The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
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But Berlin’s two concepts of liberty actually admit a third, what Berlin calls “the retreat to the inner citadel”: the carving out of some portion of one’s thought, persona, soul, that is put out of reach of the external world’s stress and strain. Berlin’s description of the conditions that give rise to such a retreat might well apply to much of Hoffmann’s life: “I am the possessor of reason and will; I conceive ends and I desire to pursue them; but if I am prevented from attaining them I no longer feel master of the situation.”30 And, in fact, in a telling postscript to his review of the Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann would rework his kingdom of the infinite into such a retreat.
As with so many Europeans during the Napoleonic era, war seemed to follow Hoffmann wherever he went. In 1813, he moved to Dresden; within a month, Napoléon was bombarding the city. Hoffmann took refuge in writing, completing a long fictional dialogue called “The Poet and the Composer”; it was published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung that December. The dialogue is mostly Hoffmann’s take on the venerable operatic contest between music and poetry, as translated into Romantic terms (Hoffmann comes out in favor of a proto-Wagnerian union of both jobs in a single creator). But “The Poet and the Composer” opens with a story set in the midst of urban warfare: “The enemy was at the gates, guns thundered all around, and grenades sizzled through the air amid showers of sparks. The townsfolk, their faces white with fear, ran into their houses; the deserted streets rang with the sound of horses’ hooves, as mounted patrols galloped past and with curses drove the remaining soldiers into their redoubts.”
This is pure reportage on Hoffmann’s part, a glimpse of his own Dresden existence. But then Hoffmann shifts into a fantasy that reflects the escapism of creative activity (around this time, Hoffmann would note that writing “removes me from the pressures of life outside”31). And we meet someone who seems more than a little familiar:
Ludwig sat in his little back room, completely absorbed and lost in the wonderful, brightly coloured world of fantasy that unfolded before him at the piano. He had just completed a symphony, in which he had striven to capture in written notation all the resonances of his innermost soul; the work sought, like Beethoven’s compositions of that type, to speak in heavenly language of the glorious wonders of that far, romantic realm in which we swoon away in inexpressible yearning.
Not Beethoven, but a name-sharing doppelgänger, one whose symphony, judging by a description nearly self-plagiarized from Hoffmann’s 1810 review, is itself a double of the Fifth Symphony. But reality intrudes:
Then his landlady came into the room, upbraiding him and asking how he could simply play the piano through all that anguish and distress, and whether he wanted to get himself shot dead in his garret. Ludwig did not quite follow the woman’s drift, until with a sudden crash a shell carried away part of the roof and shattered the window panes. Screaming and wailing the landlady ran down the stairs, while Ludwig seized the dearest thing he now possessed, the score of his symphony, and hurried after her down to the cellar.
Here the entire household was gathered. In a quite untypical fit of largesse, the wine seller who lived downstairs had made available a few dozen bottles of his best wine, and the women, fretting and fussing but as always anxiously concerned with physical sustenance and comfort, filled their sewing baskets with tasty morsels from the pantry. They ate, they drank, and their agitation and distress were soon transformed into that agreeable state in which we seek and fancy we find security in neighbourly companionship; that state in which all the petty airs and graces which propriety teaches are subsumed, as it were, into the great round danced to the irresistible beat of fate’s iron fist.32
The irresistible beat of fate’s iron fist. Hoffmann’s cellar might be the most tantalizingly plausible source of either Beethoven’s post hoc explanation of the Fifth’s opening or Schindler’s invented poeticization of it. Hoffmann, though, sets up the symphony in opposition to fate, a fate that nevertheless is irresistibly omnipresent, something you can, at best, temporarily ignore. Choose your illusion, he seems to say: either the “sublime siren voices” of art or the fancied security of “neighbourly companionship.” If fate is at the door, the purpose of a symphony might just be to drown out the knocking.
