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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Nietzsche had the eponymous hero of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra—an allegory saturated with amor fati—illustrate Fate as a deceptive gateway. “This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us—that is another eternity,” Zarathustra notes. “They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: ‘Moment.’

  “[A]ll things that can run have already run along this lane”84—up to and including the current moment; what’s more, “all things [are] bound fast together” such that, in turn, the moment symmetrically draws the future toward it.

  As an example, the Canadian philosopher Peter Hallward provides another of history’s great heroes of fate:

  Caesar’s only real task is to become worthy of the events he has been created to embody. Amor fati. What Caesar actually does adds nothing to what he virtually is. When Caesar actually crosses the Rubicon this involves no deliberation or choice since it is simply part of the entire, immediate expression of Caesarness, it simply unrolls or “unfolds something that was encompassed for all times in the notion of Caesar”—and a world in which Caesar did not cross the Rubicon would thus have to be an entirely different world.85

  Hallward’s formulation clashes with every bit of our intuition about causality and agency, but also brings to the fore two of the more important facets of Nietzsche’s thought: his bias against free will, and his emphasis on affirmation, on embracing one’s becoming.

  Amor fati is not just a cosmic version of playing the hand you’re dealt; it defines the game itself as inescapably all-encompassing. The universe is a perpetual state of becoming; and nothing exists outside of that becoming—including what Nietzsche regards as the irrationally egotistic idea of free will. One of Nietzsche’s favorite words is Verhängnis, which can be translated in multiple directions: literally “hanging together,” but also meaning “fate” or even “calamity.” It’s all the same thing, and it’s only the distorting habit of regarding ourselves as self-mastered individuals that keeps us from that realization: “[O]ne is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole.”86 There’s no way of getting off the roller coaster of Fate: we’re built into it. If you’re enjoying the ride, you’ve achieved greatness.

  No wonder Nietzsche doesn’t go in for the Fifth Symphony’s defiance. He prefers to praise “Beethoven’s noble hermit’s resignation.”87 Love your fate.

  EARLY IN his career, Nietzsche worked on both philosophy and music, pursuing the latter with more raw talent than skill, a deficit that earned him a fair amount of scorn after the twenty-four-year-old professor of philology inserted himself into Richard Wagner’s circle in the late 1860s. Nietzsche and Wagner talked over what became Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy; Wagner defended the book when it came under attack from Nietzsche’s more hidebound colleagues. But Wagner also made a point of left-handedly complimenting Nietzsche’s piano improvisations, telling him “you play too well for a professor.”88 Nietzsche fared no better with his written compositions, having never mastered forms beyond miniatures; Hans von Bülow criticized one as “the most extreme piece of fantastic extravagance, the most undelightful and the most antimusical drafts on musical paper that I have faced in a long time. Frequently I had to ask myself: is the whole thing a joke, perhaps you intended a parody of the so-called music of the future?”89

  Nietzsche, intellectually tougher than his enthusiastic-professor mien may have let on, went from lauding Wagner and his artwork (Kunstwerk) of the future to denouncing him, accusing him of being corrupted by Christianity, and enthusiastically proclaiming the superiority of Offenbach and Bizet. (Nevertheless, even after breaking with Wagner, in person and in print, Nietzsche recognized the importance of their discussions to his own intellectual journey: “I’d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships.”90)

  The “fantastic extravagance” that Bülow faulted in Nietzsche’s music was the touchstone of his prose; and as with much of his philosophy, Nietzsche’s views on art and music are fluid, pungently aphoristic, and, over time, somewhat self-contradictory. The constant is Nietzsche’s skepticism of art, a skepticism so deep that it can only have grown from an irresistible love: he is forever flying too close to the flame and then musing on just how and why it burns.

  In Nietzsche’s estimation, all artists were actors—benevolent liars, usually themselves unaware of their own make-believe. The deception is not in art’s scope but in its importance: art is as meaningful as life itself, but—in the light of the consequences of amor fati—life is not nearly as meaningful as we would like to think. Nietzsche dismissed an artist’s biography, his or her individual fate, as an irrelevant illusion. To interpret the Fifth and its opening motive in a way that emphasizes Beethoven’s own emotional life—his struggle with deafness or loneliness, take your pick—is to fall into the same trap that artists always set, however unwittingly. “Artists are by no means men of great passion,” Nietzsche wrote, “but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable if their own life speaks for their experience in this field.”91

  Perhaps because he knew it so well, Nietzsche regarded music as particularly fertile ground for this sort of con game; music’s “primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to come from the inner world.” Listening “for the reason” in music is a modern habit; music “does not speak of the ‘will’ or of the ‘thing in itself’; the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life.”92 That is, an age that has distorted music from a sensual pleasure into a repository for the Absolute—which is exactly what had happened to Beethoven’s music, the Fifth Symphony especially.

  Unusually susceptible to music’s power, Nietzsche was also unusually sensitive to how explanations of its “meaning” could deflect that power. It was a pattern he sensed in other areas of human endeavor as well. One of Nietzsche’s essays in his collection Untimely Meditations was a discussion of history and how it is written, a polemic he called On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Nietzsche’s main target in his History essay is alleged historical objectivity, “a condition in the historian which permits him to observe an event in all its motivations and consequences so purely that it has no effect at all on his own subjectivity”93—which had become the goal of “scientific” historians in the nineteenth century, taking their cue from the German historian Leopold von Ranke and his famous (if somewhat ambiguous) call for a history that “wants only to show what actually happened.”94

  Nietzsche calls such objectivity “mythology, and bad mythology at that”95—not only impossible but also liable to distort history into something closer to the artificiality of drama, the competing needs of narrative cohesion and disinterested viewpoint finding patterns in historical events where no patterns exist. Such patterns, Nietzsche makes clear, are usually more than a little Hegelian, be it Right or Left: “But what is one to make of this assertion, hovering as it does between tautology and nonsense, by one celebrated historical virtuoso: ‘the fact of the matter is that all human actions are subject to the mighty and irresistible direction of the course of things, though it may often not be apparent’?”96

  The “virtuoso” in question is none other than Leopold von Ranke,97 but the target is Hegel’s Spirit of History, all its subsequent elaborations and/or simplifications, and its oppressive pressure on the individual will. “If every success is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the ‘idea,’ ” Nietzsche mocks, “then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder of ‘success’!”98

  The problem, as Nietzsche sees it, is that “history is held in greater honour than l
ife”—dominating and enervating everything that makes life worth living, music included. It is “an injustice against the most vigorous part of our culture” that “such men as Mozart and Beethoven [are] already engulfed by all the learned dust of biography and compelled by the torture-instruments of historical criticism to answer a thousand impertinent questions.”99 Maybe this is why, when Nietzsche does get around to prescribing his ideal history, the description sounds more than a little like Beethoven’s Fifth: “[I]ts value will be seen to consist in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensive symbol, and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty.”100

  IN Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche imagined exhuming Beethoven and asking what he thought of how subsequent generations had used his music:

  [H]e would probably for a long time stay dumb, undecided whether to raise his hand in a blessing or a curse, but at length say perhaps: “Well, yes! That is neither I nor not-I but some third thing—and if it is not exactly right, it is nonetheless right in its own way. But you had better take care what you’re doing, since it’s you who have to listen to it—and, as our Schiller says, the living are always in the right. So be in the right and let me depart again.”101

  The story of Fate knocking at the door, which might charitably be described as neither Beethoven nor not-Beethoven, but some third thing, only became more so as the century went on. Whatever the origin of Schindler’s anecdote—a Beethovenian jest, a garbled memory, an out-and-out fiction—it ended up enhancing the Fifth’s stature probably even more than the “friend of Beethoven” could have anticipated. From a personal destiny, malleable with enough effort, the notion of Fate would gradually acquire greater and greater significance: Hegel’s historical engine, Marx’s revolutionary sustenance, Nietzsche’s all-pervasive force. Originally interpreted as a vivid portrait of an individual trajectory, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Fifth Symphony could plausibly be said to be about, well, everything.

