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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Orpheus and his lyre should tip us off, though: Hoffmann is, in essence, retelling the Fifth Symphony as a heroic myth. The great classicist John H. Finley Jr. mapped ancient Greek thought into four stages; the first, most basic, was the mythic, what he called the “heroic mind.” Finley noted how, in Homer’s epics, objects keep their descriptive epithets—he points to Hector’s helmet, always “all-shining”—even when the descriptions are irrelevant to the dramatic context. “It is as if in whatever circumstances [the object] keeps its particular being,” Finley wrote. The object “does not change because people are sad or happy but remains what it is, one of the innumerable fixed entities that comprise the world.” Hoffmann, in laying out the Fifth’s fixed entities, exhibits Finley’s characterization of a mythic-heroic apprehension, “an outgazing bent of mind that sees things exactly, each for itself, and seems innocent of the idea that thought discerps and colors reality.”14

  On the one hand, Hoffmann’s assertion of mythic status fits his Romanticizing agenda nicely. Dennis Ford, citing Finley’s mythic category, practically spells out the mechanics of Hoffmann’s review. “The sacred realm as articulated by myth is universal, impersonal, timeless, and transcendent. As such, it contrasts with the everyday, profane world that is particular, personal, and time-bound.”15 Hoffmann’s repeated longing for the infinite (and/or infinite longing) is reminding the reader what to be listening for as he spins Beethoven’s tale, a tale immutable and unchanging in its specific notes and rhythms but, like all epics, a renewable source of metaphysical energy. On the other hand, that space between specificity and universality tips the interpretive prerogative back to the listener—which Romantic aestheticians would have considered a step back.

  COMPOSERS’ CAREERS are now routinely divided into “early,” “middle,” and “late” periods; this three-bin laundry sort was first invoked to put a shape on Beethoven’s career. At least with Beethoven, critics and musicologists could color within somewhat clear biographical lines: early-period Beethoven starts early; middle-period Beethoven starts with the Heiligenstadt Testament, a reboot of determination in the face of his approaching deafness; late-period Beethoven starts when the deafness finally reaches the point where Beethoven retreats, as the Romantics would eventually portray it, into a world of pure musical imagination.

  It is easy to see why the Romantic musical aesthetic, with its championing of art as a deeply personal statement, a missive from the unadulterated Divine to an intellectually qualified reality, would seize on the example of late-period Beethoven: the best way to eliminate the messy contamination of the sensed world is to shut it out. For Hoffmann to take the Fifth—one of the high-water marks of Beethoven’s middle-period heroic style—as the model for a Romantic symphony is, by comparison, odd: the sheer force of Beethoven’s heroic music deflects the personal as much as it amplifies it.

  Middle-period Beethoven is not necessarily Heroic Beethoven, but all of Beethoven’s heroic works date from the middle period: the Eroica, the Emperor Concerto, the less sitcom-like portions of Fidelio, the Appassionata and Waldstein Piano Sonatas, and, of course, the Fifth Symphony. From the beginning of his career, Beethoven had a reputation as an innovative rule breaker, and it was the heroic works, especially the Third and Fifth Symphonies, that cemented that image. But to convince an audience that you’re breaking the rules, you have to establish a context in which the rules still apply; in Classical terms, Beethoven’s heroic music is some of his most conformist, the better to highlight where he goes off script—the “false” horn entrance in the Eroica; the distant-key entrance of the second theme in the Waldstein; the incursion of the third movement’s march into the finale of the Fifth. Even that incursion can be subsumed into an operation that audiences accustomed to Mozart and Haydn would have recognized—just as the end of the third movement dovetails into the finale with a sudden burst of volume, the self-quotation explodes into a repeat of the finale’s opening, fulfilling the formal requirement for a recapitulation of the movement’s primary theme.

  Where the heroic Beethoven breaks from his predecessors is in rhetorical tone. “Heroism is assertive,” is how musicologist Michael P. Steinberg puts it. “The heroic style is a style of assertion.”16 Steinberg contrasts that with the Classical pattern of dialogue, themes juxtaposed so that they seem to question and answer each other. Assertion would, at first glance, seem to aid the Romantic program of shifting aesthetic power away from the listener and toward the creator. But Beethoven’s assertive style also pushes forward a musical surface so insistent that it becomes something of a firewall—and shifts the power back to the listener. The surface energy prevents us from peering behind its curtain, but because we nevertheless want to sense something behind that curtain, we make an educated guess, based on our own emotional experience.

  In other words, Beethoven’s heroic music is a lot like Steve McQueen’s acting. In films such as The Great Escape, Bullitt, or The Getaway, McQueen offered probably the purest example of a post-1960 Hollywood tough guy; physically dynamic, emotionally inscrutable, stoically cool. Do McQueen’s characters have deep reserves of imagination? An internal, intricately interwoven matrix of memory and doubt? Complicated, conflicted inner lives? Who can tell? Novelist and screenwriter William Goldman once described the movie star’s preference for an implacable surface over a complex interior: “I don’t want to be the man who learns—I want to be the man who knows.”17 (Compare Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.”18)

  The Fifth Symphony knows. Beethoven doesn’t so much take the listener on the journey with him as return from the journey and start telling war stories. Both the first movement’s struggle and the finale’s triumph are very public demonstrations. The energies are directed outward, at the listener, not inward, drawing the listener. This is not to say that Beethoven’s effect—or McQueen’s for that matter—is unemotional, but that, rather than transporting the viewer/listener into a new emotional consciousness, the experience is rather that of a provocative outline for the viewer/listener to fill in. It shifts the determination of musical substance back to the listener.

  Besides, Beethoven could eschew action movies when he wanted to. Throughout the middle period, one can almost sense Beethoven alternating between heroic and intimate on a piece-by-piece basis, much like a star following up a blockbuster with that more “personal” project. This, too, would seem to violate the Romantic stricture of organic unity. Intriguingly, variants of the four-note motive turn up in other middle-period works, leaving one to wonder whether it is a coincidence, a stylistic tic, or a deliberate sign of Beethoven’s putting asunder a narrative that the Romantic aesthetic would see joined.

  Owen Jander19 has noted how Beethoven’s superimposition of stylized quail and cuckoo songs (so labeled in the score) in the “Scene by the Brook” of the Pastoral Symphony produces both the three repeated notes and the falling third; taking the Schindler-sourced “Fate” interpretation at face value, he reads the Sixth Symphony, as well as the Fifth, as an autobiographical essay on the composer’s advancing deafness. Raymond Knapp goes further,20 noting numerous similarities of structure between the Fifth and the Sixth (for example, the Sixth’s opening phrase, like the Fifth, begins with a three-note pickup and ends with a fermata), and proposing that the Fifth and the Sixth Symphonies be heard as a giant whole. The gentle, caressing classicism of the opening of the Fourth Piano Concerto might be the emotional opposite of the Fifth’s haymaker gambit, but a closer look reveals, again, parallel features: three unaccented notes leading into the downbeat, an initial avoidance of the tonic note in the melody, a rhythmically ambiguous held note—we are approaching movie-star catchphrase territory here. And all three of these works had their public premieres in the same concert: first the Sixth, then the concerto, then the Fifth.

  Considering the three works as a speculative trilogy at least points up why the Fifth Symphony alone might have made a less awkward soapbox for Romantic pro
selytizing. The Sixth Symphony’s literalism would have put off Romantic proponents (Hoffmann took part of his review of the Fifth to dismiss those of Beethoven’s contemporaries who trafficked in such imitative effects); as would, perhaps, the concerto’s retro-Mozart tone of Apollonian reticence (when the Romantics finally got around to programmatizing the concerto, they heard in its slow movement, again, the story of Orpheus opening the gates of the underworld). Moreover, taken as a trilogy, one could even read the three-act whole in Kantian terms: raw sense information (the Sixth’s naturalism) is processed by the rational mind (the concerto’s classicism) by which it is raised beyond the subjective into universal knowledge (the Fifth’s singular absoluteness). No wonder the Romantics, their collective eyebrow cocked at Kant’s compartmentalization, focused their attention on the Fifth as a self-contained whole.

  • • •

  BUT EVEN on its own, the Fifth’s heroic mettle, its corporeal, visceral presence and apparent narrative of struggle in this world, complicates Hoffmann’s sense of unnameable longing. (As one critic has put it, the Fifth “would seem to provide one of the least convincing examples of a music that [in Hoffmann’s words] ‘has nothing in common with the outer sensory world.’ ”21) When Hoffmann describes the ultimate effect of the Andante as calling back “the frightful spirit” of the opening movement “to step forth and threaten every moment from the storm clouds into which it had disappeared,” when he ignores the obvious march and martial overtones of the Finale, when he is so intent on demonstrating the symphony’s unity that he asserts that the entirety “holds the listener’s soul firmly in a single mood” (and that the orchestra playing it must be “inspired by a single spirit”), it is hard not to surmise that Hoffmann is letting his aesthetic concerns guide his ears, and not the other way around.22 His review, which did so much to establish Beethoven and Beethoven’s Fifth as the benchmark for artistic achievement, also established the Fifth’s tabula rasa potential, its ability to be bent to a variety of philosophical and artistic agendas.

  Hoffmann’s agenda—to promote Romanticism—was not one that had previously made much use of music, Romanticism having been primarily a literary phenomenon. What makes Hoffmann’s choice of the Fifth so provocative as an object of Romantic advertising is that it was simultaneously troublesome and ingenious. As easy as it is to point out the rickety parts of Hoffmann’s scaffolding, his use of the Fifth to promote music to a Romantic status above and beyond literature was wildly successful. Music was an experience both concrete enough to require explanation and vague enough to admit of a certain latitude in the explaining, a willful running up against the limits of language.

  Of course, Hoffmann may have had another agenda; after all, he wrote in German, not French. In his review of the Fifth, written, as it was, during French occupation, Hoffmann’s criticism of French music and the Enlightenment’s cultural progeny was circumspect—limited to the disparaging mention of the French vogue for literalistic battle symphonies (ironically, the sort of thing Beethoven would himself produce with Wellington’s Victory).23 Nevertheless, Hoffmann’s review of the Fifth could easily be tied to the movement for German nationalist renewal in the wake of Napoléon’s invasion. And it starts at the beginning; as Stephen Rumph has noted, the use of the first four notes of the Fifth as the basis for the symphony’s overall unity paralleled a crucial feature of German nationalistic thought, the unity that “lies at the heart of Romantic political thought”: “The Romantics repudiated the mechanistic, atomizing, and utilitarian tendencies of Western liberalism.… They upheld instead a vision of the state in which each individual interest was subordinated to the articulated—and hence, hierarchical—structure of the total organism.”24 (Compare Hoffmann, on Beethoven: “Separating what is merely himself from the innermost kingdom of notes, he is thus able to rule over it as an absolute lord.”) How much Hoffmann intended his review of the Fifth to be a coded shot across the bow of Napoleonic occupation is unknowable, but he was attuned to the Romantic jargon that would lend itself so well to German nationalistic aspirations.

  And the jargon mattered: the wellspring of the patriotism behind that vocabulary, eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, was a man fascinated by language. Herder was a scrupulous thinker (he studied with both Kant and Hamann; each held him in high enough regard to later feel betrayed whenever Herder tried to philosophically mediate between their two extremes) whose posthumous reputation was somewhat hijacked by his advocacy of the all-too-easily simplified idea of German nationalism. However, Herder’s nationalism was based not around geography or misty conceptions of the medieval Teutonic soul, but around language—German unity was a unification of everyone who spoke German.

  While Herder could disparage the French with the best of them—“Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine!” read one poem, “Speak German, O you German!”25—his linguistics were strikingly subtle and modern. According to Herder, one’s thoughts are imperceptibly channeled in different directions based on what language one thinks in; and languages are hardly universal, each evolving out of its own specific cultural circumstances. Herder thought that the French language was geared too much toward cosmopolitan niceties to get to the philosophical heart of things; as one scholar has summarized it, “The French language suspends the mind above sense experience and therefore refers to nothing but itself; German goes all the way down to brute sense perception and, through it, goes all the way up to higher reason.”26

  Herder’s ideas actually undermined straightforward nationalism: any argument for national exceptionalism was actually an argument for linguistic exceptionalism, an argument necessarily expressed within the language one wished to promote, and so on down the philosophical rabbit hole. The German Romantics’ introduction of instrumental music into the equation provided an escape hatch: music was an expression beyond speech, and the fact that the most celebrated instrumental composer of the day was German seemed to indicate that there was something exceptional about the German soul that likewise went beyond language.

  Hoffmann’s exaltation of the Fifth thus lent itself to a self-buttressing argument: only German is adequate to even begin to describe the philosophical striving that he hears the Fifth translating into musical expression, a rhetorical stance that boosts both the prospective nation unified around the German language and the German culture that can uniquely surpass any language, even German. Hoffmann’s description of the Fifth charts a treasure map of national renewal. In what is, after all, a wartime review of a wartime piece, Hoffmann rationalizes occupation by making the Fifth a stand-in for German glory, a kingdom of latent power awaiting its realization.

  THAT SEEMING PARADOX of the Romantics—the simultaneous extolling of individual expressive prerogative and of collective ethnic identity—hinges around freedom’s split personality, the divide between positive and negative liberty most famously analyzed by Isaiah Berlin, the British impresario of political philosophy. It is, basically, the divide between well-intentioned interference and benign neglect.

  “Positive” liberty implies a proactive process, springing from the need of individuals to feel as if they are in control of their decisions. The dangerous irony is that the means (for example, the participation in the democratic process) can lead to ends in which individual choice is suppressed by majority rule, even as the individuals are made to feel empowered—in Berlin’s opinion, making it that much easier to justify tyranny on the grounds that people aren’t always aware of what’s best for them. (“Recent history has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely academic,” he warned.27) “Negative” liberty is, by contrast, the absence of meddling in one’s individual decisions. “By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others,” Berlin put it.28 The ideal Romantic artist might have embodied a heroic individual negative liberty. But outside the realm of aesthetics, while this concept of liberty was prevalent among English thinkers—Hobbes, Bentham, Mill—after the French Revolution, positive liberty
held sway on the Continent.

  It is easy to consider a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any classical repertoire—as a notch in the belt of positive liberty, both in the way we agree to accept the authority of the score (those same first four notes, in the same order, will open every rendition) and the all-too-common atmosphere of improvement, be it moral or aesthetic. It is a short jump from the idea that Beethoven is good for us to the idea that Beethoven was asserting what was good for us, whether we know it or not. Critiques of Western classical music often echo Berlin’s critique of positive liberty—it causes us to fool ourselves into thinking we are freer than we are. Bassist and sociologist Ortiz Walton (the first African-American to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, incidentally) was particularly scathing on this point:

  The consumer, or concertgoer, like his counterpart in the world of commerce, has been made into a passive recipient of various sounds. He either accepts the product or rejects it, but never is he allowed to add his own creativity to it.… So even though one has heard Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 for the hundredth time, he still keeps listening to it, claiming falsely that he hears something new every time. His participation is limited to applause after the finale or occasional coughing during the section played loud enough to cover the sound.29

  But, then again, music, by its very incorporeal nature, has a tendency toward negative liberty as well. The connection between music and listener brooks no restriction on interpretation; each of us can hear music as each of us pleases. One is free to pick and choose from two centuries of critical interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth—and, possibly, reject it all—every time fate, as Schindler would have us believe, knocks at the door. Positive liberty helpfully breaks in. Negative liberty peeks through the drapes and decides if it wants to be home.