In Hoffmann, then, the nineteenth-century philosophical tendencies to depersonalize and externalize both aesthetics and fate found an ideal vessel. The way he found himself buffeted by the winds of chance, politics, and war, perhaps he sensed that the one could vindicate the other, that the terror and awe of the sublime might lend an artistic redemption to the less exalted terror of life during wartime. Surrendering to art gives surrender a good name.
Here is shewn once more the idiosyncrasy of German nature, that profoundly inward gift which stamps its mark on every form by moulding it afresh from within, and thus is saved from the necessity of outward overthrow. Thus is the German no revolutionary, but a reformer.…
—RICHARD WAGNER, “Beethoven”
AND THEN, a strange coda: as German nationalism went from aspirational to imperious, German Romanticism—and, with it, the resonance of the Fifth Symphony—went from mystical to messianic. By the year of the Beethoven centennial, 1870, the anxiety of the Napoleonic Wars and the idealism of the revolutions of the 1840s had been supplanted by imperial brinksmanship, as France (led by once-President, then-Emperor Napoléon III) and Prussia (guided by the conservatively pragmatic hand of Otto von Bismarck) went to war in July after much diplomatic sniping; Prussia scored a decisive upset victory, paving the way for German unification while at the same time scuttling the renascent French monarchy for good. (King Wilhelm I of Prussia was part of a large gathering that observed the Prussian victory at Sedan from a hilly vantage, “a glittering concourse of uniformed notabilities more suitable to an opera-house or a race-course than to a climactic battle which was to decide the destinies of Europe and perhaps of the world.”33) Bismarck had already secured the allegiance of most of the other German-speaking states after a brief 1866 clash with the Austrian Empire; a story went around that Bismarck, who revered Beethoven, had arranged a command performance of the Fifth Symphony prior to signing the declaration of war. (The concert at which Bismarck heard the Fifth was actually a month earlier.)
Also by 1870, after twelve years in exile, Richard Wagner was once again a German in good standing, albeit living in Switzerland; Wagner acquired a zealous and fortuitous fan in the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but jealousy among the Munich court necessitated his leaving. (The composer talked the monarch out of abdicating and following him.) It was still a remarkable change of fortunes.
The 1848 revolutions had taken a full year to reach Dresden, where Wagner was, at the time, kapellmeister of the Royal Saxon Court—patronage that did not keep Wagner from supporting the revolution wholeheartedly. He had been radicalized by August Röckel, a fellow conductor and die-hard activist who lost his own musical position after advocating armed uprising one too many times. Röckel was also connected to Beethoven—his father, Joseph August Röckel, had been Beethoven’s Florestan for the second try at Fidelio; his aunt was, possibly, the dedicatee of “Für Elise.”34 Röckel introduced Wagner to Mikhail Bakunin, who was going from revolution to revolution, hiding out in Dresden after escaping from Prague—“a really amiable and tender-hearted man,” in Wagner’s estimation.35
In his autobiography, Wagner gave the impression of having been pulled into the uprising by the undertow of the mob (“I suddenly became conscious of the cry raised on all sides: ‘To the barricades! to the barricades!’ Driven by a mechanical impulse I followed the stream of people”36), but he had, in fact, helped plan the rebellion, even ordering a shipment of grenades. The Dresden revolution collapsed in violence, and Wagner was forced to flee, first to Leipzig, then to Paris. He was lucky; Röckel was captured and, after his death sentence was commuted, spent more than a decade in prison.
