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

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by Matthew Guerrieri


  Marx and Engels formed one of history’s most influential symbiotic friendships. They dropped an all-time intellectual bombshell by co-writing The Communist Manifesto, then chased the 1848–49 revolutions around Europe, hoping to get in on the action. (Marx, who was deported from Prussia in the midst of the revolutions, never quite caught up with an uprising, but Engels did, manning the front lines in the south of Germany before escaping back to London.) In order to have the funds to support Marx, whom he always regarded as the more brilliant thinker, Engels reluctantly returned to the family firm, assuming the role of a proper Victorian businessman. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels kept the faith, defending Marx’s reputation, expanding and promoting Marxist thought, and having a go at finishing the last volume of Capital. The bond between the two was enduring; for all their later activity and notoriety, they never quite abandoned their identity as enthusiastic students, arguing Hegel and history over copious amounts of beer.

  In fact, it was a pub crawl from later in his life that gave us one of the few glimpses of Marx’s musical taste. Sometime in the 1850s, when London was seemingly flooded with revolutionaries-in-exile, Marx took Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a pair of old Young Hegelian associates, on a quest “to ‘take something’ in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road,” as Liebknecht remembered it, a fairly daunting prospect in that particular district. (Bauer, a frank advocate of terrorism, had apparently remained a drinking buddy even after being intellectually savaged by Marx and Engels in their “Critique of Critical Criticism” The Holy Family; Liebknecht would go on to be a founder of Germany’s Social Democratic party. The Young Hegelians were always a confederation of strange bedfellows.)

  At the end of this inebriated tour, Bauer took offense at the patriotic deprecations of a group of Englishmen, and Marx joined in the drunken defense of German culture. Liebknecht again:

  [N]o other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of music as Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the miserable political and economical conditions from accomplishing any great practical work, but who would yet outclass all other nations. So fluently I have never heard him speaking English.61

  Marx never advanced anything close to a comprehensive philosophy of art; nevertheless, dosed with liquid courage, Marx defended not the German intellectual heritage—not Goethe, not Kant, not Hegel—but its composers, in a progression culminating with Beethoven.

  Nowadays, Marx and Engels are still inextricably associated with—and blamed for—Communism and all its disgraces. Their most lasting contribution, though, was the materialist conception of history, a redesign of Hegel’s historical engine to run on less mystical fuel. Marx: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life.”62

  For Marx, the best use of the dialectic was not to overcome contradictions, as Hegel preached, but to reveal and focus them: to clarify the content, not reveal a speculative form. History doesn’t resolve conflict, advancing toward an Absolute stand-in for transcendental unity; history happens because of conflicts that are fundamentally unresolvable. If you can dialectically boil your analysis down to these fundamental conflicts—capital versus labor, say, or collective control versus anarchic individualism—you can grasp the levers of history.

  Historical materialism even informed Marx’s pub-crawl music critique: to note Beethoven’s achievement in the face of “miserable political and economical conditions” was high praise indeed. Hegel thought that it was the Idea that creates political, social, and economic conditions. Marx thought that Hegel had things completely back-to-front. Marx often thought that way—it was a critical trick he had picked up from one of the leading lights of the Left-Hegelians, a lapsed theologian named Ludwig Feuerbach, who liked to bring metaphysical flights of fancy down to earth by flipping around subject and predicate. For Marx, the Idea doesn’t project circumstances onto people; people project onto their circumstances the illusion of an Idea. True greatness was not, as Hegel might have put it, the realization of an ideal Fate; true greatness—Beethoven’s greatness—was to triumph in spite of it.63

  But what does the materialist conception of history—and its colonization of the modern worldview—have to do with the Fifth’s subsequent biography? A lot, perhaps; at the very least, a renewed focus on the first movement and its omnipresent motive. Once the motive’s assigned meaning—Fate—became a matter of worldly friction instead of Ideal accord, the sharper contrasts of the opening movement were bound to sound more “real” and immediate than the relentless victory of the end. Initially, the Fifth was particularly celebrated for its Finale, the troublesome scherzo exploding into triumphant, major-key synthesis, a musical Hegelian in-and-of-itself. But as the perception of history shifted toward materialism, the first movement—and its epochal opening—gradually became the symphony’s most famous feature: a dramatic showdown between history and the individual, irreconcilably defiant. The fact that more people know the Fifth’s beginning than its end could be read as evidence that Marx’s historical-materialistic inversion of Hegel, with its embrace of contradiction and struggle, is the more deeply woven into the fabric of society.

  Then again, it could just be shorter attention spans. But it is worth noting that it was Engels, the onetime prospective composer, who initially formulated historical materialism—and who later forever complicated Marxist thought by insisting that the dialectic was not just an intellectual tool: “[D]ialectical laws are really laws of development of nature.”64 If the dialectic is inherent in creation itself, the struggle and triumph of the Fifth Symphony’s narrative could be applied to the whole of existence.

