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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  “Truth always finds a natural way of telling her story,” Ives preached, “and a natural way is an effective way, simple or not.” The preaching in this case was not to musicians, but to insurance agents, in a pamphlet entitled “The Amount to Carry—Measuring the Prospect,” originally written as an article for The Eastern Underwriter. Ives’s guide went through several reprints and established him as a pioneer of the modern practice of estate planning. Much of “The Amount to Carry” could easily be read as a Transcendentalist tract. “[T]he influence of science will continue to help mankind realize more fully, the greater moral and spiritual values,” Ives wrote. “Life insurance is doing its part in the progress of the greater life values.”48 Then again, Emerson’s “Compensation” could just as easily be read as a prophetic description of Ives’s music—or, perhaps, his life:

  Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.49

  Historian Robert M. Crunden notes, “The computations of the actuaries, to Ives and to other progressives, were scientific versions of Walt Whitman’s lists of democratic events and objects. Once enumerated, they could be of assistance in realizing Transcendental ideals.”50 But it was the enumeration that drove Ives, the adding up, the cumulative force of multiplicity. He spent much of his later life advocating for direct democracy, pushing a constitutional amendment that would enshrine a mechanism for popular referendum at the federal level, promoting—even mandating—that every citizen stand up and be counted. Ives sold his proposed amendment with a testimonial: “Wendell Phillips, a student of history and a close observer of men, as George William Curtis says, rejected the fear of the multitude which springs from the timid feeling that many are ignorant and the few are wise; he believed the saying, too profound for Talleyrand, that EVERYBODY KNOWS MORE THAN ANYBODY.”51

  Everybody gets a say in the Concord Sonata—Emerson has his own movement, and so does the skeptical Hawthorne, his “atmosphere charged with the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,” as Ives put it.52 The third movement portrays “The Alcotts”—Bronson Alcott in counterpoint with his house full of daughters. Only Thoreau, in the final movement, seems off by himself, but as the sage of Walden begins to play his flute, Ives writes in an obbligato flute part—the solitary thinker splitting into multiple performers.

  Beethoven is a connecting thread—the first four notes of the Fifth turn up in each movement of the Concord—but even Beethoven is only part of a chorus of voices. The familiar motive thunders out in the bass on the first page of “Emerson,” only to be immediately subsumed into a patchwork of other quotations: Beethoven’s op. 106 Hammerklavier Piano Sonata, Marsh’s “Martyn,” as well as another hymn tune, Heinrich Zeuner’s 1832 “Missionary Chant.”53 The Fifth will rarely appear in the Concord Sonata without being coupled to at least one of its Ivesian doppelgängers. In “Hawthorne,” it emerges out of a whirl of demonic ragtime, only to be immediately shunted down the Puritan-guilt alley of “Martyn.” Its entrance is delayed in “Thoreau” until the philosopher’s flute reverie, at which point it dons the “Missionary Chant” guise (spreading the gospel of Walden), before finishing the piece as a distant tolling bell, high on the keyboard.

  Ives’s use of the motive is most fertile and provocative in “The Alcotts.” It opens with the Fifth tidied into a sweet, major-key harmonization redolent of psalm books and parlors. It is Ives’s evocation of an idealized childhood, a romanticization of hardship, patterned after the Marches at home in Little Women rather than the actual Alcotts freezing at Fruitlands:

  Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves—much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.54

  But Ives is programmatically setting up family conflict, not family harmony. Beth’s playing runs off into improvisatory, chromatic two-part counterpoint, when the Fifth suddenly bursts in again—Bronson Alcott, perhaps, keeping his daughter on task, ensuring her lessons are sufficiently high-minded. As Ives embarks on an extended fantasy on the four-note theme, emphatic and grand, then impressionistic and mysterious, one can hear his description of Bronson, the “kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles—a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and outside serious benevolence.”55 Ives is giving us both the cause and the effect of the Transcendental propaganda on behalf of Beethoven and his music, the sensation of untrammeled power it must have first provided, and its dutiful assimilation into the next generation’s domesticity. Bronson is apparently in that perennial parental conundrum, trying to convince his children that he once was cool.

  Beth has her revenge, though; in addition to the “old Scotch airs,” she appears to know other tunes. One is the “Bridal March” from Wagner’s Lohengrin, a representative of the new generation Dwight disdained, and which, in the Beethoven-saturated context of “The Alcotts,” sounds appropriately like the Fifth Symphony flipped upside-down. The “Bridal March” is followed immediately by another tune, a little curl of melody that then walks upward: the opening phrase of a minstrel song by A. F. Winnemore, “A DUETT,” as the 1847 sheet music announces, “Sung by one in imitation of two rival niggers Gumbo & Sambo.” That alone would be enough to rile Bronson Alcott, an unflinching abolitionist who was forced to shut down his Temple School in Boston when he admitted—and refused to expel—an African-American child. But the song also undercuts the Romantic image of Beethoven, going all the way back to Schindler’s mythologizing. Its title: “Stop Dat Knocking at De Door.”56

