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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Submission, deepest submission to your fate, only this can give you the sacrifices—for this matter of service. O hard struggle!13

  Beethoven probably started the journal just after his intense but doomed affair with the infamous “Immortal Beloved,” so one can understand the dramatic self-pity. Still, fate is a recurring theme in the Tagebuch. Beethoven jots down a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (act 1, scene 5): “Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe; / What is decreed must be, and be this so.”14 A quote from Homer’s Iliad (“But now Fate catches me! / Let me not sink into the dust unresisting and inglorious, / But first accomplish great things, of which future generations too shall hear!”15) includes indications of the poetic scansion, a sign that Beethoven was considering setting it to music. Throughout the Tagebuch, as throughout his life, Beethoven’s fatalism varies with his mood. But though Beethoven can still muster determination, the sheer defiance of his 1801 self is gone.

  And somewhere in between these two poles came the 1808 premiere of the Fifth Symphony, as well as Beethoven’s most well-known statement on fate, the letter now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, dated October 6, 1802, addressed to his brothers but never delivered, and only discovered after his death. (Well into the twentieth century, Beethoven’s stays in Heiligenstadt were still a relatively fresh bit of local lore. The house where he wrote the Testament had stayed in the same family, and the old woman of the house recalled stories her grandmother had told her of the composer’s “almost savage” irascibility. “[H]e must have been terrible,” she concluded.16)

  The Heiligenstadt Testament was Beethoven’s most emotionally raw effort to come to terms with his advancing deafness. To read it is almost like eavesdropping on Beethoven pulling himself together—what starts off like a suicide note (“Oh, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others”) ends up as an austere manifesto: “I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it pleases the inexorable Parcae to break the thread.” At the same time, the Testament might be the most self-consciously literary thing Beethoven ever wrote. It seasons the stream-of-consciousness style of his most personal letters with phrases that jut out from the prevailing tone like learned quotations, even though they’re not. For example, the line toward the end of the Testament, “With joy I go to meet death” (mit Freuden eil ich dem Tode entgegen), calls to mind the faith of martyrs, and certainly may have been intended to echo something like this poetic evocation of Christ on the way to Golgotha, by the Swiss writer, physiognomist, and sometime friend of Goethe, Johann Kaspar Lavater:

  Du gehst auf deinen dunkeln Wegen dem Tode freudiger entgegen, weil du des Sünders Hoffnung bist.17

  (You go to meet dark death more joyfully, because you are the sinners’ hope.)

  On the other hand, it could have just as easily come from the secular heroism of, say, the poems of Ossian (as translated/forged by James Macpherson), which Beethoven read and admired in translation:

  Er wandte sich nicht der spreissende Krieger. Er drängte Vorwärts dem Tode voll Muthes entgegen!18

  (The young warrior did not fly; but met death as he went forward in his strength!)

  Take even the Testament’s striking opening, seeming to announce the document’s at least partially public nature: “O you men,” or “O ye mankind”—the original German, “O ihr Menschen,” sounds biblical enough, but actually appears nowhere in Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible. Where it does turn up is in the Koran. Friedrich Eberhard Boysen’s German translation, first published in 1775, uses “O ihr Menschen” for the Arabic phrase yaa ay-yuhan naasu, as in Sura 27:

  O ihr Menschen! Wir sind in der Wissenschaft unterrichtet worden, den Gesang der Vögel zu verstehn …19

  (O men, we have been taught the speech of birds, and are endued with everything …)

  While there is no hard evidence Beethoven ever read the Koran (either in Boysen’s translation or the less-popular but favored-by-Goethe 1772 translation by David Friedrich Megerlin), there is more than enough evidence to say that it would not be at all surprising if he had. When he first came to Vienna, for instance, Beethoven made the acquaintance of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an Austrian diplomat who would become a prolific Orientalist, translator of numerous Arabic and Persian texts, and author of a five-act “historical drama” called Mohammed, or the Conquest of Mecca (1823).

  German-speaking intellectual life during Beethoven’s time was permeated with a fashion for all things Eastern, near and far. European scholarship on the subject had been primed by imperialism—the British in India, France in the Middle East—but the German vogue carried with it the prospect of self-invention: against a backdrop of political division and French occupation, a lot of German writing about ancient India or Persia can read like a subtle pep talk, a dropped hint that the scattered states of the former Holy Roman Empire could be a cradle of civilization, too. August Wilhelm von Schlegel put it plainly: “If the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.”20

  In his later years, Beethoven kept a framed quotation on his desk, the inscription that Plutarch recorded as having been on the statue of Isis at the Egyptian city of Sais: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.” Beethoven had read the quotation in Schiller’s essay “Die Sendung Moses” (“The Mission of Moses”), an analysis of that prophet’s unique qualifications for engineering the renaissance of a race. The Israelites—like Schiller’s fellow Germans, perhaps—were too downtrodden to muster the energy to free themselves; what was needed was an injection of new intellectual blood:

  A native Egyptian was not inspired by the national sympathy necessary to become the saviour of the Hebrews. A mere Hebrew was deficient in power and mind for this purpose. What expedient did destiny [Schicksals] resort to? It snatched a Hebrew at an early age from the bosom of his brutalized nation, and placed him in possession of Egyptian wisdom; thus it was that a Hebrew, reared by Egyptians, became the instrument, by means of which his nation was freed from bondage.21

  Beethoven remained fascinated by Eastern thought, and his Tagebuch contains numerous quotations taken from Eastern sources, Hindu scriptures and Sanskrit Vedas in particular. (Such proclivities might even have inspired a rueful jest from his onetime teacher Haydn; once he had outlived his usefulness to Beethoven’s career, Beethoven largely ceased visiting the elder master, and Haydn took to asking mutual acquaintances: “How goes it with our Great Mogul?”22)

  Beethoven also, throughout his life, maintained close connections with Freemasonry, a milieu saturated with Eastern images and ideas. The composer apparently never joined a lodge, but so many of his friends and acquaintances were Masons—Beethoven’s composition teacher, Christoph Gottlieb Neefe; friend-of-the-family Franz Anton Ries (Ferdinand’s father); Franz Wegeler, in whom Beethoven confided regarding his advancing deafness—that one wonders why Beethoven never took the step himself. (Politics, probably—Beethoven arrived in Vienna just as the Hapsburg emperor was outlawing the societies, an authoritarian prophylactic in the wake of the French Revolution.) Maynard Solomon has speculated that the Tagebuch was actually a sort of self-study journal in preparation for initiation.23

  In making the case for Beethoven’s Masonic leanings, it is almost too tempting to hear in the Fifth’s opening—or at least its popular interpretation—an echo of such an initiation, especially when confronted with this detail of the elevation of an Entered Apprentice to the Fellow Craft Degree, from Malcolm Duncan’s 1866 Masonic Ritual and Monitor:

  [Senior Deacon]—Worshipful Master (making the sign of a Fellow Craft), there is an alarm at the inner door of our Lodge.

  W. M.—You will attend to the alarm, and ascertain the cause.

  The Deacon gives three raps, which are responded to by the Junior Deacon, and answered to by one rap from the Senior Deacon inside, who opens the door, and says:

 
; S. D.—Who comes here?24

  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:

  Gemeine Neubegier kommt nie dem Lichte nah.

  Nur wer die Wahrheit sucht, darf an die Pforte pochen.25

  (Vulgar Curiosity never comes close to the light.

  Only he who seeks Truth may knock on the door.)

  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 BEETHOVEN’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.

  And this is

  Life. Toil! and wherefore should I toil? Because

  My father could not keep his place in Eden?

  What had I done in this? I was unborn;

  I sought not to be born; nor love the state

  To which that birth has brought me.28

  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:

  What is rational is real;

  And what is real is rational.32

  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:

  You cannot step twice into the same river.…

  Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.

  The way up [the road] and the way down is one and the same.34

  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 authorit
y 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.