  AS MARXISM shifted into Marxism-Leninism, the materialist interpretation of history took a detour, one reminiscent of how the revolutionary impression of Beethoven’s music was interpreted. Karl Kautsky, an evangelist for “traditional” Marxism, had criticized the Bolshevik Revolution, arguing that the Russian proletariat wasn’t ready for Communism, that the revolution had, in effect, happened too early—beating history to the punch, as it were. As a result, he predicted, the conditions were ripe for another Reign of Terror. “If the morality of the communists has not formed itself before the beginning of socialisation,” Kautsky warned, “it will be too late to develop it after expropriation has taken place.”65 Leon Trotsky ridiculed Kautsky’s critique: “[T]he Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it”66 (emphasis added). The Slovenian Hegelian-Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has noted how Trotsky’s formulation has a parallel in modern attitudes toward innovation and cultural history. He quotes T. S. Eliot: “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity between old and new.”67

  It’s an expanded perspective on the idea that truly revolutionary works of art create their own audience—except in this view, such works actually create (and re-create) their own history. It is not hard to find notions like this applied to Beethoven and his symphonic style: one need look no further than the other Marx, Adolph Bernhard, who even during Beethoven’s lifetime was already justifying a progressive view of his hero’s music in terms similar to Eliot’s:

  The preliminary works of philosophers of art are useful to us, and we find the way paved that they first had to prepare laboriously. Above all, however, we make reference to the fact that art first had to reach the stage of perfection where
it provided material for a higher point of view.68

  Of course, hanging that expectation on Beethoven’s symphonies practically ensured that they would be continually reinterpreted to justify each newer “higher point of view”—which is exactly what happened. The idea of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any other piece of music—being “timeless” originates with this (largely successful) effort to portray Beethoven as a figure in the vanguard of a progressive view of history.

  In attempting to control that progression, the Soviet state ironically gradually came to rely on Beethoven’s being a specifically historical figure. At the outset of the Bolshevik regime, the Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of how “Beethoven … not only expressed the complexities of his own personality, but reflected most forcefully the storms of the Great Revolution.”69 Lunacharsky was using Beethoven as a yardstick for demonstrating that the Russian avant-gardists of the time—Scriabin, Prokofiev—were also expressing socialist ideals. By the time of the 1927 Beethoven centennial, however, things had changed: Lenin was dead, Stalin was tightening his grip on power, and socialist ideals were better expressed by Beethoven’s music, Lunacharsky pronounced, than by any contemporary “futurists and hooligan opponents of the classics.”70

  The straitjacket can be sensed in another momentous Fifth Symphony, that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Written in 1937, it was the composer’s response to his own Stalinist difficulties, the frightening shift in his official reputation after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was judged to be contrary to the tenets of socialist realism. Shostakovich’s Fifth shadows Beethoven’s both in its minor-to-major struggle-to-triumph trajectory, and in its obsessive use and reuse of short motives. And, like Beethoven, Shostakovich produced a work whose greatness is in no small part due to the ambiguity of its powerful rhetoric, creating a template for enduring reinterpretation: “a richly coded utterance,” as Richard Taruskin has put it, “but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively paraphrased.”71 Shostakovich’s Fifth mixed triumph and uneasiness enough for both Soviet officialdom and its discontents to claim its narrative.

  But the symphony’s opening theme hints at the increasingly suffocating presence of the Beethovenian paragon. Shostakovich jump-starts with a series of angular, dotted-rhythm leaps, up and down, but the vaults are herded into a mutter: by the fourth bar, the bravado has been abraded into a single note, rapped three times, staccato. In Shostakovich’s version, Beethoven’s repeated-note opening becomes a hesitant cessation: an ominous, unanswered tapping, quashing the defiance of those impulsive leaps. It is as if Beethoven’s Fifth were run backward and the finale’s dotted-rhythm outbursts subsumed back into the opening’s grim announcement. (In Stalin’s Russia, after all, a knock on the door could be all too literally fatal.)

  The open-ended nature of the interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth complicated its status in Communist regimes, even as the Party relied on Beethoven’s Fifth to fire up revolutionary fervor. Functionaries of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the official East German socialist youth group, noted the music’s usefulness to a journalist in the 1960s: “What I like about Beethoven is the militant element. We recently heard his Fifth Symphony … ‘and now the eyes of the youth friends light up.’ ”72 Militant Beethoven could, however, become dangerous once revolutions turned monolithic: Beethoven’s Egmont Overture (which plays like a potent distillation of the Fifth’s struggle) became the soundtrack of the 1956 uprising in Communist Hungary; during the similar 1968 rebellion in Czechoslovakia, “as tension and expectations rose, Radio Free Prague played over and over Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”73

  In Communist China, the vague knocking of the first four notes made Beethoven’s Fifth a pawn in the Cultural Revolution. Western classical music in China had been drastically undermined by the Revolution—the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory was decimated as professors were arrested or driven to suicide74—and Beethoven was officially eschewed in favor of ideologically pure operas and ballets created under the direction of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife. The power struggle between Jiang and Premier Zhou Enlai turned symphonic as rapprochement with the United States (the prospect of which Jiang despised) moved forward. For one of Henry Kissinger’s trips to Beijing to plan Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit, Zhou had the idea of marking the occasion with a concert by China’s Central Philharmonic. “Kissinger’s German,” Zhou instructed Li Delun, the Philharmonic’s conductor. “You should play Beethoven.”75

  But which Beethoven? Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the Central Philharmonic had often performed the symphonies; called into a meeting with Jiang Qing and Yu Huiyong, the minister of culture and Jiang’s chief musical consultant, Li expressed a preference for the Fifth, as it was the piece the Philharmonic performed best. But Yu insisted that the Fifth was contrary to the spirit of Communist China, since—post hoc the first four notes—it was about fatalism.

  Li had stepped into a Byzantine intellectual power struggle, one of Jiang Qing’s perennial propaganda battles against those who would try to reverse the course of revolutionary history in favor of the status quo.76 It was the Old and Young Hegelians all over again: the Fifth lacked sufficient specificity as to just which kind of fate it was in favor of. Jiang and Yu substituted Beethoven’s Sixth, Beethoven’s nature pictures presumably being less open to troublesome interpretation. (Jiang Qing pulled the same switch on Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra on their 1973 visit, leading to a certain amount of last-minute scrambling, as the group had only brought parts for the Fifth, not the Sixth.77)

  After Mao’s death, Yu Huiyong would commit suicide by drinking a bottle of sulfuric acid. The Cultural Revolution was over, the milestone having been marked, in part, by Li Delun and the Central Philharmonic returning to the symphony they played best, Beethoven’s Fifth, a performance broadcast throughout China in March of 1977. Xu Ximing, head of the Shanghai Music Lovers’ Association, recognized the significance. “It is about the light that comes after a period of great difficulty,” he recalled, “so it was very appropriate.”78 (Then again, in 1997, during the ceremonial transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, Chinese police drowned out protesters with a PA broadcast of the Fifth.79)

  Elsewhere in the Communist world, Trotsky’s dynamically created majority had long since ossified into a bureaucracy of oppression, with a cynicism toward progress to rival Metternich’s. The order failed to make room for Trotsky himself, who was forced out of party and country. Asylum in Norway turned into house arrest, an internment slightly alleviated by a radio: “Beethoven was a great help to us, but the music was a rarity”—drowned out by propaganda broadcasts from both Stalin and Hitler.80 Trotsky was shipped from Norway to Mexico, where he was assassinated in 1940. Even in exile, though, Trotsky had kept the historical-materialist faith, the same tenets that elaborated the perception of the Fifth’s opening into a tolling of the fate of all mankind:

  And what of your personal fate?—I hear a question, in which curiosity is mixed with irony.… I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate. On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development.81

  “Mankind” does not advance, it does not even exist.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power

  ALL ALONG, there had been another lane on the Fifth’s journey to canonic greatness, running parallel to Hegel and Marx, but surpassing both of them in its conception of Fate. Its surveyor was the era’s great iconoclast, promoting a worldview fiercely generous and exuberantly desolate: Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1888, in the months preceding his sudden mental breakdown, Nietzsche wrote his own version of an autobiography: Ecce Homo, a breezy, cocky tour of his own works and thought processes. At the close of a chapter entitled “Why I Am So Clever,” Nietzsche offered this prescription: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be
different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”82

  Nietzsche’s amor fati, his love of Fate, was the final mutation in the nineteenth-century evolution of concepts of Fate and History. Quite simply, after Nietzsche, there was no place left for Fate to go: in a way, it became philosophically indistinguishable from the whole of creation. Schindler’s investing of the Fifth with a single share of Fate had unwittingly proved one of the canniest metaphysical investments possible. And yet Nietzsche himself would warn against the dividend.

  Amor fati grew out of Nietzsche’s contemplation of the old idea of eternal recurrence, the idea that, contrary to Hegel, history was not progressive but constantly cycled through the same patterns over and over again. It’s as if Hegel’s idea of everything perpetually becoming had no Absolute endpoint—becoming is all there is. Nietzsche famously posed the question in his 1882 book The Gay Science:

  What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence …”

  “Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?” Nietzsche posits. “Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ”83 The latter response is the quintessence of amor fati.

 

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