  It is, perhaps, Ives’s retort to the sentimentalization of Beethoven, the steady stream of sad stories about Beethoven’s deafness or loneliness. Ives’s sympathies were with Bronson, as it were—Beethoven as an object of Transcendental defiance, not comfortable pity. Ives came no closer to pinning down Transcendentalism than the Transcendentalists themselves, but though one could get there by emulating their effort, by ringing out the “tune the Concord bards are ever playing while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethoven-like sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance, for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate.”57

  As Ives’s music began to trickle into musicians’ consciousness in the 1930s and ’40s, much of the appeal came from Ives’s status as a kind of Rip van Winkle, an Emersonian representative man suddenly found living in the modern world. One early Ivesian was the future film composer Bernard Herrmann, who recalled that he “plowed through the movements of the Concord Sonata” at Camp Tamiment, a socialist summer camp in the Poconos, in the 1930s.58 It’s possible that the sonata spoiled Beethoven for the opinionated Herrmann; Len Engel, a music editor at Twentieth-Century-Fox, remembered Herrmann holding court at the commissary:

  Benny would sit with us, gravy down his tie, and clobber all his colleagues as well as past composers. The one that knocked me out was Beethoven; he thought Beethoven’s Fifth was the worst thing: “Anybody can do da-da-da-dum! What the hell’s so unique about that?” The music editors always got a kick out of that, so as we were eating, we’d hum the opening bars of the Fifth; and each time Benny would give us that look.59

  Herrmann and his jaded ears, however, were preceded by Ives, who came to regard Beethoven’s actual notes as, perhaps, a little wan next to the construct of Beethoven in the Sonata. Clara Clemens, Mar
k Twain’s daughter (Twain was good friends with Ives’s father-in-law), invited the Iveses to a Beethoven recital by her husband, the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch (whose name Ives spelled “Ossssssip,” a sure sign he didn’t consider him manly enough to tackle such repertoire). Ives came away disappointed: “After two and a half hours of the (perhaps) best music in the world (around 1829), there is something in substance (not spirit together) that is gradually missed—that is, it was with me. I remember feeling towards Beethoven [that he’s] a great man—but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key.”60

  It was not the only Beethoven performance that frustrated Ives. In a draft letter to Nicolas Slonimsky, Ives blamed the conventionality of American audiences on Toscanini’s renditions of the symphonies. The rant offers a glimpse of Ives’s usually suppressed penchant for boiling-over tantrums, the composer’s unfiltered id:

  [A]lmost as bad is the way the lady-birds fall for that $75000 masseur’ that old stop-watch, … little metronome “Arthur Tascaninny” with his “permanent waves”(in both arms) he hypnotizes the nice boys in purple coats & the silk ladies—& gets their money! He makes Beethoven an Emasculated lily-pad—he plays the notes B. wrote down—plays it nice, even, up-down precise, sweet pretty tone, cissy-sounding way—not the music of Beethoven. He makes it easy for bodily part of the box-sitting sap & gets the money! … A Nation Mollycoddled by commercialized papp—America losing her manhood—for money—Whatever faults the puritans—they were men—& not effeminate!! Wake up America—kill somebody before breakfast.61

  The railing against effeminacy is typical for Ives, but, as Ives scholar Thomas Clarke Owens has noted, Ives’s silken imagery also symbolizes privilege, a sign of the ambivalence Ives felt toward wealth and success, and a measure of the energy he expended maintaining his life’s multiple facets.

  The draft was never sent. In its place was a letter from Ives’s wife, Harmony: “It wasn’t lack of audience & appreciation that made Mr. Ives stop composing. It just happened—the War & the complete breakdown in health. He had worked tremendously hard in his quarry all those years & exhausted the vein I suppose.”62

  My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles …

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  IVES HAD little use for quasi-Hegelian models of musical progress, thinking they confused personal experience with universal truth. Ives himself admitted to a youthful enthusiasm for Wagner, but by the time of the Sonata, Wagner’s “music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare.” Yet to try to generalize from that, to “try to prove that as this stream of change flows towards the eventual ocean of mankind’s perfection … the perpetual flow of the life stream is affected by and affects each individual riverbed of the universal watersheds,” is to ignore those figures whose true transcendence trumps mere chronology. “Something makes our hypotheses seem purely speculative if not useless,” Ives proclaims. “It is men like Bach and Beethoven.”63 Ives’s biographer, J. Peter Burkholder, views Ives himself on the same broader, less precise scale: “Ives’s career and his music are coherent, once one abandons the expectation that coherence requires consistency, sameness, and a single line of development.”64

  The Concord Sonata translates Ives’s view of history into musical form: it is cumulative (to use Burkholder’s term), not goal-oriented. From the very first page, the quotation of Beethoven’s Fifth begins to accrue meanings and mirrors, one among equals in its constellation of similarities, the Hammerklavier, the “Missionary Chant,” “Martyn.” The rhythm is altered, slowed down, smoothed out; Beethoven picks up Ivesian dissonances along the way. The four-note motive is there because of its fame and familiarity, its original power and its power as cliché inseparable. Beethoven’s music doesn’t come out of the previous generation and lead to the next—it stands outside time, it transcends time, and history coalesces around it.