  Back to Münzer’s Mademoiselle: having, in the meantime, caught a glimpse of his governess naked, young Eduard is understandably more pale and nervous—and less pianistically accurate—than usual when instructed to again join her for their duet; Eduard’s mother wants to impress her husband with Beethoven’s symphony, which, in her estimation, “seems so modern” with its “spicy effects”:

  Once again sounded the mysterious, stern, threatening motif. Unwritten dissonance increased its foreboding.…

  “I don’t know,” said her innocuous husband. “To me, it sounds more wrong than spicy, so to speak.”

  “Adolf,” cried his wife indignantly, “that’s just the misfortune of your one-dimensional legal training. You’ve never done anything for your musical education. Now comes the payback: you cannot follow the artistic insight of your family.”

  The conclusion of the first phrase surpassed the middle in its considerable unresolved dissonance, because, while this time the young lady played correctly, Eduard was suddenly in F-sharp major.

  The lawyer twitched sensitively and moaned audibly, but his wife squirmed, as it were, with delight, and said in a tone of contemptuous profundity:

  “Richard Strauss!!”102

  The scandalous modernity of Richard Strauss—who did, after all, compose a tone poem on Zarathustra—might well have sounded to contemporaries like Beethoven’s C-minor tonality overlaid with Eduard’s F-sharp major, a tritone away, the height of dissonance. But the nineteenth-century shape of history, an inexorable movement toward some inherently better future, demanded it: composers were deemed profound only inasmuch as they pushed the envelope. Such escalation is nowadays taken for granted, to judge by persistent vocabularies of “advance” and “progress” from descendants of Left and Right alike; Beethoven was present at the creation. The grafting of “fate knocking at the door” onto the Fifth’s iconic opening might have been nothing more than a romanticized anecdote, but it did its part to keep goal-oriented civilizations focused on destiny.

  Perhaps inevitably, Mademoiselle ends with the governess paying a late-night visit to Eduard. No need to knock—Beethoven has taken care of that already:

  She smiled and, graciously and lovingly, quietly opened the unlocked door of the boy’s room …103

  3

  Infinities

  “The modern school of music, Janet, is like the romantic drama,” I added, with a forced attempt at continuing the conversation, for I felt my sadness increasing beyond my control. “I mean the music commencing with Beethoven; not the gay, joy-loving, Athenian Mozart, but from Beethoven, the sad old giant, up to poor Schubert and Schumann and Chopin. There is a whole lifetime of woe, sometimes, in one of their shortest creations. I wonder, Janet, if the Greeks ever suffered and sorrowed as we moderns do? They seem to have been exempt from our curse; they worshipped the beautiful, and raised it to their altars,—made of it God.”

  “Their drama, my friend, was the voice of their ideal, not of their real life. The moderns have indeed bowed down before sorrow and pain, lifted them up to their most holy of holies, and there they will remain so long as the quick pulse of anguish throbs in man’s and woman’s heart.”

  —ANNE M. H. BREWSTER, St. Martin’s Summer (1866)

  AS A YOUNG MAN just out of the University of Berlin, years before the materialist conception of history crossed paths with Fate and the Fifth, Karl Marx had been briefly pulled into the orbit of none other than Bettina von Arnim, the mythopoeicist of Goethe and Beethoven, then nearing sixty and as provocative as ever. But her spirit apparently proved too indefinable for Marx’s skeptical taste. He wrote a poem mocking her:

  The child, who, as you know, once wrote to Goethe,

  In order to point out that he might love her,

  The child was at the theater one day;

  A Uniform advanced her way

  And, with a smile, his eye on her did rest.

  “Sir, Bettina wishes to suggest

  Her curly head to lean upon

  That choice supply of wondrous brawn.”

  The Uniform, quite dryly, then replied:

  “Bettina, let desire be your guide!”

  “Fine,” she said, “you know, my little mouse,

  On my head there’s not a single louse!”

  The poem was called “Newfangled Romanticism.”1 Marx’s doggerel, perhaps, marks the point where Romanticism became a fad, but, by that point, Romanticism had already left its indelible mark. The Romantics were dedicated to bringing back into art the inexplicably sublime, which they thought had been bled out by the Enlightenment’s excessive rationality. They were anything but timid: for a musical exemplar, the Romantics drafted the most singular and dynamic thing around—Beethoven’s Fifth. Both symphony and school would benefit from the association, their fame and influence boosted to ever new heights.

  The Romantics heard in Beethoven’s music a representation of a limitless beyond; a result, paradoxically, of Beethoven being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Beethoven was already the greatest composer of an era in which it was suddenly decided that composers were eligible for greatness; he was specializing in instrumental music just when instrumental music made a worst-to-first leap in the aesthetic standings. And, unusually for such shifts of intellectual ground, Beethoven’s transformation from an heir of the Classical tradition to a godfather of the Romantic tradition can be traced to a single source: a review of the Fifth Symphony in the July 4 and 10, 1810, issues of the leading German-language music magazine of the time, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. If Beethoven’s Fifth marks the birth of music as philosophical artifact, the midwife was the reviewer, E. T. A. Hoffmann.

  To reconnoiter the Romantic era, its progenitors and propagandists, its crusaders and discontents, is not just an idle historical exercise; the Romantic era never really ended. The free-for-all of individualism, mysticism, and nationalism w
e loosely gather under the banner of the Romantic aesthetic became so ingrained in Western civilization’s everyday assumptions about the relationship between art, creator, performer, and audience, that we don’t even notice it anymore. Every time a singer-songwriter is praised for projecting autobiographical authenticity; every time a movie star expresses the desire for a project that’s “more personal”; every time a flop is subsequently recategorized as a before-its-time masterpiece—all these are reverberations of the bombshell of Romanticism, and one of its preeminent delivery systems was Beethoven’s Fifth.

  BEETHOVEN’S CURIOSITY kept him current with the Romantics, with the likes of Schiller and Schlegel and Fichte and Herder, but in his Tagebuch, alongside passages from Romantic literary efforts, the only contemporary philosophy Beethoven saw fit to copy down was of the previous generation, that of Immanuel Kant: “It is not the chance confluence of … atoms that has formed the world; innate powers and laws that have their source in wisest Reason are the unchangeable basis of that order.”2

  To be sure, Beethoven was quoting Kant the forerunner of Naturphilosophie, not Kant the defender of rationalism, but it’s still a reminder that Beethoven was adopted by Romanticism, and not the other way around. Beethoven’s reference was, maybe, partly nostalgic: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the high point of the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment, came out when Beethoven was eleven, and Beethoven’s early education in Bonn included a healthy serving of Enlightenment zwieback.

  Kant revamped his life and personality in order to write his trio of Critiques, turning from a gregarious wit (and sometime card sharp) to a man whose habits were so particular and fixed that Königsberg housewives, it was said, set their clocks by his daily walk. The Critiques made Kant famous, and an in-demand teacher, but by the time he died, in 1804—the same year Beethoven sketched his first ideas for the Fifth Symphony—his philosophy was already being autopsied by the next generation, the Romantics. Nevertheless, Kant made the Romantic movement possible by his sheer competence; the Critiques pushed the rationalist program as far as it could go, and it was at that boundary that the Romantics found their intellectual focus. Where Kant ran out of road was exactly where Hoffmann and the rest of the Romantics would locate the greatness of Beethoven’s Fifth.