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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  That ideal instinct, Wagner goes on, “coincided with the struggle to rescue from every plausible objection raised by his experience of life the conscious belief in human nature’s original goodness.”52 The experience of life is an objection to innocence; to rescue it is to rewind life’s advance.

  In his final nationalistic peroration, Wagner even has the effrontery to mingle such innocence with the then-raging Franco-Prussian War:

  And beside [German] valour’s victories in this wondrous 1870 no loftier trophy can be set, than the memory of our great Beethoven, who was born to the German Folk one hundred years ago. Whither our arms are urging now, to the primal seat of “insolent fashion,” there had his genius begun already the noblest conquest: what our thinkers, our poets, in toilsome transposition, had only touched as with a half-heard word, the Beethovenian Symphony had stirred to its deepest core: the new religion, the world-redeeming gospel of sublimest innocence, was there already understood as by ourselves.53

  To double-book German military triumph with German cultural triumph was certainly an inspired move by the German Geist. (“The war is Beethoven’s jubilee,” Cosima remarked to Richard.54) But Wagner’s insistence on Beethoven’s youthful qualities was a glimpse of a juvenile strain that would become more and more prominent as the German Confederation turned into Imperial Germany—from Ludwig II’s expensive habit of building fairy-tale castles throughout Bavaria to the destructive childishness of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  Then again, petulance was never far from the surface in nineteenth-century Europe. In 1845, there was a Beethoven Festival in Bonn, attended by representatives from throughout Europe, featuring the unveiling of a statue of the city’s most famous son. Franz Liszt, then at the height of his celebrity, had financially rescued the entire project. The King of Prussia escorted Queen Victoria into the concert hall for the festival’s finale, after which followed a huge banquet. If the concert was unsuccessful—long and nearly devoid of Beethoven, apart from the Egmont Overture and a bit of the Archduke Trio, quoted by Liszt in a specially composed cantata—the dinner was worse. Sir George Smart, Beethoven’s English champion, had also made the journey to Bonn; he recorded in his diary that, at the dinner, Liszt made a toast in which he “complimented all nations except the French … this omission caused dissatisfaction among the French, who, with the Jews, are not popular here.” (Liszt’s oversight was probably unintentional, a result of giving his speech in German, a language he was less than comfortable with.) The hall was soon consumed by outbursts of recrimination. “This row was noisy,” Smart recorded, “and fearing we might get into a scrape we left the Room.” Smart saw the Jewish-born Ignaz Moscheles—Beethoven’s old colleague, who had translated Schindler’s biography into English—leave the banquet, dismayed by anti-Semitic comments. “I am ashamed of my Countrymen!” Moscheles exclaimed.55

  Liszt wasn’t invited back to Bonn for the Beethoven centennial in 1870—the city fathers had been too scandalized when Liszt’s ex-mistress, the Irish-born dancer Lola Montez, turned up uninvited at the 1845 banquet, drank too much, and began dancing on a table at the height of the uproar.56 Thus it was that Liszt ended up composing a second Beethoven cantata for the city of Weimar.

  The old text, by Bernhard Wolff, was “a sort of Magnificat of human genius conquered by God,” in Liszt’s judgment.57 But the new text, by Adolf Stern, cast Beethoven as a newborn divine, reminding us of “the old legend from distant, pious times of a festival day announced by a star”:

  The star has ascended in this winter’s night, blessed is he for whom the golden ray of splendor lights the way. Hail Beethoven, Hail!58

  And heaven and nature sing.

  4

  Associations

  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Self-Reliance” (1841)

  IN 1840, John Sullivan Dwight was ordained as pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. The charge at his ordination was given by William Ellery Channing, the leading theologian of Unitarianism; Channing’s 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” a clarion call for tempering faith in the fire of reason, sparked the emergence of American Unitarianism as a national movement.