  In the Essays, Ives reserves his most personally resonant compliments for Thoreau—who thought that the wind blowing through the trees “wears better than the opera, methinks,”65 Thoreau who insisted that the “really inspiring melodies are cheap and universal,”66 Thoreau who called the random counterpoint of a Walden owl and a passing flock of geese “one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard.”67 For Ives, “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ ” Thoreau’s symphony was in nature, “he sang of the submission to Nature … distinguishing between the complexity of Nature, which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism, which teaches slavery.” In Ives’s portrayal, Thoreau is Beethoven’s mirror image: both earned the broadest canvas for their inspiration, but when it came to the accompanying passion, Beethoven “could not but be ever showing it,” while Thoreau “could not easily expose it.”68

  Ives accommodates both Thoreau’s prickly temperament and his generous ideas by expanding the tapestry into which he weaves Thoreau’s musical avatar. What’s more, Ives’s defense of Thoreau—“The unsympathetic treatment accorded Thoreau on account of the false colors that his personality apparently gave to some of his important ideas and virtues might be lessened if it were more constantly remembered that a command of his today is but a mood of yesterday and a contradiction to-morrow”69—could just as easily be read as a defense of Beethoven, or more to the point, as a Thoreau or Beethoven that looks a lot like Charles Ives. Philip Corner, a founding member of the avant-garde Fluxus group, admired Ives’s mutability, musical and philosophical: “[H]e puts Beethoven’s Fifth into everything he writes. He knows all the good things humanity has left behind—laid up for his, and our, uses. Not to be sacrificed to, lest the world be corrupted by a single true idea.”70 The great majority of Ives’s lives—radical and conservative, nostalgic and reformer, reclusive artist and evangelizing businessman—were lived at the same time, as it were, but where others might see contradiction, Ives saw simultaneity. He ascribed to Thoreau a habit he shared: “he observed acutely even things that did not particularly interest him”71—except that Ives was interested in, seemingly, everything, consumed by a faith that the right aggregation of notes could encompass both the thunder and the bell. (Preparing a revised edition of the sonata, Ives sent emendations and changes to his publisher for seven years, ten proofs in all; at one point, his editor wrote Harmony Ives, begging her to rein in her husband’s additions: “The plates absolutely will not stand any more.”72)

  Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony appears in the music not just as period color, but as its own library of allusions, eager to be cataloged. The Concord Sonata, in a way, represents a culmination, a clearinghouse for all the meanings attributed to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, a comprehensive collection of every varying interpretation and use to which the four notes had ever been put: profound and trivial, sacred and profane, feral and tame, indefinite and infinite. By the time Ives’s sonata saw the light of day, Beethoven’s image was beginning to fragment, competing exegeses set up in opposition. Ives nonetheless believed he could fully encompass Beethoven’s manifold posthumous existence, that every mask ever applied to those four notes deserved to have its vote heard. It was his duty, in more ways than one: the Transcendentalist and the insurance man, tallying up the Beethovenian legacy, making sure the entire estate is covered.

  5

  Secret Remedies

  “One does not always care to feel that fate is knocking at the portal.”

  “No,” she said; “but we have nationalized the sisters. They wear evening gowns nowadays, and we try to propitiate them by asking them to dinner and ‘hoping that they are well.’ ”

  —JESSIE VAN ZILE BELDEN, Fate at the Door (1895)

  FOR A FEW YEARS in the late 1870s, Hans von Bülow and August Manns engaged in a typically Prussian feud, but it is perhaps a small triumph for the spread of German ideas that their feud played out in the British press. Since 1855, Man
ns, a former army bandmaster, had directed the concerts at London’s Crystal Palace, concerts at which Bülow had appeared as a piano soloist on several occasions. The chronically impolitic Bülow, irked at never having been invited to conduct, and dismissive of London’s musical life in general, began to disparage Manns in the pages of The London Figaro; Manns’s slow-burning rage eventually boiled. In November 1878, Bülow took the podium at St. James’s Hall, conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, and Manns duly reported his impressions to the press.

  It was a grand idea of my noble confrere to prefix three silent bars at the beginning of the first movement. I wonder if some New German–principled conductor could add four bars more in order to vex Destiny—who, as we know, is waiting to knock at the door—into a still greater fury than Herr von Bülow did last Tuesday. That Destiny was made impatient through being compelled to wait three bars before it could proceed with its knocking at the door became evident to all who were present; for it did knock with a vengeance after the first beat, and rushed off with such a furious impetuosity that my noble colleague got fairly frightened, and was compelled “to pull up” which had the disastrous effect of destroying, for the rest of the movement, the plastic pose of his left arm, because the left hand had to assist the right one in tightening the reins of infuriated Destiny.1

  Manns did not, however, mention the reason for Bülow’s extra gestural care at the outset: only a small portion of the orchestra was actually watching him, the group being made up of professors and students from the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind.