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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Many of Debord’s aphorisms seem to provocatively glance off both the Victorian predicament and the prominence that Beethoven and the Fifth Symphony accumulated throughout the burgeoning industrial age. The popular programmatic narrative of the symphony’s “struggle,” for instance, and its status as an exemplar of organic unity: “Although the struggles between different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially presented as irreconcilable antagonisms, they actually reflect that system’s fundamental unity, both internationally and within each nation.”35 Debord’s analysis of movie and television stars might well speak to Beethoven’s Victorian celebrity: “As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live.”36 And when Debord moves on to culture as a whole, he finds that capitalism has renewed the alienation that first agitated the early Romantics, echoing the young Hegel’s line in the sand between Fichte and Schelling; again, as Hegel had put it, “The entire system of relations constituting life has become detached from art, and thus the concept of art’s all-embracing coherence has been lost, and transformed into the concept either of superstition or of entertainment.”37 Thus, in Debord’s words, culture “detached itself from the unity of myth-based society”:

  The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost unity. In the course of this quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.38

  The alienation and negation Debord saw so clearly in the society of the 1960s was just beginning to be sensed in the 1860s. It would be an oversimplification to regard the Victorian veneration of Beethoven as a deliberate or even unwitting scheme to reinforce the nascent power structure of the Industrial Revolution—even at the remove of a century, the Situationists were still not sure what to make of Beethoven. British playwright Howard Brenton could admire how “the situationists showed how all of them, the dead greats, are corpses on our backs—Goethe, Beethoven—how gigantic the fraud is”;39 but another group of British Situationists could write of how, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, art “changed from a celebration of society and its ideologies to a project of total subversion.… [I]n Beethoven … one can see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a lifetime.”40 But Raoul Vaneigem, one of the group’s leading theoreticians, sensed the Victorians’ Beethovenian sea-change in more primal terms in his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. “Nobody seems worried that joy has been absent from European music for nearly two centuries; which says everything,” he wrote. “Consume, consume: the ashes have consumed the fire.”41

  Indeed, the era confirmed the growing tendency—subterranean but significant—to underline the Fifth’s sense of struggle, rather than triumph. The most striking example is surely the reaction of Fanny Kemble, the celebrated English actress and writer. Kemble temporarily retired from the stage in 1834 to marry the American planter Pierce Butler, but her horror at the treatment of slaves on Butler’s plantations, coupled with Butler’s infidelities, resulted in their separation. Upon Kemble’s discovery of his affairs, Butler had offered a deal: she could retain access to her children on the condition that she forswear the stage and not publish anything in support of abolition; Kemble, trapped, agreed on account of the children.42 But the arrangement collapsed, Butler took the children, and Kemble returned to Europe. She chronicled a recuperative trip to Italy in A Year of Consolation, interspersing the narrative with poems, including this one:

  ON A SYMPHONY OF BEETHOVEN.

  Terrible music, whose strange utterance

  Seem’d like the spell of some dread conscious trance;

  Impotent misery, helpless despair,

  With far-off visions of things dear and fair;

  Restless desire, sharp poignant agonies;

  Soft, thrilling, melting, tender memories;

  Struggle and tempest, and around it all,

  The heavy muffling folds of some black pall

  Stifling it slowly; a wild wail for life,

  Sinking in darkness—a short passionate strife

  With hideous fate, crushing the soul to earth;

  Sweet snatches of some melancholy mirth;

  A creeping fear, a shuddering dismay,

  Like the cold dawning of some fatal day:

  Dim faces growing pale in distant lands;

  Departing feet, and slowly severing hands;

  Voices of love, speaking the words of hate,—

  The mockery of a blessing come too late;

  Loveless and hopeless life, with memory,—

  This curse that music seem’d to speak to me.43

  Kemble published several volumes of her letters, all scrupulously edited to avoid explicit mention of her marital difficulties. But the fragility and disquiet so vigilantly tamped down in her epistolary memoirs is palpable in her poetry. If the symphony in question was indeed the Fifth—a likely notion—then the balance has been decisively shifted away from the Finale (“a blessing come too late”) and toward the first movement’s turmoil. Cosima Wagner’s joke, that the Fifth’s climax was a lot of celebrating over nothing, turns serious, a shout over the abyss lurking under the shifting ground of Victorian society. Kemble had fame, success, and influential friends, but also learned that, in crucial ways, she was performing without a net.

  That disquieting opportunity and peril—the newfound ease with which one could move up the ladder, or down—was delineated as early as 1833 by the politician and indefatigable novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He blamed the anxiety of social climbing for English reserve and arrogance. “Nobody being really fixed in society, except the very great,” Bulwer-Lytton observed, “in any advance you make to a seeming equal, you may either lower yourself by an acquaintance utterly devoid of the fictitious advantages which are considered respectable; or, on the other hand, you may subject your pride to the mortification of a rebut from one, who, for reasons impossible for you to discover, considers his station far more unequivocal than your own.”44 The stiff upper lip was both a shield and a bluff.