During his exile, Wagner worked on his massive operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and
completed the equally expansive Tristan und Isolde, but neither of them would be performed until after his exile ended. His marriage collapsed; his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a silk-merchant patron, was in all likelihood unconsummated. He wrote what would prove his most wildly influential essay, “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (“The Artwork of the Future”), and his most wildly offensive, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”), but neither attracted much initial notice. A beloved pet parrot, who had just learned to whistle a scrap of the Fifth Symphony, suddenly died. (“Ah!” he wrote a friend, “if I could say to you what has died for me in this dear creature!!”37)
Wagner was also introduced to the profoundly pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer had published his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, in 1818. He scorned Hegel and the German Idealists by rewinding back to Kant; then scorned Kant by rejecting one of Kant’s fundamental concepts, the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, the object as it exists beyond the context of our senses. Kant thought the thing-in-itself was, by definition, unknowable; Schopenhauer thought that our inner experience, our desires, our endeavor to continue to exist—which he called the “will”—contained knowledge of things-in-themselves. (His specific formulation was that individual wills were facets of a single, all-knowing Will.) But the individual will was fundamentally insatiable, forever denying other individual wills, forever unfulfilled by its real-world translation into “representations,” forever making life a vale of frustration and suffering. Schopenhauer prescribed ascetic contemplation—the inner citadel could be, if not a refuge from the will, at least a neutral high ground from which to observe the hostilities.
It’s easy to see why the Wagner of the 1850s, a one-man band of unfulfilled desire, would be so strongly attracted to Schopenhauer’s bleak analysis. But the attraction persisted even as Wagner started fulfilling his desires on a regular basis. For, unlike Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer had tried to come to terms with music’s power in a way that Wagner found tellingly sympathetic—and malleable. Wagner’s essay upon the Beethoven centennial, as much about Schopenhauer as Beethoven, reimagines both figures as stand-ins for Wagner himself; and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are used to define Beethoven (and, by extension, Wagner) as the epitome of German-ness.
For Schopenhauer, music, “since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phenomenal world”—that perpetually miserable domain—“positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts.” Music “is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself.”38 Wagner takes that ball and runs with it; if music furnishes direct access to the will, then the composer must possess a unique access to “the Essence of things that eludes the forms of outer knowledge.”39 The terms are Schopenhauer’s (and, though Schopenhauer would have been loath to admit it, Hegel’s), but the empowerment is Wagner’s: “the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as the universal Will.”40
Schopenhauer still might have agreed: “It is just this universality that belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness,” he wrote, “that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows.”41 But for Wagner, that meant that the creation of music absolved the composer’s exercise of will from Schopenhauer’s ascetic demands. “[B]reaking-down the floodgates of Appearance,” he insists, “must necessarily call forth in the inspired musician a state of ecstasy wherewith no other can compare.” Such ecstasy is surpassed only by that of saints, and only because saints do not mediate between their ecstasy and “a perpetually recurrent state of individual consciousness” the way a composer does. That the composer takes on the suffering that results from such alternation, a “penalty for the state of inspiration in which he so unutterably entrances us, might make us hold the musician in higher reverence than other artists, ay, well-nigh give him claim to rank as holy.”42 And none holier than Beethoven, who had one crucial advantage in his access to the universal Will: his deafness.
Like the blind seer Tiresias (who, in one legend, was partially requited for his blindness when Athena opened his ears, giving him the ability to understand birdsong), Beethoven becomes a musical prophet, “the deaf musician who now, untroubled by life’s uproar, but listens to his inner harmonies, now from his depths but speaks to that world—for it has nothing more to tell him. So is genius freed from all outside it, at home forever with and in itself.”43 Wagner locates that freed genius within very specific borders, however:
We know that it was the “German spirit,” so terribly dreaded and hated “across the mountains” [i.e., France], that stepped into the field of Art, as everywhere else, to heal this artfully induced corruption of the European race. As in other realms we have hailed our Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and the rest, as our rescuers from that corruption, to-day we have to shew that in this musician Beethoven, who spoke the purest speech of every nation, the German spirit redeemed the spirit of mankind from deep disgrace.44
Wagner’s overtones of religious trial would become a running motive in Beethoven commentary; as noted by musicologist K. M. Knittel, “writers after Wagner privileged pieces in which [Beethoven’s] suffering seemed to manifest itself most clearly.”45 Edward Dannreuther, a German-born pianist who became one of Wagner’s great champions in Britain, asserted that “Beethoven is, in the best sense of the word, an ethical, a religious teacher.”46 Sir George Grove, in his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, could write how Beethoven’s life “formed a Valley of the Shadow of Death such as few men have been called to traverse.”47 When Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist, wireless pioneer, Fabian socialist, and paranormal enthusiast, published a catechism attempting to reconcile science and Christianity, he explained the incarnation of the Divine in man with this analogy: “The spirit of Beethoven is incarnate in his music; and he that hath heard the Fifth Symphony hath heard Beethoven.”48
Once more I’m in the ever-juvenile condition of a débutant … age, with its fruits, absolutely declines to set in.
