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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Hegel’s goal was to philosophically clear a path all the way to the divine. His method was the dialectic, resolving contradictions by expanding understanding—zooming out from individual lanes to the whole road. Hegel’s dialectic, the progressive leaps past the boundaries that philosophies and political systems carry within themselves, would be the engine driving his conception of history. Time might reveal the inherent contradictions within any endeavor—the “glorious mental dawn”37 of the French Revolution, for example, giving way to the dark night of the Reign of Terror, the historical situation still too burdened with mistrust and corruption. But rational thought could reconceptualize the world so that such conflicts were rendered meaningless. One dissolved contradiction at a time, Hegel’s dialectic would get us to the Absolute.

  Like most philosophers at the time, Hegel made a distinction between logic and aesthetics, between the discipline of discourse and the realm of art. Music appeared in Hegel’s logic (as opposed to his aesthetics) only in analogies. Actually trying to put music through Hegel’s logical paces is more problematic. If we try to follow a bit of musical information—the Fifth’s first four notes, for example—through Hegel’s outline of logic, we can get a better sense of why, in his aesthetics, Hegel was suspicious of music. We can also start to understand why the subsequent Hegelization of Beethoven and his music, perhaps, short-circuited the progress of musical history as much as it advanced it.

  The mechanism by which Hegel imagined an idea becoming an Idea is a three-step process: Being, Essence, and the Notion. It’s the second step, Essence, where musical ideas seem to go off the rails. Hegel’s discussion of Essence is one of those places where he really earns his reputation for obscurity. (When Hegel warns that “The theory of Essence is the most difficult branch of Logic,”38 it’s kind of like hearing Evel Knievel say that the ride is about to get particularly bumpy.) But one can think about it this way: if Being is all about recognizing that the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth are, Essence is all about the discussion of what they mean—how we start to relate those first four notes to other concepts.

  Hegel subdivides the realization of Essence into (of course) another three parts. Reflection is where everybody, say, tries out different interpretive concepts for the first four notes—Fate, or birds, or the French Revolution, or whatever. This will, inevitably, produce contradictory interpretations of the opening motive—differing opinions as to just who is knocking at the door. Appearance is the complement of Reflection; if Reflection is about clearing away unnecessary differences between interpretations of the first four notes, Appearance is about finding the interpretation best able to clear away differences within it. For the particular interpretation of the opening motive as a representation of Fate, for instance, the stage of Appearance is when both what we hear in the motive and what we think about Fate will adjust and grow to encompass each other. The Essence of the motive will begin to “shine forth” at this point.

  But musical ideas hit a barrier with the final step of the realization of Essence, Actuality, a dialectic between Reflection and Appearance. “The utterance of the actual is the actual itself.”39 In other words: We are no longer talking about what we, individually or even collectively, think the meaning of the first four notes might be. We are talking about what the meaning actually is.

  Can any interpretation of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth—or, indeed, of any piece of music—rise to that level of certainty? The sheer contradictory profusion of images and agendas surrounding the first four notes alone would indicate otherwise. In Hegelian terms, the protean nature of such interpretations is an indication that music and art are still historically stuck in a process of determining Essence, as the rest of society runs ahead in Hegel’s logical process. Hegel made this point explicitly all the way back in his inaugural Difference essay: “The entire system of relations constituting life has become detached from art, and thus the concept of art’s all-embracing coherence has been lost, and transformed into the concept either of superstition or of entertainment.”40 It’s hard to think of any nontrivial statement one could make about the Fifth that would make it all the way to the stage of Actuality, always tripping over the barrier between subjective opinion and objective statement.

  It’s at this point that it becomes obvious just how contrived a target the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth is for Hegel’s logic, a square peg being crammed into a round philosophical hole. But it was the ill fit, perhaps, that encouraged Hegel’s ambivalence about music in his aesthetic thinking. At various points, Hegel seems to be trying to have it both ways about music’s capacity for meaning.41 On the one hand, “[T]he real region of [musical] compositions remains a rather formal inwardness, pure sound”;42 on the other hand, without “spiritual content and expression,” music is not true art, is “empty and meaningless.”43

  At times, Hegel’s definitions of music verge on self-negation. “The meaning to be expressed in a musical theme,” he writes, “is already exhausted in the theme.”44 The composer’s subject matter is “a retreat into the inner life’s own freedom, a self-enjoyment, and, in many departments of music, even an assurance that as artist he is free from subject-matter altogether.”45 Such inherent subjectivity, historically speaking, stalled music’s advance toward the Absolute in the interpretive free-for-all of Reflection.

  Could speculative philosophy ever push our understanding of music past its current Reflective shambles, past each individual listener privileging their own interpretive imagination? Hegel thought not—only literature or, even better, philosophy could get past such subjective “formal inwardness,” get past one’s personal “feeling” to engage the objective world and, eventually, reach the Absolute Idea, the ultimate unity, the end-all of Hegel’s historical progress. Hegel admitted the Romantic idea that art and music could give a glimpse of the Absolute, but considered that a symptom of immature systems of religious thought. “As regards the close connection of art with the various religions it may be specially noted that beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute,” he wrote; art’s vision of the divine is only as clear as an imperfect religion can make it. In the long run, though, art becomes unnecessary:

  [E]ven fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme liberation itself. The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought—the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence—is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.46

  The limited, irreverent liberation of art is better than nothing, but only a poor substitute for the Idea. If Beethoven affords a better-than-average view of the promised land, it’s only because he can’t cross over.

