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.
When Méhul’s First was performed in Leipzig in 1838 (under the baton of Mendelssohn), its resemblance to the Fifth was immediately noted by Robert Schumann: he thought it “so striking, that there can be no doubt of a reminiscence on one side or the other.”100 Schumann’s suspicions notwithstanding, there is no evidence that either composer was aware of the other’s latest project. But Beethoven did know and admire Méhul’s operas. Méhul, in turn, was inspired by Beethoven’s earlier efforts to try his own hand at symphonic composition; French conductor François-Antoine Habeneck recalled reading through Beethoven’s first two symphonies at the Conservatoire in the early 1800s: “Of all the artists who heard us perform these works, only Méhul really liked them. It was actually these symphonies that encouraged Méhul to write similar ones of his own.”101 Similarities between Méhul’s First and Beethoven’s Fifth were in all likelihood the product of mutual and common influence, not plagiarism.
If anything, the Fifth’s ubiquitous short-short-short-long tattoo was something Beethoven borrowed from his French colleague. Méhul uses the rhythm all the time. It turns up on the second page of his first performed opera,102 Euphrosine (1790), and at least somewhere in just about everything he wrote. In 1799’s Ariodant (Méhul’s favorite among his operas), the accompaniment to the title character’s first-act aria—
Plus de doute, plus de souffrance More doubt, more pain
Ah, tout mon coeur est enivré Ah, my heart is intoxicated
—is built almost entirely from the motive.103 In Uthal (1806), a chorus of soldiers uses the rhythm to swear vengeance against the eponymous Ossianic hero:104
perfide U- | thal
perfidious Uthal
Uthal, with its violin-less orchestra (the better to conjure an atmosphere of rustic shadow), illustrates Méhul’s love of orchestral effect, another stylistic feature Beethoven borrowed. Euphrosine opens with strings, oboes, and clarinets in ominous octaves—not far from the Fifth’s string-and-clarinet inception. Again anticipating the Fifth, Méhul frequently beefed up his orchestra with trombones, as in 1792’s Stratonice,105 and extreme forte-piano (loud-soft) juxtapositions are common.
Beethoven would adapt the Revolutionary style—the cutting-edge musical features developed by Méhul, Cherubini, Le Sueur—into the music of the future. In France, though, the style was falling out of favor. While the Journal de Paris waxed patriotic over the G-minor Symphony’s 1809 premiere (“M. Méhul has desired to reconquer for France a branch of music that she had entirely lost”106), others disparaged the connection between Beethoven’s symphonies and Méhul’s: “The contagion of Teutonic harmony seems to win over the modern school of composition which has formed at the Conservatoire,” scolded one critic. “They believe in producing an effect with prodigal use of the most barbaric dissonances and by making a din with all the instruments of the orchestra.”107 Even as Méhul’s biblical opera Joseph became a hit in Germany, his career in France started to wane.
Napoléon’s betrayal of democracy enraged Beethoven but depressed Méhul. His entry in the French Encyclopédie de la musique is blunt: “With the establishment of the Empire, when the revolutionary movement was completely crushed, Méhul’s fecundity ceased.”108 Musicologist Alexander Ringer directly connected Méhul’s symphonies to this disillusionment: “[R]ather than court the unpredictable taste of a public that only yesterday had consisted of ardent republicans but today shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, the same composer who once argued that public opinion be accepted as an artistic guidepost now decided to write exclusively in obedience to his own conscience.”109
When Beethoven’s Fifth is heard as a Revolutionary call to arms while Méhul’s very similar First can be heard as the Revolution’s elegy, one wonders just how much specific republican sentiment Beethoven would have intended audiences to hear in his own instrumental Fête. Maybe Beethoven simply recognized in the Revolutionary style a musical force and drive missing in Viennese concerts. Then again, maybe Beethoven, a circumspect republican, intended the Fifth as a musical sleeper cell: a passive-aggressive dose of Revolutionary music slipped into the Austrian Empire under the guise of an abstract symphony, on the off chance that it would seed an upheaval of its own.
FRENCH URBAN PLANNER and philosopher Paul Virilio writes of “dromocratic” society, controlled not by power or money, but speed (dromo-from the Greek , “road”). The final arbiter of government action is the ever-increasing velocity of military action. Under such consideration, the stop-and-go of the Fifth’s opening, its hurtling pace and its braking fermatas, becomes the source of the symphony’s variable politics. Movement is facilitated while being restricted: for the rest of the symphony, our attention is shifted from the note on the downbeat to the point at which that note moves, to the unstable rhythmic point between the first and second beats. Beethoven fuels the momentum of the motive by initially stopping it in its tracks; the energy it takes to overcome that stasis is renewed every subsequent time, an illusion of perpetual acceleration. Through Virilio’s dromocratic lens, the opening becomes both the barricade and the irresistible advance. No wonder it seems so revolutionary.