—RICHARD WAGNER
WAGNER COMPLETES the full turn of the wheel from the Enlightenment to the Romantic, from controlled logic to subconscious fantasy, from a conviction that reason and rationality can explain the human condition, to the aesthetic ideal represented in the purposefully incomprehensible musical strivings of a deaf composer.
Wagner’s deification of deafness came during an outbreak of unusually drama-free circumstances in his life: living in the Swiss countryside, far from urban intrigues, with his longtime mistress (and mother of his children) Cosima von Bülow. In 1870, Wagner would finally marry Cosima, Wagner’s first wife having died, Hans von Bülow having granted Cosima a divorce, and Cosima having converted from Catholicism. As Knittel concludes, “[Wagner] was as ‘deaf’ to the troubles of the world as he could ever have hoped to be.”49 The isolation, nevertheless, was not entirely placid, as Cosima related to her diary:
Friday, February 18 [1870] Today, children, I committed a grave wrong; I offended our friend, and since this is something I wish never to do again, regarding it as the blackest of sins, I use this instance to identify the pitifulness of our human nature. We were speaking of Beethoven’s C Minor Symphony, and I willfully insisted on a tempo which I felt to be right. That astonished and offended R., and now we are both suffering—I for having done it, he for having experienced willfulness at my hands.50
Beethoven’s metronome strikes again. But the opportunity to instruct the children is in keeping with Wagner’s take on Beethoven’s music. Cosima again:
[January 20, 1873] … R. says he would like to change the time signature of the first movement [of Beethoven’s Fifth] into 4/4 because it is so awkward to beat as written, and the nuances also suffered in this rhythm—it gave rise to too many accents; Beethoven, he thinks, must have felt that people would go wrong in 4/4 and thu
s wrote it as if for children.51
In his centenary essay, Wagner raised Beethoven to Romantic majority by equating Romantic sublimity with a child’s innocence: whether in Beethoven’s folklike melodic ideas, “in which he recognised that nobility of innocence he dreamt of”; in the Sixth Symphony, in which “the world regains the innocence of its childhood”; or in the “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony, “the childlike innocence of which … breathes upon us as with a saintly breath.”
Beethoven’s goal, in Wagner’s estimation, was “to find the archetype of innocence,” an innocence Wagner hears in the Fifth’s finale, “where the naïvety of the simple march-tune … appeals to us the more as the whole symphony now seems to have been nothing but a straining of our attention for it.” Much of that straining, of course, consists of Beethoven’s working out of the implications of the opening motive, an intricate operation that might seem more the result of technical plasticity than intuitive inspiration. But Wagner is quick to counter that hearing is not necessarily believing:
[T]he C-minor Symphony appeals to us as one of those rarer conceptions of the master’s in which a stress of bitter passion, the fundamental note of the commencement, mounts rung by rung through consolation, exaltation, till it breaks into the joy of conscious victory.… [T]hough it might be doubted whether the purity of Musical Conception would not ultimately suffer by the pursuance of this path, through its leading to the dragging-in of fancies altogether foreign to the spirit of Music, yet it cannot be denied that the master was in nowise prompted by a truant fit of aesthetic speculation, but simply and solely by an ideal instinct sprung from Music’s ownest realm.