  Now, near the end of his life, Channing gave Dwight the sort of paradoxical advice that elders often give the young as evidence of their hard-won wisdom. “It may be said, that religion relates to the Infinite; that its great object is the Incomprehensible God; that human life is surrounded with abysses of mystery and darkness; that the themes on which the minister is to speak, stretch out beyond the power of imagination … that at times he only catches glimpses of truth, and cannot set it forth in all its proportions,” Channing orated. “All this is true. But it is also true, that a minister speaks to be understood; and if he cannot make himself intelligible, he should hold his peace.”1

  Within two years, Dwight had left the ministry and was living at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist utopian commune just outside Boston. When Lowell Mason’s Boston Academy of Music performed Beethoven’s Fifth in 1842, Dwight reviewed it, in the process becoming one of the country’s first serious critics of classical music.

  The subject is announced with startling directness at the outset, in three short emphatic repetitions of one note falling on the third below, which is held out some time; and then the same phrase echoed, only one degree lower. This grotesque and almost absurd passage, coming in so abruptly, like a mere freak or idle dallying with sounds, fills the mind with a strange uncertainty, as it does the ear.

  Where the opening theme embarks on its ping-pong of imitation, Dwight glimpsed an abyss of mystery and darkness. “It is as if a fearful secret, some truth of mightiest moment, startled the stillness where we were securely walking, and the heavens and the earth and hell were sending back the sound thereof from all quarters, ‘deep calling to deep,’ and yet no word of explanation,” Dwight preached. “What is it? What can all this mean?”2

  Dwight’s classmate at Harvard Divinity School, future abolitionist Theodore Parker, wasn’t surprised that Dwight didn’t make it as a reverend. Dwight, he said, often “mistook the indefinite for the Infinite.”3 Out of such metaphysical optimism would sprout an American cult of Beethoven.

  WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING’S nephew, William Henry Channing, was, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the catalyst for Transcendentalism. “Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840 [Emerson gets the date wrong; it was actually 1836] with George Ripley, to the point whether it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful people together, and make society that deserved the name.”4 Emerson took some pains to paint a casual, accidental air around the founding myth of the intellectual school he would eventually become identified with. The circle, in Emerson’s telling, would have been “surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism.… From that time meetings were held for conversation, with very little form, from house to house, of people engaged in studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter it flowed. Nothing could be less formal.”5

  And yet, Emerson admitted, members of the group not only produced their own publication, The Dial (which “enjoyed its obscurity for four years,” Emerson insisted), but also, in 1841, purchased nearly two hundred acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, inaugurating the social experiment of Brook Farm. The driving force behind Brook Farm was the above-mentioned George Ripley, like Channing and Dwight, a Unitarian minister. The first meeting of what would be called the Transcendentalist Club (the name “given nobody knows by whom,” according to Emerson) was held at Ripley’s house.

  Transcendentalism always resisted pithy definition; another Transcendental Club member joked that the group referred to themselves as “like-minded; I suppose because no two of us thought alike.”6 But the movement, everyone involved agreed, was heavily influenced by German Romanticism—Germany being to Americ
an intellectuals of the time what Paris would be to their 1920s counterparts. The rendition was more enthusiastic than systematic.

  Probably because it transmitted much of the aura and reputation of German Romanticism without any specificity, Beethoven’s music was a central reference point. Lindsay Swift, an early historian of Brook Farm, insisted that, if “the transplantation of German ideas [is] to be held of much account in the simple story of Boston Transcendentalism, the name of Beethoven must enter any reckoning which includes Goethe and Kant. No external influence has been so potent or lasting in Boston as the genuine love for Beethoven, and for the few other names clustering around the greater genius.”7