  Nevertheless, other commentators were only too happy to give Beethoven a privileged place in Hegel-like intellectual hierarchies. American poet Sidney Lanier portrayed the “satisfying symphonies” as something like dialectic syntheses, soothing those “thoughts that fray the restless soul,” including “The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate, / Whereof both cannot be, yet are.”47 And already by 1867, Ludwig Nohl, in his biography of Beethoven, was opening out the Fifth’s philosophical playing field toward an encompassed Absolute, extending the expanded Fate of the first four notes over the whole work:

  In his heart of hearts, Beethoven feels that fate has knocked at his door, only because in his following the dictates of force and action, he has sinned against nature, and that all will is only transitoriness and self-deception.… [T]he song of jubilation in the finale which tells not of the joy and sorrow of one heart only; it lifts the freedom which has been praised and sought for into the higher region of moral will. Thus the symphony in C minor has a significance greater than any mere “work of art.” Like the production of religious art, it is a representation of those secret forces which hold the world together.48

  B
ut the most lasting incursion of Hegelian concepts into Beethoven’s reputation concerned the composer himself: Beethoven’s career and music, the very fact of his existence, was interpreted as an unprecedented watershed in a progressive view of music history. One of the most influential and subtle exponents of this idea was a Berlin-based lawyer-turned-music-critic named Adolph Bernhard Marx.

  IN 1830, the year before he died, Hegel was appointed Rector of the University of Berlin. The same year, the university offered a chair in music to A. B. Marx, who promptly put into pedagogical practice what he had already been preaching through journalism: championing the evident greatness of Austro-German music—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—in Hegelian terms. As musicologist Scott Burnham has written, it was a matter “of transforming the southern currency of the Viennese musical masters into a more fiercely northern intellectual and political capital.”49

  Marx is today primarily remembered for codifying and naming what we now call sonata-allegro (or just sonata) form, a structural pattern common to works of the mid- to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The pattern goes like this:

  A movement starts with a first theme in the overall key of the piece—the tonic.

  Followed by a second theme in a contrasting key, usually the interval of a perfect fifth up from the tonic—the dominant, if the movement is in a major key—or a third away—the relative major, if it is in a minor key.

  A third theme brings the opening section to a close in either the dominant key or its relative major.

  There follows a freer development section.

  After which there comes a recapitulation of the three themes; this time all in the tonic key.

  The opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth fits this pattern to a tee. As it should: sonata form was explicitly modeled on Beethoven’s practice, an after-the-fact attempt to systematize what the next generation regarded as the apex of Classical composition. But it also, deliberately, put Beethoven’s music in a privileged position vis-à-vis history.

  Marx took pains to present sonata form as the culmination of a Hegelian process. In his 1856 essay “Form in Music,” Marx starts at the formal level of the motive (“Only the succession of two or more tones … shows the spirit persisting in the musical element”50) and works his way up through a series of dialectical oppositions to the “greater whole” of the sonata. “The evolution of this series of forms,” he summarizes, “has been the historical task of all artists faithful to their calling.” Unlike Hegel, however, Marx’s ladder never runs out of rungs, for music is inseparable from the human spirit: “[T]he series of forms may be deemed infinite; at least no one can point to an end, or cut-off point, of the series, as long as music maintains its place in the realm of human affairs—that is, forever. For that which the human spirit has begotten in accordance with the necessity of its essence is created forever.”51 The difficulty of Hegel’s theory of Essence is (perhaps dialectically) also an opportunity, a vacuum that Marx fills with a more exalted view of music than Hegel himself ever took—a vacuum that (as we shall see) the Romantics would fill with similar enthusiasm.

  Marx’s most complete exegesis of sonata form came in the third volume of his four-volume Practical and Theoretical Method of Musical Composition. Again, Hegelian hints abound, with Marx seeing a fundamental process of theme-digression-return rising through five levels of rondo form to arrive at sonata form, where the multiplicity of themes is fodder for synthesis: “the whole in its inner unity … becomes the main concern.”52

  Marx formulated his definition of sonata form primarily from Beethoven, yet he spends even more space exploring all those instances where Beethoven seems to push the definition to its breaking point. Marx is, in fact, engaged in an exercise more subtle than just demonstrating Beethoven’s music to be a Hegelian culmination; he is defining sonata form as something that Beethoven has already surpassed. The laws are set down in order that Marx can show how Beethoven rendered the laws obsolete. Sonata form is a concept through which Beethoven’s essence can shine forth. The implicit lesson for any composition students who happened to be reading: surpass the previous generation and keep history on the move.

  But Marx’s Hegelian definition of sonata form forever closed it off from the possibility of Hegelian progress. “When sonata form did not yet exist, it had a history,” Charles Rosen once noted. “Once it had been called into existence by early nineteenth-century theory, history was no longer possible for it; it was defined, fixed, and unalterable.”53 But that was, perhaps, the point all along. Early on in his career, Marx had already cast the Fifth as “the first [symphony] to advance beyond the Mozartian point of view.”54 In Marx’s analysis, sonata form changed from a basic, flexible framework into a historical boundary for Beethoven’s genius to vault over.

  There is a bit of a full-circle aspect to Marx’s formulation. Beethoven thought in terms of a personal Fate to be surmounted: in his Tagebuch Beethoven copied down lengthy excerpts from Zacharias Werner’s dramatic poem Die Söhne des Thals (The Sons of the Valley). Like much of the rest of Beethoven’s journal, the drama is steeped in Masonic atmosphere—it retells one of the more popular legends of Freemasonry’s origins, tracing the order to the fourteenth-century suppression of the Knights Templar. And it also poeticizes a Hegelian transcendence of Fate:

  The hero bravely presents to Fate the harp

  Which the Creator placed in his bosom.

  It might rage through the strings;

  But it cannot destroy the marvelous inner accord

  And the dissonances soon dissolve into pure harmony,

  Because God’s peace rustles through the strings.55

  A generation later, with Hegel as an enabler, Marx portrayed Beethoven as surmounting historical, rather than personal, Fate.

  But such projecting of the Fifth’s narrative onto the whole of human society raises a question, one that parallels the subsequent nineteenth-century rumpus over Hegel’s concept of history: Is the Fifth’s fateful struggle and eventual exultation a mirror of civilization, or its unrealized blueprint? Both explanations came into play as Hegel’s legacy bifurcated; Hegel’s rational-is-real formulation produced competing claimants to Hegel’s mantle. The teams even acquired their own names, at least in hindsight: the Right-, or Old Hegelians versus the Left-, or Young Hegelians. (Both terms proved more useful to historians than to the players themselves: the Right-Hegelians never used the name themselves, and the Young Hegelians, like many intellectual blocs, spent as much time arguing amongst themselves as they did taking on their Old counterparts.)

  Putting it somewhat simply, a Right-Hegelian could argue that if the real is rational, then the way things are, right now, falls somewhere along Hegel’s path to the absolute, the implication being that the way things are—economically, socially, politically—is as good, and as moral, as it could possibly be. But a radical Left-Hegelian could counter that the continuing existence of societal divisions was clear evidence that Hegel’s Absolute remained unfulfilled, that change is always necessary, that the work goes on.

  IN 1839, eighteen-year-old Friedrich Engels was working as an unpaid clerk for a linen exporter in Bremen. Bored and antsy, he passed the time by writing letters to his sister. In one letter, he showed off his burgeoning composing skills with a two-part harmonization of Luther’s chorale “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”; Marie Engels must have given her brother some grief over it. “Listen,” Friedrich protests, “composing is hard work; you have to pay attention to so many things—the harmony of the chords and the right progression, and that gives a lot of trouble.”56

  Two years later, Friedrich’s restlessness had only gotten worse. “Thank God that I too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voilà tout,” he informs Marie. Still, he is proud of his moustache: “It is now in full flower again and growing and when I have the pleasure—as I don’t doubt I shall—of boozing with you in Mannheim in the spring, you will be amazed at
its glory.” And Bremen still has its charms. “There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today … while I can,” Friedrich boasts. And, continuing the letter the next day: “What a symphony it was last night! … What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements!”57

  In his teenage letters, Friedrich Engels comes across as very much the bourgeois scion he was: an indifferent apprentice, a bit of a dilettante, a devotee of beer, cigars, and music. But the letters also hint at an intellectual double life. Metternich’s Carlsbad Decrees had made subversion prevalent by making just about everything subversive; even facial hair could be regarded as a dangerous republican provocation.58 (Hence the moustache.) His taste in music carried rebellious overtones, not just the Fifth’s “celebration of freedom,” but also “Ein feste Burg,” its opening a distant mirror of Beethoven’s (three repeated notes, followed by a downward leap), a chorale Engels, in later life, would characterize as “the Marseillaise of the Peasant War,”59 the sixteenth-century German uprising that was the largest European rebellion prior to 1789.

  And Engels was abandoning the “dreary hole” of Bremen for Berlin, where—while ostensibly fulfilling his military service—he would sit in on Schelling’s lectures, pitting his youthful idolization of Hegel against Schelling’s learned deprecations. (His fellow auditors included both the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.)60 At the same time his family was grooming him to take over the family’s textile business, Engels was fashioning himself into a political radical.

  In true Hegelian fashion, Engels’s road up to working-class liberation and down to capitalist exploitation was the same road. Sent to Manchester to learn the family trade, Engels turned what he saw into a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, a groundbreaking exposé of the Industrial Revolution. One of the book’s many admirers was another Young Hegelian, a peripatetic and perpetually impoverished journalist, polemicist, and dialectician named Karl Marx.