But, as Virilio observes, “revolution is movement, but movement is not a revolution.”110 Power is no longer in resisting movement, but in channeling it. Virilio notes how the Jacobins, the architects of the Reign of Terror, encouraged the disaffected to keep on the move: “[T]he new organization of traffic flows that we arbitrarily call the ‘French Revolution’ … is nothing other than the rational organization of a social abduction. The ‘mass uprising’ of 1793 is the removal of the masses.”111 Similarly, a reviewer of an 1830 performance of the Fifth wrote of its “restless forward motion made up of self-consuming longing.”112 A repository of political energies could also function as a corral.
In his autobiography, Igor Stravinsky ruefully quoted an observation from the Soviet daily Izvestia:
Beethoven is the friend and contemporary of the French Revolution, and he remained faithful to it even at the time when, during the Jacobin dictatorship, humanitarians with weak nerves of the Schiller type turned from it, preferring to destroy tyrants on the theatrical stage with the help of cardboard swords.
“I should like to know,” Stravinsky critiqued, “in what this mentality differs from the platitudes and commonplace utterances of the publicity-mongers of liberalism in all the bourgeois democracies long before the social revolution in Russia.” Only in its directness. But Stravinsky’s wish that Beethoven would be appreciated solely for his compositional achievement—“It is only the music that matters”—is equally utopian.113 Beethoven hitched the Fifth to enough revolutionary stars that the connection was inevitable; and the connection, in turn, lent the Fifth a measure of historic significance
that helped secure its impregnable canonic status. Even in purely musical terms, the Fifth was a product of its time: its disorienting, even subversive opening almost inevitably echoes the upheavals of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftershocks. But the zeal was shorn of a specific agenda. Beethoven became the prototypical revolutionary composer, while the true Revolutionaries, the composers of the Fêtes, for the most part, faded into obscurity. (Only Cherubini maintained a foothold in the repertoire.)
Eighteen forty-eight finally brought what everyone had been anticipating or fearing for more than fifty years, a French revolution that spread throughout Europe. It was triggered by the cancellation of a dinner; after the French King, Louis-Philippe, had banned political meetings, the various opposition factions had continued to meet under the guise of increasingly large feasts, the Campagne des banquets of 1847–48. Threats of a massacre quashed a Parisian banquet scheduled for February 22, 1848; within two days, Louis-Philippe had abdicated. (The old chansons should have tipped the king off; as one landlady noted, you could tell a revolution was imminent because of all the singing.114)
The 1848 revolution in France would inspire Karl Marx’s famous formulation of history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”;115 by December, the Empire was back up and running. But in the first days of the Second Republic, on March 5, 1848, the Paris Conservatoire hosted a benefit concert for those wounded in the previous month’s uprising. The program validated the transfer of Revolutionary musical authority: “La Marseillaise” was followed by Beethoven’s Fifth.116 In Le Monde musical, Auguste Morel approved of the juxtaposition, but in terms that projected the Fifth’s Revolutionary trappings onto a blank slate: though “Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor does not, of course, express any specific idea … it conveys an eminently martial tone, and when it comes to celebrating a triumph one could not find anything better.”117
2
Fates
“I’m not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic.”
—THOMAS PYNCHON, Gravity’s Rainbow
THE TITLE CHARACTER of Kurt Münzer’s 1919 “erotic novella” Mademoiselle is a young governess languishing in a “big, cold German town,” teaching a lawyer’s children. The eldest son, thirteen-year-old Eduard, has his piano lesson, his thin, pale fingers stalking the keyboard “like giant spider’s legs”; from the next room, his mother finds the exercises “simply intolerable,” and suggests a duet—“That thing by Beethoven … a symphony, isn’t it?”
Mademoiselle reached for the Beethoven volume. She opened to the symphony, put the music on the rack and settled herself next to Eduard.
“One-and two-and three—and—,” she began, and played. But Eduard suddenly dropped his hands and said, without looking at the girl:
“Today,” he said quietly, “today Brunner from the Obersekunda, who wants to be a pianist, was talking with me. I told him that we played this symphony, and he called it the Fate-Symphony. These first notes, he said, mean: so klopft das Schicksal an die Pforte—thus fate knocks at the door.”
And he struck the notes while softly humming along:
So klopft das Schicksal an die Pfor—te.
“Naturally,” said Mademoiselle, thoughtlessly. God knows where her thoughts were.1
Eduard’s clumsy conversion into lyrics does no small violence to the tune, but the connection between sentiment and symphony would have been familiar even to readers of erotic novellas. That poetic image—fate knocking at the door—first saw the (public) light of day in 1840, and immediately became ineluctably attached to the Fifth’s opening. The timing was auspicious: driven by some of the nineteenth century’s most formidable thinkers—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche—the very idea of Fate was about to experience a momentous intellectual growth spurt, expanding from a personal lot to an all-encompassing one. Riding Fate’s philosophical coattails, the symphony—and its first four notes—would become more famous than ever.