  In such circumstances, Beethoven’s very lack of Englishness could become a virtue, a chance for a hemmed-in society to vicariously revel in unfettered foreignness. George Grove once jotted down these thoughts in a notebook under the heading “Beethoven”: “Such men cannot be judged by the standard of ordinary men—of Englishmen particularly. They are free from conventions which bind us, they are all nerves, they indulge in strange gestures and utter odd noises and say strange words, and make everyone laugh till we find that the gestures and looks and words are the absolute expression of their inmost feeling.”45

  Beethoven became a proxy, expressing the inmost feelings of Victorians who would never admit that the feelings were their own. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s son, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, followed in his father’s literary footsteps, publishing under the pen name of Owen Meredith. (“Genius does what it must,” Lytton/Meredith famously wrote, “talent does what it can.”) The younger Bulwer-Lytton—“one of the most amateur of all nineteenth-century politicians” in the words of British minister and historian Roy Jenkins46—also became a fixture in Victorian diplomacy; as Viceroy of India, Lytton counted on his résumé the Great Indian Famine of the late 1870s as well as the Pyrrhically expensive Second Anglo-Afghan War, the latter decisively contributing to the downfall of Disraeli’s final premiership in 1880. Falling upward in the peerage, Lytton was created 1st Earl of Lytton for his efforts. “Never regret, never explain, never apologise,” as the Oxford Master Benjamin Jowett was said to have encouraged a generation of Victorian elites;47 but the veneer could crack, as in Robert Bulwer-Lytton’s description of a Beethove
n symphony:

  Behold! that anguish—it is thine: that remorse—it is thine own conscience which recognises itself. Recognise this also—it is Faith: and this—it is Hope. What hast thou done with them? That abyss of darkness and chaos—it is thine own soul. Know thyself at last. Ah! didst thou think to lap thee in delightful lies? Up then! confront the universe as it is. Say not, What matters it to me? Thou canst not extricate thyself from the infinite.48

  The Victorian stereotype of imperturbable pride was well-earned, but the angst it covered up was hidden in plain sight, often under Beethoven’s byline.

  Beecham’s Pills: Aloes, ginger, and soap.

  —“PATENT MEDICINES,”

  The British Medical Journal, DEC. 26, 1903

  BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC became a repository for inchoate Victorian emotions in much the same way that Hoffmann et al., fueled by the anxieties of the Napoleonic era, had traced Romanticism onto the outline of the Fifth Symphony—and in much the same way that the products Victorian factories turned out acquired Romantic mysteries of their own, textiles and patent medicines taking on trappings previously reserved for symphonies. Even Karl Marx—whose exile, it should be remembered, made him a Victorian Londoner—couldn’t help but revert to old Romantic ideas when confronted with the era’s flood of saleable stuff. Assiduously collecting data, Marx could track how ever-cheaper manufacturing created a growing disparity between use value (what a thing was worth) and money-form (what it cost to produce), but quantifying the larger meaning was more difficult. The imbalance was an opportunity for capitalists—but a philosophical conundrum for Marx.

  Romanticism abhors a vacuum, and, much as it colonized the uncharted areas of Enlightenment aesthetics, it filled in the no-man’s-land between commodities’ use value and their money-form. Marx’s sketch of what he called the “Fetishism” of commodities is filled with terminology reminiscent of Hoffmann and Hamann, familiar symbolism papering over a logical void. To make a table out of wood does not change its substance: “the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood,” Marx writes. “But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.” A commodity has “mystical character,” it is “enigmatical” and “mysterious,” it is, “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Commodities become the ether through which people relate, crowding out the reality of the human labor that produced them. Their power is so intangible that Marx tries all sorts of oblique strategies to describe it, finally appealing to a higher power, or at least its worldly illusion: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”49

  Perhaps the quintessential Victorian commodity was Beecham’s Pills, the near-ubiquitous patent medicine. Formulated by Thomas Beecham, a former livestock keeper who enjoyed experimenting with herbal veterinary treatments, the pills first appeared in the 1840s, part of a brand lineup that included tooth powders and something called “Female’s Friend.”50 But it was the pills that became the mainstay of Beecham’s company. They worked as laxatives—and not much else—but that didn’t stop the company from ascribing to them an almost universal applicability. “Beecham’s Pills are admitted by thousands to be worth above a Guinea a Box,” read one typical ad,

  for Bilious and Nervous Disorders, such as Wind and Pain in the Stomach, Sick Headache, Giddiness, Fulness and Swelling after Meals, Dizziness and Drowsiness, Cold Chills, Flushings of Heat, Loss of Appetite, Shortness of Breath, Costiveness, Scurvy, Blotches on the Skin, Disturbed Sleep, Frightful Dreams, and all Nervous and Trembling Sensations, &c. The first dose will give relief in twenty minutes. This is no fiction, for they have done it in thousands of cases. Every sufferer is earnestly invited to try one box of these pills, and they will be acknowledged to be WORTH A GUINEA A BOX. For Females of all ages these Pills are invaluable, as a few doses of them carry off all humours, and bring about all that is required.

