setting as early as 1793.78 That would have been just about the radical-chic zenith for Schiller, who had been arrested by the Duke of Württemberg after the sensational 1781 premiere of his play Die Räuber, and whose tragedies of authoritarianism and snuffed-out flames of freedom were enough to warrant the author a grant of honorary French citizenship from the National Assembly in 1792. But Schiller had already begun to sour on the French Revolution, its violence and chaos. In 1793, he would begin writing his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, in which he postulated art as a more reliable source of freedom:
The dynamic State can merely make society possible, by letting one nature be curbed by another; the ethical State can merely make it (morally) necessary, by subjecting the individual will to the general; the aesthetic State alone can make it real, because it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual.79
“[I]t is the aesthetic mode of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom,” Schiller concluded.80 By the time news of his French citizenship reached him, in 1798, Schiller considered the honor a postcard “from the empire of the dead,”81 as he told his now-friend, the conservative Goethe. In 1802, ten years after the Assembly offered him symbolic fraternity, he accepted the nobiliary particle, becoming Friedrich von Schiller. (True, he accepted it from the comparatively liberal Charles Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, but still.)
The young Beethoven was enough of a Schiller fan that he and his friends could trade quotes from Don Carlos in their autograph books. But soon after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna, Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris, Schiller’s plays were banned by the Hapsburg monarchy, and Beethoven’s revolutionary enthusiasms became more circumspect. He continued to work on a setting of “An die Freude”—perhaps even finishing it—but ultimately decided to keep it under wraps.82 By the time Beethoven returned to the “Ode” in the Ninth Symphony, some three decades later, both the delay and Schiller’s post-“Ode” moderation had somewhat dulled the connection with the Revolution.
Beethoven’s politics are tricky to unravel, not just because of the novel political landscape he inhabited, but because his personal intersection with politics, fame, and necessary livelihood was largely unprecedented. One oft-repeated story of Beethoven and politics concerns the Third Symphony, the Eroica, which Beethoven originally planned to dedicate to—and name after—Napoléon. As Ferdinand Ries told it:
I was the first to tell him the news that Bonaparte had declared himself Emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and shouted: “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man! mortal! Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!” Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page at the top, ripped it all the way through, and flung it to the floor.83
Beethoven scratched Bonaparte’s name off the title page of the original manuscript with such vehemence that he wore a hole in the paper, and ensured his future reputation as a champion of individual freedom. Except that, as late as 1810, some six years later, Beethoven was considering dedicating another work to the former First Consul.84 Napoléon had abandoned democratic ideals, occupied Vienna—twice—and yet Beethoven kept circling back. While working on the Fifth, he received a job offer from Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoléon’s youngest brother, recently made King of Westphalia, a Napoleonic attempt at German unification; only an intervention of Viennese patronage kept Beethoven from leaving. Several years later, in 1815, Beethoven entertained dignitaries gathered to dispose of the Napoleonic Era at the Congress of Vienna. In the wake of Waterloo, he must have felt as if his career had dodged a bullet—and yet, after Napoléon left the stage, Beethoven largely abandoned his heroic style, the style that had made him famous, the style of the Fifth.85
For all his paper-mutilating rage, Beethoven surely sensed that he and Napoléon were more alike than not: both coming up from modest backgrounds, both disdainful of the limitations of traditional class structure and privilege while leveraging tradition to their own ends. Napoléon paved the way for Beethoven, setting a pattern of innovative fame—one based as much on a cultivated force of personality as on achievement—that Beethoven exploited to the hilt. Leo Braudy, preeminent critic of fame, described the Emperor in terms that could easily apply to Beethoven: “He was at once the man of destiny—melancholic, brooding, striving alone—and the man of classic order, ensuring the survival of all those institutions … at whose center he stood.”86 Every anecdote of Beethoven’s disheveled dress, his oblivious demeanor, his contempt of social ceremony, his reverence for the classics (literary and musical: toward the end of his life, Beethoven even bruited about the idea of an overture on the B-A-C-H theme), proved to be canny moves in a game Napoléon had pioneered.
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 Betti
na 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:
Yesterday, on our way home, we met the whole Imperial family; we saw them coming some way off, when Goethe withdrew his arm from mine, in order to stand aside, and say what I would, I could not prevail on him to make another step in advance. I pressed down my hat more firmly on my head, buttoned up my great coat, and, crossing my arms behind me, I made my way through the thickest portion of the crowd. Princes and courtiers formed a lane for me; Archduke Rudolph took off his hat, and the Empress bowed to me first. These great ones of the earth know me. To my infinite amusement, I saw the procession defile past Goethe, who stood aside with his hat off, bowing profoundly.90
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:
Le bonnet | de la liber- | té
The bonnet of liberty …
As does “L’Heureuse décade” (“The Happy Decade”), from 1793:
Pour terras- | ses nos enne- | mis
To block off our enemies …
Similarly, an abolitionist plea from 1794, “La Liberté des Nègres” (“The Freedom of the Negroes”):
Le savez- | vous, Républi- | cains
You know, Republicans …
The national anthem of the First Empire, “Le Chant du départ” (“Song of Departure”), also dates from 1794; the chorus starts in familiar rhythm:
La Répub- | lique nous ap- | pelle
The Republic is calling us …
A 1795 anti-Jacobin chanson, “Le Réveil du peuple” (“The awakening of the people”):
Peuple fran- | çais, peuple de | frères
French people, fraternal 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”:
Allons en- | fants de Patri- | e
Come, children of the Fatherland …94
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.
Jour glori- | eux … jour de mé- | moire …
(O Rome an- | tique … sors du tom- | beau!)
(Glorious day, day of memory,
O ancient Rome, leave the tomb!)97
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.