THE STORY linking the Fifth to fate comes from Beethoven’s biographer, Anton Schindler. In the first edition of his biography, published in 1840, Schindler connects the image only to the opening: “Beethoven expressed himself in something like vehement animation, when describing to me his idea:—‘It is thus that Fate knocks at the door.’ ”2
By the time of the third edition, 1860, mission creep is starting to set in, and Fate, it is hinted, is asking after the whole symphony:
What a life of poetry this work unfolds before our senses, allowing us to see into its depths! The composer himself provided the key to those depths when one day, in this author’s presence, he pointed to the beginning of the first movement and expressed in these words the fundamental idea of his work: “Thus Fate knocks at the door!”3
Schindler spent the last five years of Beethoven’s life as the composer’s amanuensis, and then parlayed that association into a long career (he died in 1864) as a purveyor of Beethoveniana. He was possessive and prickly regarding his musical hero. Conductor Felix Weingartner sarcastically summed up Schindler’s reputation when he noted that “the key to [his] character, I think, is sufficiently given by the fact that after the master’s death he had visiting cards printed with the title ‘Ami de Beethoven’ ”4—though, in all fairness, maintaining a friendship with Beethoven may have seemed rather like a full-time vocation. Margaret Fuller, the New England Transcendentalist, called Schindler “one of those devout Germans who can cling for so many years to a single flower, nor feel they have rifled all its sweets.”5 Another American, composer and pianist William Mason, got to know Schindler while studying music in Germany. “He worshiped his idol’s memory,” Mason remembered, “and was so familiar with his music that the slightest mistake in interpretation or departure from Beethoven’s invention or design jarred upon his nerves—or possibly he made a pretense of this.”6
At a concert in Frankfurt, Mason witnessed Schindler typically advertising his own superior sensitivity to Beethoven’s intentions:
The concerts took place in a very old stone building called the “Museum,” and on the occasion here referred to the symphony was Beethoven’s “No. 5, C Minor.” It so happened that, owing to long-continued rains and extreme humidity, the stone walls of the old hall were saturated with dampness, in fact, were actually wet. This excess of moisture affected the pitch of the wood wind-instruments to such a degree that the other instruments had to be adjusted to accommodate them. Schindler, it was noticed, left the hall at the close of the first movement. This seemed a strange proceeding on the part of the “Ami de Beethoven,” and when later in the evening he was seen at the Bürger Verein and asked why he had gone away so suddenly, he replied gruffly, “I don’t care to hear Beethoven’s ‘C Minor Symphony’ played in the key of B minor.”7
Schindler’s biography ended up erecting a rather large wing of the house of Beethoven scholarship on a foundation of sand. His account is, thanks to his years of daily contact with the composer, a primary source, and, indeed, the sole source for many of the more famous Beethoven stories (fate knocking at the door included). He was also prone to getting things wrong, making things up, and even concocting outright forgeries, be they marginal notes in Beethoven’s scores,8 minor pieces of music,9 or, most seriously, the conversation books, the conduits for communication once Beethoven’s deafness had advanced past the point of chitchat; coming into possession of the books after Beethoven’s death, Schindler added and altered entries to exaggerate his relationship with the composer and thus his authority over Beethoven’s legacy—that is, in those conversation books he didn’t simply destroy.10 (Interestingly, many of the forged additions were in the service of justifying Schindler’s preference for performing Beethoven’s music slower than Beethoven’s metronome markings would indicate.)
So, like so many of Schindler’s anecdotes, the Fate/Door characterization of the Fifth and its opening lives on in an indistinct limbo, neither confirmed nor contradicted. The historical ha
ze, actually, was a boon to the image’s popularity: instead of a confirmed fact, fixed in time and circumstance, Schindler’s story became a fluid, adaptable trope. What may have been simply after-the-fact table talk—Schindler could only have heard the anecdote well over a decade after the Fifth’s premiere—could be made into a precompositional inspiration. What may have even been a bit of mockery on Beethoven’s part—Philip Hale, the venerable Boston music critic, was of the opinion that “Ferdinand Ries was the author of this explanation, and that Beethoven was grimly sarcastic when Ries, his pupil, made it known to him”11—thus becomes an earnest encapsulation of the state of the composer’s soul.
And even if it was an out-and-out fiction, give Schindler credit for at least knowing what would make a plausible story. Beethoven talked about fate all the time.
IN NOVEMBER OF 1801, Beethoven sent a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler, discussing the miseries of a quack cure that Beethoven had been prescribed to combat his advancing deafness, as well as the hopeful prospects of new, different quack cures. (“People talk about miraculous cures by galvanism; what is your opinion?”) But in the end, Beethoven gives himself a pep talk: “You will find me as happy as I am fated to be on this earth, not unhappy—no, that I could not bear—I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely—”12 Skip forward eleven years, and Beethoven begins a journal (Tagebuch), in which he makes entries on and off from 1812 until 1816. The opening entry finds a less defiant Beethoven:
The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Page 5