  Even Emerson, not much of a music lover, recognized Beethoven’s importance. “The music of Beethoven,” he wrote, “is said by those who understand it, to labor with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before.”8 Beethoven was part of the Transcendentalist ethos from the start, probably introduced by Margaret Fuller, whose awesome erudition and willed self-assurance bewitched and bothered a fair portion of the circle. (“I find no intellect comparable to my own,”9 she once posited, and she may have been right.) Fuller, drawing on accounts by Goethe and Bettina von Arnim, painted Beethoven in Transcendental colors, shaded with the dialectic: “He traveled inward, downward, till downward was shown to be the same as upward, for the centre was passed.”10

  Fuller, recruited by Emerson to edit The Dial, could have been echoing another Transcendentalist—Bronson Alcott, a pioneering educator, a passionate (and sometimes impractical) activist, and, if the encomiums of the rest of the Transcendental Club are to be believed, the true heart of the circle. Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” spread over three issues of The Dial, were aphorisms in the German Romantic vein, only more impenetrable; parodies of Alcott’s gnomic utterances became a favorite way to mock the New England intellectuals. But Alcott nevertheless came close to both defining the Transcendental ideal and the image of Beethoven they fashioned to match it:

  We need, what Genius is unconsciously seeking, and, by some daring generalization of the universe, shall assuredly discover, a spiritual calculus, a novum organon, whereby nature shall be divined in the soul, the soul in God, matter in spirit, polarity resolved into unity; and that power which pulsates in all life, animates and builds all organizations, shall manifest itself as one universal deific energy, present alike at the outskirts and centre of the universe, whose centre and circumference are one; omniscient, omnipotent, self-subsisting, uncontained, yet containing all things in the unbroken synthesis of its being.11

  George Ripley himself tried to sum up the Transcendentalists’ philosophy in a letter to his Purchase Street Church congregation: “[T]hey maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all—the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure—to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented.”12

  The letter was a last-ditch effort to justify his socially conscious preaching to his increasingly suspicious parishioners, but three months later Ripley tendered his resignation. After giving his farewell sermon in March of 1841, he moved to Brook Farm. Dwight, who was friends with Ripley—Ripley had also preached at Dwight’s Northampton ordination—turned up at Brook Farm in November.

  RIPLEY ORGANIZED Brook Farm as a joint-stock company, selling shares for $500 each and promising each shareholder 5 percent interest. Emerson declined to join, as did Margaret Fuller, though both would visit often. (One who did sign on was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who initially enjoyed seeing himself as a man of the soil—“Ownest wife, thy husband has milked a cow!!!” he informed his fiancée.13 But, resistant to Brook Farm’s idealism and disappointed in the return on investment, Hawthorne soon left.)

  Dwight tolerated being a farmhand; he rather more enjoyed his work in Brook Farm’s school, where he taught Latin and, naturally, music. The curriculum, based around singing and discussion, was heavy on Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and included field trips that took advantage of the burgeoning vogue for the latter. Dwight would lead parties into Boston “to drink in the symphonies, and then walk back the whole way, seven miles at night, and unconscious of fatigue, carrying home with them a new good genius, beautiful and strong, to help them through the next day’s labors,” according to George William Curtis, who became famous as a writer, public speaker, and government reformer. Curtis was a teenager at Brook Farm, and formed a lifelong friendship with Dwight. In later life Curtis recalled those walks, the radicals descending into moral peril for spiritual sustenance like musical Dantes:

  As the last sounds died away, the group of Brook Farmers, who had ventured from the Arcadia of co-operation into the Gehenna of competition, gathered up their unsoiled garments and departed. Out of the city, along the bare Tremont road, through green Roxbury and bowery Jamaica Plain, into the deeper and lonelier country, they trudged on, chatting and laughing and singing, sharing the enthusiasm of Dwight, and unconsciously taught by him that the evening had been greater than they knew.14

  If Wagner’s brand of nationalist mysticism might be characterized as Hegelianism without socialism, the American energies that produced Brook Farm were socialism without Hegelianism, or at least without the Young Hegelians’ ambitious fabric-of-history scope. The Dial extolled Brook Farm’s back-to-the-land ethos (“The lowing of cattle is the natural bass to the melody of human voices”) but reserved the benefits for a certain breed of the intellectually aspirant: “Minds incapable of refinement will not be attracted into this association. It is an Ideal Community, and only to the ideally inclined will it be attractive.”15

  The commune would, indeed, evolve in response to idealized programs rather than practical concerns. The first shift was toward Fourierism, named for Charles Fourier, a French socialist who came up with a scheme for remaking society that was equal parts far-seeing tolerance and numerological eccentricity. He proposed reorganizing human society into communities called phalanxes, each with an ideal population of 1,620—a number Fourier arrived at by categorizing twelve kinds of human passions, which could combine into 810 types of human character, which he then multiplied by two (male and female). Each community would be centered around a phalanstery, a large multipurpose building for which Fourier helpfully provided a detailed architectural layout.

  At his most outlandish, Fourier displayed an imagination worthy of science fiction. He assigned personalities to the heavenly bodies: the moon, for example, was a dead mummy that would eventually give way to five living replacements. At its peak, society would reach a stage of Harmony, at which time, Fourier infamously insisted, the oceans would turn to lemonade. Friedrich Engels recommended Fourier, despite his ignorance of Hegelian theory, as a tonic against the tendency of Hegelianism toward arrogant solemnity. “If it has to be,” Engels wrote, “I shall prefer to believe with the cheerful Fourier in all these stories rather than in the realm of the absolute spirit, where there is no lemonade at all.”16

  Fourier’s ideas were brought to America by his student Alfred Brisbane, who soft-pedaled Fourier’s more extravagant fancies; still, enough remained, especially the obsessive streams of impossibly precise numbers, to make even Brisbane’s watered-down Fourierism off-the-wall by modern mainstream standards. And yet some of the leading minds of the day—such as New York writer, publisher, and activist Horace Greeley and, in turn, Ripley, Dwight, and others in the Transcendentalist circle—became, for a time, dedicated Fourierists.

  Fourier himself had lived through the French Revolution; the meticulous detail of his prospectus can be read as a reaction to that idealistic descent into chaos. In America, though, his prescriptive zeal was something to empower individual freedom. Personal liberty wasn’t dependent on status, luck, or power; all one had to do was follow directions. “Life brings to each his task,” Emerson wrote, “and, whatever art you select,
algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,—all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms … begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step.”17 The appeal of Fourier in America wasn’t just his harmonious destination, but that traditional New England holy grail: a turn-by-turn guide for getting there, a path spelled out so that anyone could follow it.

  Hand in hand with Fourier’s social theories came the religious speculations of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In his fifties, while working on an anatomical study called The Economy of the Animal Kingdom (attempting to demonstrate that the soul resided in the blood, since it penetrated the entire body), the well-connected eighteenth-century Swedish gentleman-scientist began having vivid dreams, which soon manifested themselves as revelatory experiences. The Lord himself appeared to him, Swedenborg claimed, anointing him His messenger, letting him travel freely among heaven and hell, conversing with spirits along the way.

  The theology that resulted from Swedenborg’s fact-finding tours of the next world offered a vision—equal parts Eastern religious traditions and proto-Hegelianism—of mankind graduating from its current materialist existence to a higher, spiritual plane. A connection to Fourier’s prospective Harmony was easily made by Transcendental enthusiasts. (Emerson included Swedenborg in his 1850 book Representative Men, along with, among others, Shakespeare, Napoléon, and Goethe.) Swedenborg combined the prospect of enlightenment with a prescription of charitable work in a way that appealed to Brook Farmers Ripley and Dwight, both of whom had abandoned the pulpit in search of more concrete action. “Faith without charity is not faith,” Swedenborg insisted. “The separation of charity and faith coincides also with the separation of flesh and blood; for the blood separated from the flesh is gore and becomes corruption, and the flesh separated from the blood by degrees grows putrid and produces worms.”18