The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
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I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.
—FREDDIE MERCURY
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION was felt all the more keenly in a Britain that had regarded the political revolutions of the eighteenth century as foreign aberrations, and had managed to keep such wolves at bay. Having resisted change for so long, when the Victorians finally noticed change, it seemed to burst like a thunderbolt. Regarding the era, scholar Walter E. Houghton noted how much more history, it seemed, was being cast aside:
“[T]he past which they had out grown was not the Romantic period and not even the eighteenth century,” Houghton wrote. “It was the Middle Ages.” It was only in the 1830s, when England could no longer cling to the bulwarks of mythical Albion—the Church of England, the hierarchy of class, the local economies of farms and guilds—that “men suddenly realized they were living in an age of radical change.”2
For the Victorians, the best psychological defense was a good offense; hence their exuberant mythologizing of commerce and industry, which reached an apotheosis in the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal Palace, a specially built immensity of glass and iron. The Exhibition combined a trade show with an industrial pageant; the Crystal Palace was its cathedral, a sacred space for the worship of stuff.
The organizers of the Great Exhibition saw the effort as utopian and transcendent, marrying the burgeoning theology of Victorian industry to the hazy infinities of the Romantics. Prince Albert, a prime mover behind the Exhibition and the founding president of its Royal Commission, invoked a grand goal: “Nobody who has paid any attention to the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to the accomplishment of that great end to which, indeed, all history points—the realisation of the unity of mankind.”
A Scottish clergyman, the Rev. John Blakely, approvingly quoted the Prince Consort in an 1856 volume called The Theology of Inventions. “True it is,” Blakely admitted, “that those nations, which met in the Crystal Palace in mechanical rivalry, have now met in the field of carnage, to decide with the weapons of death the fate of nations.… But it furnishes no argument against the truth already announced, regarding the tendency of machinery to promote the brotherhood of nations.” The Victorian mind could—indeed, almost had to—rationalize the fallout of misery from the Industrial Revolution as a Divine test; Blakely kept faith with the factories. Mechanical inventions would “unite the separated sons of Adam.” The “achievements of the past and the present are but faint types of the future.” The machinery heralded a revival: “There is a good time coming.”3
Beethoven made a cameo appearance at the Great Exhibition, in the form of Gustav Blaeser’s “Statue of Louis van Beethoven upon a pedestal, in bronze; with corner figures, representing the Spirits of Chivalry, Religion, Sadness, and Joy”4—Blaeser’s Beethoven-as-Apollo, a design rejected for the Bonn Beethoven monument, now standing among other examples of Prussian industry, including an “Ælodion, a six-octave keyed instrument, with metal springs, or tongues, caused to vibrate by bellows”; a “large and costly apparatus for the evaporation of syrup, made of beaten copper”; and a “variety of samples of blue and grey military cloths, such as are supplied for the clothing of the Royal Prussian army.”5
Beethoven would attain a more prominent pedestal after the Crystal Palace was relocated from Hyde Park. The edifice—in essence a giant conservatory, designed by Joseph Paxton, a gardener and greenhouse architect—was rebuilt on Sydenham Hill, a wealthy suburb of London. The enterprise also acquired a new head, officially titled (in the unassuming Victorian manner) Secretary to the Crystal Palace: a railway engineer and music-lover named George Grove.
Victorian convictions were inculcated in Grove by the Rev. Charles Pritchard, Grove’s headmaster at the Stockwell and, later, the Clapham Grammar School. Pritchard, according to Grove’s biographer, “insisted that the main intention of early education should be the development of the habit of thinking, and he further laid great stress on the necessity of providing resources for the leisure hours of maturer life.”6 Both tenets bore fruit. Though an unruly student—“his circumstantial touches were often trying to the gravity of his instructor”7—Grove would bring to the concert hall the era’s faith in educational improvement.
He became a panjandrum of Victorian music, editing his eponymous Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and serving as the first director of the Royal College of Music, but his background was that of an enthusiastic amateur. Grove came to music through, Britishly enough, Handel’s Messiah—while still a teenager, he bought a score for the then-not-inconsiderable amount of a guinea. While an apprentice engineer, Grove spent his off hours copying scores in the British Museum. Working for a specialist in the erection of cast-iron lighthouses, Grove traveled, to Jamaica, to Bermuda. He visited Paris in the revolutionary year of 1848, prior to the election of Louis-Napoléon; a traveling companion remembered him blithely jotting down the notes of “God Save the Queen” for a group of musically minded workers at Notre-Dame.8
Grove had switched from building lighthouses to building railway stations and bridges just in time to be caught in the collapse of England’s railway bubble; in 1850, influential acquaintances arranged for the increasingly idle Grove to be appointed secretary of the Society of Arts. The president of the Society, Prince Albert, had already convinced the group to mount an industrial showcase; the twenty-nine-year-old Grove found himself in the thick of preparations for the Great Exhibition. After the Exhibition closed, Grove slipped into the secretaryship of the new Crystal Palace without fuss.
With an opportunity to apply the fruits of his all-consuming hobby, Grove took special interest in the presentation of music at the Crystal Palace. At first, the offerings were limited to band concerts under the direction of one Henry Schallehn. But Schallehn’s former assistant, Prussian-born former bandmaster August Manns, shrewdly stayed in contact with Grove, sending the secretary programs of his foreign concerts. Impressed by his high-minded repertoire, Grove wrote Manns that he “would give a great deal to have such music done in the Crystal Palace.”9 Schallehn was out; Manns was in.
Manns, who combined military discipline with a certain artist’s-privilege aloofness,10 convinced Grove to let him field a full orchestra. The Palace’s first great musical successes were parochial: the chorus-and-orchestra Handel festivals, celebrations of the country’s most famous adopted musical son. But with the advent of what became known as the “Analytical Concerts,” combining Manns’s conducting and Grove’s program notes, the Classical-Romantic canon took up residence at the Crystal Palace: Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and, especially, Beethoven.
The concerts at the Crystal Palace illustrated the increasing permeability of class in Victorian England. Beethoven had been featured as both high and low entertainment before. The Philharmonic Society of London, founded in 1813—the group commissioned Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony—presented the symphonies as noble endeavors. Prince Albert, himself a musician and composer, occasionally designed concerts for the Philharmonic Society, with Beethoven featured in all but one. (The Fifth was a princely favorite, appearing on four of the fourteen royally programmed concerts, more than any other work.)11
On the other end, perhaps, was Louis Antoine Jullien, a Parisian conductor who, having fled his debts to London, became a celebrity in the 1840s and ’50s for his flamboyantly showy direction and presentations of huge orchestras, performing grab-bag programs of symphonies, operatic airs, and dance music. When the program came around to Beethoven, Jullien would don clean kid gloves and conduct with a jeweled baton that was brought to him on a silver platter. He augmented the Fifth Symphony with “parts for four ophicleides and a saxophone, besides those of his favourite regiment of side-drums,” if a newspaper complaint is to be believed,12 but all the same he brought the symphonies to a public that would have had little or no access to the Philharmonic Society. Whe
n George Grove came to edit his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, first published in 1878, he took on Jullien’s entry himself. “[W]hat Jullien aimed at was good, and what he aimed at he did thoroughly well,” Grove wrote.13
Manns and Grove split the difference between the exclusivity of the Philharmonic Society’s Hanover Square Rooms and Jullien’s shilling-ticket extravaganzas. The result was quintessential Victorian uplift, a musical gospel preached in the era’s church of industry, a space blessed with both a royal box and a convenient, cheap railway connection. Like everything else in the Crystal Palace, Beethoven’s music became drafted into a campaign of spiritual and commercial betterment.
The Crystal Palace as reconstructed at Sydenham was both larger and more morally didactic than its previous incarnation. Architect Owen Jones, who had designed the Palace’s interior layout at Hyde Park, produced a series of ten Fine Arts Courts for Sydenham, each devoted to a historical architectural style: Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, even a court re-creating the decorative ambiance of Jones’s architectural benchmark, the Alhambra in Spain. The Egyptian Court featured a commemorative inscription translated into hieroglyphics: “In the 17th year of the reign of her Majesty, the ruler of the waves, the royal daughter, Victoria lady most gracious, the chiefs, architects, sculptors, and painters, erected this palace and gardens.”14 (The artisans who constructed the Fine Arts Courts were largely German, Italian, and French; when Queen Victoria paid a visit to the construction site, the foreigners provided a rendition of “God Save the Queen” “in first-rate style,” according to a reporter.15 Grove would have been pleased.) The Fine Arts Courts were intended to contribute to the improvement of Victorian Londoners, suggesting, in the words of historian Jan Piggott, “a certain politics of empire, a philosophy and even a morality: the fall of proud, wealthy and luxurious civilizations”16—a warning to maintain propriety and rectitude, lest an increasingly moneyed British society meet the same fate. (Not for nothing was a Nineveh Court included.) At the same time, the Sydenham Palace—which, unlike the Exhibition, was organized as a commercial, private enterprise—rented shops and stalls, making the building as much a shopping mall as a museum. “[I]t may truly be said, that nowhere can purchases be made with less trouble and fatigue, or with more advantage to the purchasers,” the Palace’s directors assured patrons.17 While Prince Albert and the Society of Arts had taken the 1851 Exhibition’s profits to build what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum, “the public,” as one of the Society’s correspondents remarked, “have taken their spare cash to shop down at Sydenham.”18
Music at the Crystal Palace likewise served both God and Mammon. Victorian cleric and commentator Hugh Reginald Haweis thought that the type of programs that Manns and Grove put on were indicative of the “immense advance of the popular mind”19 because, though the Palace’s shareholders were tempted to “sacrifice everything to attract a paying mob anyhow and anywhen,” Grove “stood firm, and he took his stand on music.”20 Grove himself, on the other hand, appreciated the way Beethoven nourished both soul and box office. When he collected his program notes on the Beethoven symphonies into a popular book, Grove introduced the Fifth at the nexus of meaning and fame:
The C minor Symphony is not only the best known, and therefore the most generally enjoyed, of Beethoven’s nine Symphonies, but it is a more universal favourite than any other work of the same class—“the C minor Symphony always fills the room.” And this not only among amateurs who have some practical familiarity with music, but among the large mass of persons who go to hear music pour passer le temps.21
The Fifth most often appeared at the end of Crystal Palace concerts, the better to keep the room filled through any prior novelties. An audience survey during the 1879–80 season put three of Beethoven’s symphonies (nos. 3, 5, and 6) in the top five, along with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and Schubert’s Unfinished.22 (And not just at the Crystal Palace: the Fifth was already the preferred symphony of the Royal Philharmonic Society, with thirty-four performances by 1850; from 1858 to 1895, Charles Hallé’s orchestra in Manchester played the Fifth eighteen times.23)
Grove regarded his musical endeavors, and the Victorian promotion of “noble music” in general, as part and parcel with the Industrial Revolution. “It is the division of labour,” he wrote, “the spread of machinery” and the concomitant changes in transport and education—“it is these characteristic achievements of the reign of Victoria which have effected so much in literature and music that it is a mere commonplace to us, but which to our fathers and grandfathers was unknown, unexpected, impossible.”24 Something was needed to elevate the newly desirous masses, and something was needed to get them in the door; Beethoven fit the bill on both counts. “[I]n London, in Paris, everywhere else,” Grove wrote, “the C minor Symphony has been the harbinger of the Beethoven religion.”25
Such religions were a growth industry at the time. As industry re-created more and more of the world in its mechanistic image, Victorians began to fear a supplanting of the infinite. As a result, Victorian life was defensively saturated with a hollow exaltation of religion. Reformer and novelist the Rev. Charles Kingsley wrote of his fellow Anglicans “losing most fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of Christianity, and … for that very reason, clinging all the more convulsively—and who can blame them?—to the outward letter of it.” In the meantime, “the more thoughtful” searched for a substitute, be it Catholicism, commerce, or, most insidiously, art: “an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualist Epicurism which, in my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it looks at first sight most like an angel of light.”26 (Kingsley once filled out a literary questionnaire: “Favourite composer? Beethoven … The character you most dislike? Myself.”27)
In an 1878 issue of Punch, “Our Representative Man” reported hearing Beethoven’s Fifth at Covent Garden in the company of a “Stupendous Musical Amateur,” one of Kingsley’s spiritualist epicures in excelsis:
As the Allegro finished, my Stupendous Friend rose from his seat, and, frowning upon me as though challenging, or defying contradiction, addressed me thus. “The Allegro,” he said, firmly and authoritatively, “is the point where Human Genius has reached its uttermost limits,”—and with this he strode grandly from the box, in so ethereally transcendental a manner that, had any one met me immediately afterwards, and told me “Your friend has gone straight up through the roof into the sky above, all among the angels,” I should not have been surprised: indeed, I should rather have expected it.28
The zeal with which George Grove evangelized on Beethoven’s behalf was the result of a relatively late conversion; well into his thirties, he had remained puzzled by the symphonies. In spite of his later devotion, researching and writing both his program notes and the lengthy “Beethoven” entry in the first edition of his Dictionary, Grove again felt a twinge of anxious heresy late in his life. In poor health, taking the waters at the Swiss resort of Ragatz, he was suddenly seized with trepidation. “In the dead of night it came into my mind,” he wrote his brother-in-law. “Had Beethoven written anything sublime?” Grove elaborated in a letter to his brother. “The sublime, as I take it, must have a supernatural element in poetry or music. I don’t find the C minor symphony has any of the sublime,” he wrote. “Personal and terrible it is in the first movement, mystical in the Scherzo and connection with the Finale; and triumphantly magnificent in the Finale itself. But I find nothing which … makes me silent with awe.” To another correspondent, Grove disclosed, “It quite frightens me to admit that there is anything which Beethoven had not, and yet, as I see at present, I must admit he had not this.”29 Even mortal gods fell hard.
BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC at the Crystal Palace, perhaps, was fulfilling the same function in Victorian life as the manufactures that had filled the hall in 1851—talismans of the spiritual validation of earthly goods. The Great Exhibition was not primarily about advancing technology, but about justifying the societal pressure toward consumpt
ion that technology created. Scholar Thomas Richards, surveying Victorian “commodity culture,” seizes on the Great Exhibition as that culture’s inaugural liturgy, a glorification of manufactured goods as self-warranting objects. Richards points out that the Exhibition’s most prominent exhibits were not practical machinery, but gadgets, mechanical devices “so specialized as to be practically useless.”30 Just as Beethoven’s symphonies had risen to the pinnacle of musical value by exalting pure, unadulterated expression, the gadget could better declare for industry the more it avoided actual function. Absolute music; absolute manufacture.
Richards views the Great Exhibition through the lens of Guy Debord’s 1967 Situationist classic, The Society of the Spectacle. The radical pranksters of the Situationist International, fomenting revolutionary attitude in 1960s France, might seem far away from nineteenth-century Britain, but their targets were those Victorian novelties, consumption and advertising. “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” Debord wrote. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”31 Such spectacles, in Debord’s reckoning, are elaborate reinforcements of the ruling order, “its never-ending monologue of self-praise.”32 His analysis drew on Karl Marx (it is French theory, after all),33 but also Hegel—and Hegel by way of Nietzsche. Where Nietzsche posited history itself as an impersonal agent, Debord said that Hegelian “progress” has replaced that historical force with the commodity itself—stuff we manufacture, stuff we consume, turning back on us and controlling our lives. “The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life,” Debord noted. “Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.”34