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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  What’s more, both Fourier and Swedenborg preached tolerance. Fourier was, in essence, an early feminist (one factor behind the proposed phalansteries was to free women from the tyranny of the house), and also thought society should be considerate toward alternative sexualities; Swedenborg believed that the New Jerusalem, the final epoch of Christianity, would most likely take hold in Africa, since Africans were “more interior”19 and thus more receptive to enlightenment—a stance that, noble-savage overtones aside, fit nicely with the Transcendentalists’ abolitionist bent.

  Encouraged by Greeley and Brisbane, Brook Farm converted to Fourierism and Swedenborgianism, rebranding themselves from an Association to a Phalanx, and taking over editing and printing of the main Fourierist newspaper in America, now renamed The Harbinger. Not all the Brook Farmers went along with change, but Dwight certainly did. He became The Harbinger’s music critic, and promptly began pouring his Beethovenian wine into Fourierist bottles, filing composers under Fourier’s various human passions: Handel represented Universal Friendship; Haydn, Paternity; and Mozart, Love. Beethoven was Ambition: “the aspiring Promethean spirit, struggling for release from monotony and falseness, sick of the actual, subduing every sincere sadness by heroic triumphs in art, which are like tears brightening into joys of most rapturous, inspired visions of a coming Era, which shall consummate the Unity of all things.”20

  Such prose indicates how radical-by-association, at the time, Beethoven’s reputation could and possibly should be considered. To sum up: Dwight was living on a commune, espousing a far-out political system, delving into a mystical religion. He was, as much as one could be in nineteenth-century America, a hippie. And Beethoven’s symphonies were his music of choice. Lest anyone mistake the connection, Dwight spelled it out: “In religion we have Swedenborg; in social economy, Fourier; in music, Beethoven.”21

  The new idols proved false. With a huge part of the farm’s income siphoned off to fund the construction of a Fourierist phalanstery, commune-wide economizing took a toll on morale; when the nearly finished phalanstery burned to the ground, in March 1846, Brook Farm was, essentially, financially ruined. “The idealists lingered last, loath to leave a spot endeared by so many associations, hallowed by so many hopes,” wrote one chronicler. “One of the last to go, one of the saddest of heart, one of the most self-sacrificing through it all, was John S. Dwight. It may be truly said that Brook Farm dies in music.”22

  At least Brook Farm could measure its span in years; Bronson Alcott, the Orphic idealist, saw his own commune, a ninety-acre tract in Harvard, Massachusetts, dubbed “Fruitlands” (“We rise with early dawn, begin the day with cold bathing, succeeded by a music lesson, and then a chaste repast”23) fail after only seven months. His daughter Louisa, after writing her wildly successful novel Little Women, revisited the Fruitlands fiasco in a thinly disguised 1873 satire called “Transcendental Wild Oats.” Her humor was cutting, but her postmortem, from its Gilded Age vantage, was sympathetic to the fragility of the radical Transcendentalists’ idealism in a society increasingly governed by capitalist ambition:

  The world was not ready for Utopia yet, and those who attempted to found it only got laughed at for their pains.… To live for one’s principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and noble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians.24

  Annie Russell Marble, the daughter of one of Emerson’s favorite ministers and herself a literary critic, was sassier, calling the Transcendentalists “a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.”25

  Nathaniel Hawthorne also put a sardonic spin on his Brook Farm memories in his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance. D. H. Lawrence summarized The Blithedale Romance in pithy style: “[T]he famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp.… Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn’t stand one another. And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling.”26

  In Hawthorne’s case, the rue is also at least a little self-directed. He had left Brook Farm after only five months; even before his final departure, he wrote, “It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community: there has been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself.”27 In the form of Miles Coverdale, the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne would be rebuked for that by the novel’s dark feminine presence, Zenobia (modeled, many thought, on Margaret Fuller):

  “Have you given up Blithedale forever?” I inquired.

  “Why should you think so?” asked she.

  “I cannot tell,” answered I; “except that it appears all like a dream that we were ever there together.”

  “It is not so to me,” said Zenobia. “I should think it a poor and meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must convert all the past into a dream merely because the present happens to be unlike it.”

  Arriving for the interview, Coverdale had “heard a rich, and, as it were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia’s character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her skill upon the instrument.”28 Beethoven’s Fifth, maybe? Hawthorne doesn’t say.

  SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS resulting from the off-the-shelf adoption of Romantic ideas by the Transcendentalists and their progeny might have derailed thinkers less confident of the exceptional nature of the American experience. Dwight’s writings on Beethoven manage to evoke both the most progressive strains of Transcendentalism and the American habit of co-opting transcendence in the service of more worldly pursuits. In 1851, Dwight produced a survey of “The Sentiment of Various Musical Composers” for the Philadelphia-based Sartain’s Magazine (he liked it enough to recycle it for an early issue of Dwight’s Journal of Music a year later). Beethoven, the best, is saved for last—in terms that make him into an honorary American: “With a many-sidedness like Shakespeare’s, there is still one pervading sentiment in all the music of Beethoven. It has more of the prophetic character than any other. The progressive spirit of this age, the expansive social instinct of these new times, accepts it by a strange sympathy. Many a young music-loving American jumps the previous steps of training, through the taste for Haydn, Mozart, Hummel, &c., and with his whole soul loves at once Beethoven.”29

  Dwight’s young Americans can be read as model Romantic rule-breakers, but the sentiment could just as well have been invoked in the service of wealth. (Around the same time, the Reverend Darius Mead of New York could rationalize the country’s expanding trade as an aid in the conversion of distant heathens: “The love of lucre—the adventurous spirit of Discovery and Commerce—these agencies, supported and strengthened by rapid improvements in the arts and sciences of civilized and christianized society, have already brought the ends of the earth together, and the valleys are indeed ‘exalted.’ ”30 Prophetic character, indeed.)

  Dwight goes on:

  It is because Beethoven is, to speak by correspondence, like the seventh note in the musical scale. His music is full of that deep, aspiring passion, which in its false exercise we call ambition, but which at bottom is most generous, most reverent, and yearns for perfect harmony and order. The demands of the human soul are insatiable—infinite.31

  Dwight recycles his customary cross-breeding of Fourierism and Swedenborgianism with the Hoffmann image of Beethoven. But note the cautious qualification of the Fourierist passion of ambition. And, exported outside the old, specific Harbinger contexts, the rhetoric can seem to manifest any number of destinies: “So long as anything is not ours, we are poor. So long as any s
ympathy is denied us, we are bereft and solitary. We are to have all and realize all by a true state of harmony with all. Is not this the meaning of Beethoven’s music?”32 Ambition is generosity; possession (“to have all”) is harmony. (One can imagine a stereotypical plutocrat gravely nodding in agreement.) The heroic Beethoven becomes a transfer point between rarefied Transcendentalism and the American pursuit of wealth.

  It took George Ripley some fifteen years to pay off the debt of Brook Farm, but he would die a rich man, having made a fortune in royalties from co-editing The New American Cyclopedia. In its entry on the composer, the Cyclopedia evoked both the Transcendentalist-Romantic Beethoven and public monuments to civic wherewithal:

  As Gothic architecture is the artistic record of the aspirations of the ages during which it grew to perfection, so the orchestral works of Beethoven are the musical record of the great ideas of his time in the form and likeness which they assumed in his mind. Haydn and Mozart perfected instrumental music in its form—Beethoven touched it, and it became a living soul.33

  LIKE MANY a hippie after him, Dwight took his youthful enthusiasms for eternal verities. The Fifth Symphony made its impression on him once and indelibly; eschewing any reassessment, Dwight would reprint the salient portion of his review of the Academy of Music’s 1842 performance in both The Harbinger and Dwight’s Journal of Music,34 and subsequently, whenever the subject of the Fifth came up, direct the reader’s attention back to the reprints. Dwight was a man eager to make up his mind, and dedicated to keeping it that way.

  By standing still as the world shifted around him, Dwight changed from radical to conservative. He admitted as much in the last issue of Dwight’s Journal, published in 1881. “Lacking the genius to make the old seem new, we candidly confess that what now challenges the world as new in music fails to stir us to the depths of soul and feeling that the old masters did and doubtless always will,” he wrote.35 But Dwight’s indefatigable promotion of Beethoven’s music as a path to personal and societal progress would bear fruit in the accumulated wealth of post–Civil War America.

  To follow Dwight’s career is to watch the foundation of the classical-music canon being poured and then gradually hardening. Dwight had only ever heard Beethoven interpreted by either amateur or essentially freelance groups (even the New York Philharmonic, who had performed Beethoven’s Fifth on their inaugural concert in 1842, operated as a cooperative until 1909), but toward the end of his career, Dwight evangelized for permanent orchestras. If Beethoven’s symphonies offered the prospect of moral uplift, the proselytization required professional institutions, “musicians who play and rehearse together from one end of the season to the other.” (Beethoven, who premiered his symphonies with pickup groups, would have been envious.) “The question is: Can our moneyed men, our merchant princes and millionaires, be got to give their money, and give it freely for this object?”36 They could be got—1881 also saw the debut of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, funded by banker and music lover Henry Lee Higginson; the inaugural season featured no fewer than nineteen Beethoven works, including all nine symphonies.

  Dwight’s professionalizing crusade had been sparked by the polished performances of German-born conductor Theodore Thomas and his touring orchestra. When Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay asked Thomas over dinner at Delmonico’s if he would move to Chicago to head up a permanent orchestra—for which fifty local barons had contributed $1,000 each—Thomas, the story goes, replied, “I would go to hell if they gave me a permanent orchestra.” Thomas pushed for the construction of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall; to inaugurate the Hall in 1904, he programmed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. When Thomas suddenly died a month later, the directors of the Chicago Auditorium Association, another collection of wealthy businessmen, adopted a memorial resolution, calling Thomas “the great missionary—in our country—of the ‘music of the brain,’ ” music which “elevates, refines, ennobles, inspires, stirs, and impassions the mysterious weft of the human mind.”37 The Transcendentalists’ Beethoven had been fully assimilated into the Gilded Age.

  The concentration of patronage in large cities paralleled the dilution of the Transcendental focus on nature, which had been so crucial to the original generation. Compare Thoreau—“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil”38—with the town-and-country Transcendentalism of Walt Whitman: “This is the city and I am one of the citizens, / Whatever interests the rest interests me.”39 Whitman’s Beethoven likewise seems far from the Concord woods: “Beethoven had the vision of the new need. He interpreted in tones his own environment. What a tone-picture he could have given of our seething, glowing times of great promise! He was the forerunner of the American musician of the modern that will one day appear.”40

  In a similar way, Dr. Henry T. McEwen, a Presbyterian minister in Amsterdam, New York, soft-pedaled nature’s obvious effects in telling of how one of his parishioners, a traveling singing teacher and sometime composer named Simeon B. Marsh, was inspired to write his best-known piece. Marsh, in McEwen’s telling, was riding through the countryside one autumn morning in 1834 when inspiration struck—but not through the intercession of nature. “The beautiful scenery, because familiar, had nothing new to attract him,” McEwen insists; inspiration rather “burned within him.” Marsh sat down under an elm—“which then stood,” McEwen notes, “where now the four tracks of the New York Central Railway bear a mighty commerce to the sea”—and wrote down his tune on a scrap of paper.41

  Marsh’s tune, which he named “Martyn,” would be matched with Charles Wesley’s poem “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” after which the song became one of the best-known hymns of the nineteenth century. “Martyn” opens with three repeated notes followed by a descending interval of a third, a contour identical to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. The resemblance was not lost on an insurance executive, political gadfly, and singular composer—an “American musician of the modern”—Charles Ives.

  Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “The American Scholar”

  IN 1837—thirty-seven years before Charles Ives was born—an abolitionist activist and newspaper editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was shot to death by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois. A month later, at a protest rally in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, twenty-six-year-old lawyer Wendell Phillips galvanized the abolitionist movement with a speech that made him famous. Phillips himself would perpetuate the myth that “The Murder of Lovejoy” was a spur-of-the-moment oration, recalling how “I suddenly felt myself inspired, and tearing off my overcoat, started for the platform. My wife seized me by the arm, half terrified, and said, ‘Wendell, what are you going to do?’ I replied, ‘I am going to speak, if I can make myself heard.’ ”42

  Charles Ives borrowed Beethoven’s rhetoric to memorialize Wendell Phillips in a piano study called “The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830’s and 1840’s”43; in keeping with his penchant for saturating his music with quotations from other tunes, Ives gave over the climax of the piece to clanging iterations of the opening motive from the Fifth Symphony. The use of the Fifth’s theme was a common thread in Ives’s musical tributes to New England Transcendentalism—Beethoven’s first four notes would ring over and over throughout Ives’s most encyclopedic realization of his Transcendentalist sympathies, his Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass., 1840–60, probably composed between 1916 and 1919, but drawing on a previous decade’s worth of works and sketches, and subsequently tinkered with for nearly another thirty years.

  Ives was a Transcendentalist born too late and a modernist composer born too soon, and both traits were family legacies. The Transcendentalism grew from location—the Ives family was venerable New England stock—and connection, Emerson having been a family friend. The modernism came directly from his father, George, a free-thinking bandleader who seems to have been regarded as the local eccentric of Danbury, Connecticut. (“George Ives was a ki
nd of original creature,” recalled one of Charles’s boyhood acquaintances.44) Charles Ives would recall his father

  standing without hat or coat in the back garden; the church bell next door was ringing. He would rush into the house to the piano, and then back again. “I’ve heard a chord I’ve never heard before—it comes over and over but I can’t seem to catch it.” He stayed up most of the night trying to find it in the piano.45

  Both father and son would strive sonically to realize such Romantic images, earnestly blurring the line more-buttoned-down listeners might draw between music and noise. “You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds,” George instructed.46

  Ives graduated from Yale with a degree in music, and worked for a time as a church organist in New York City, but after the 1902 premiere of his cantata The Celestial Country, he decided that the prospective path of a professional composer in turn-of-the-century America was not for him, and turned his career energies to his day job: selling life insurance. Ives and a friend, Julian Myrick, went into business together, and the Ives & Myrick firm was soon selling close to $2,000,000 in policies a year. Ives trained agents during the day and composed at night. He would always insist that his vocations reinforced each other.

  If there were unacknowledged conflicts in Ives’s double life, Transcendentalism helped smooth them over, providing a perspective from which the duality might turn out to be complementary forces. One of his favorite essays was Emerson’s “Compensation,” an assertion of faith in a self-equalizing, organic nature. “The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself,” Emerson wrote. “Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you.”47 The “exact value” was Ives’s goal in all his varied pursuits, the common thread around which he organized his clamorous life.