  That last claim, at least, may have been a deliberately vague accuracy—there is some evidence that the pills, taken in sufficient quantities, could induce abortions.51 “These are ‘facts’ admitted by thousands, in all classes of society,” the pitch continued, “and one of the best guarantees to the Nervous and Debilitated is that Beecham’s Pills have the Largest Sale of any Patent Medicine in the World.” In other words, not only did the pills sell because they worked, they worked because they sold. Other advertisements for the pills were even more explicit in their commodity fetishism. “Beecham’s Pills have unfailingly carried the message of health and good cheer to the homes of the people”—and the evangelists were so good at proclaiming their gospel that they were self-sufficient. “Personal letters endorsing Beecham’s Pills are received by the thousands,” the ad goes on, “but it is never necessary to publish them. The pills recommend themselves.”

  The self-recommending pills were nevertheless the beneficiaries of a startling amount of marketing: appearing before a parliamentary committee in 1913, Sir Joseph Beecham, the founder’s son, admitted that the company’s spending on advertising had reached £100,000 a year.52 Among the advertising was a series of Beecham’s Music Portfolios, cheap songbooks leavened with tunes extolling the benefits of Beecham’s Pills. One of the most well known of these set new words to a Mendelssohnian Victorian favorite:

  Hark! the herald angels sing!

  Beecham’s Pills are just the thing,

  Two for a woman one for a child …

  Peace on Earth and mercy mild!

  Authorship of the carol was claimed by Sir Joseph’s son Thomas. “Look here, my lad,” he recalled his father telling him, “I’ve been spendin’ a lot o’ brass on your musical education, and now Ah wants you to help me.” Even late in life, Sir Thomas Beecham, the greatest British conductor of his time, who went through an estimated hundred-million-pound inheritance founding orchestras and opera companies, remained cheekily proud of his early effort. “These sentiments … especially the ellipsis, seemed to me admirably to express the rapture which is occasioned by a good effortless release.”53

  Beecham’s father, Sir Joseph, was a music lover himself, and something of an impresario—late in life, he bankrolled a “Grand Season of Russian Opera and Ballet” that included the British premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. In 1899, for his inauguration as mayor of the town of St. Helens (where he had built the enormous Beecham’s factory), Sir Joseph hired the Hallé Orchestra, under director Hans Richter, to play a special gala concert. “Almost at the eleventh hour,” Thomas recalled, “the devastating intelligence arrived that Richter could not appear: my father was in despair, his magnificent entertainment seemed threatened with disaster.” Sir Joseph asked his son what to do. “I made the suggestion,” the son replied, “that I should take the absentee’s place.” Sir Joseph eventually came around to the idea of a twenty-year-old neophyte taking the podium in front of one of the country’s most accomplished professional orchestras, and it was thus that Thomas Beecham made his professional debut, conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His father, the venerable pill seller, had spied a marketing opportunity—realizing, in his son’s words, “being the astutest advertiser of his day, that what had looked like a possible reverse might be worked up to a definite advantage.”54

  The marketing extended to the music. Beecham’s branding had so saturated Victorian life that a story went around of an English explorer, deep in uncharted Africa, coming across a tree painted with an advertisement for Beecham’s Pills.55 The Fifth Symphony was similarly established in the Victorian imagination. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1894 novel The Ebb-Tide (written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne), the poetically named Robert Herrick, bright and cultured, but “deficient in consistency and intellectu
al manhood,” initially embodies his namesake’s carpe diem reputation—“While Fates permit us, let’s be merry; / Passe all we must the fatall Ferry.”56

  Herrick has abandoned a string of financial failures in England and America, fleeing to Tahiti; as the book opens, he is sick and homeless, sheltering in an abandoned jail. Struck by an acute sense of rootlessness and transition, Herrick decides to add a memorial of his own presence to the building’s mass of graffiti:

  From his jarred nerves there came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could not say: change, he knew no more—change, with inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud voice of the symphony. “Destiny knocking at the door,” he thought; drew a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth Symphony. “So,” thought he, “they will know that I loved music and had classical tastes.”57

  The symphony recommends itself.

  • • •

  THE MOST FAMOUS Victorian advertisement (in the word’s original sense) of Beethoven’s Fifth actually appeared nearly a decade after Victoria’s reign ended. E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End was published in 1910, the year Victoria’s son and successor Edward VII died, taking with him, perhaps, the notion that royal bonhomie, strategic marriage, and noblesse oblige could, on their own, hold civilization together. Howards End is Forster’s tone poem of the era’s fade-out, and the tone is telling: tragedy and farce, jostling for position. Forster—who lived until 1970—would have a chance to observe the twentieth century’s harrowing pageant, but his point of view was forever attuned to Victorian shades. Humanist, leftist, and homosexual, Forster made his intellectual home in that English specialty, the curiously central margin—he was a member of the Bloomsbury group, the quintessential band of inside outsiders. “I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism,” he noted.58