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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  In the fifth chapter of Howards End, the middle-class, intellectually inclined, late-Romantic Schlegels—Margaret, Helen, their brother, Tibby—attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Queen’s Hall; even in that “dreariest music-room in London,” as Forster judged it, the Fifth, “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man,” is “cheap at two shillings.”59 (The room was, indeed, cheap: while the Crystal Palace offered season tickets for reserved stalls at two guineas, Queen’s Hall undercut that price by half—there, at least, Beethoven was worth a guinea a box.)

  Forster tells the Fifth through the ears and imagination of Helen, the most volatile of the Schlegels—her precipitate, quickly abandoned engagement to Paul Wilcox, the younger son of his upper-class, business-minded clan, has already set the novel’s events in motion. Helen envisions “heroes and shipwrecks” in the opening movement; the relative equanimity of the Andante doesn’t much interest her, even as it engrosses Frieda, the Schlegels’ German cousin, and Frieda’s equally German companion.

  But with the Scherzo, where the symphony’s opening motive returns in clipped, deliberate translation—the “wonderful movement,” Helen calls it—her poetic impressions combine Romantic fantasy and Victorian dread. “[T]he music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end,” she imagines. “Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen.” The goblins see through the fundamental façade of Victorian decorum: “They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world.” What’s left is, as Helen describes it in her favorite melodramatic phrase, “panic and emptiness.” The return of the Scherzo in the middle of the triumphant Finale only confirms Helen’s enthrallingly bleak impressions. “The goblins really had been there. They might return—and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over—and waste to steam and froth.”60

  Like Punch’s Stupendous Amateur, Helen abandons the concert hall after the symphony:

  Helen pushed her way out during the applause. She desired to be alone. The music summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career.… The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning. She pushed right out of the building, and walked slowly down the outside staircase, breathing the autumnal air, and then she strolled home.61

  Again, Helen’s impulsiveness fuels the plot: she has absent-mindedly walked off with the umbrella of Leonard Bast, an anxious lower-class dreamer. (“He was not in the abyss, but he could see it.”62) The meeting completes the novel’s tripartite, low-to-high hierarchy of class: Basts, Schlegels, Wilcoxes, soon to be knotted in dramatic tangles. The Wilcox matriarch tries to leave the family’s suburban cottage, Howards End, to Margaret Schlegel, but the Wilcox family suppresses her will. The now-widowed Henry Wilcox marries Margaret, and, through bad business advice, almost offhandedly ruins Leonard Bast. Bast has an affair with Helen, resulting in her pregnancy, before being killed at the hands of Charles, the Wilcox scion. No wonder Helen leaves the concert early; if the Fifth indeed summed up all that could—and does—happen in Helen’s career, one could well imagine that any further music would be a bit much.

  Forster’s pairing of feminine sensation and Beethoven’s music drew on a long-standing Victorian commonplace; British and American novels of the nineteenth century teem with young women at the piano, playing their Beethoven. Surveying the throng of fictional female pianists, Mary Burgan summed up the varying rationales for their cultivation of the keyboard: “[P]iano expertise was a commodity in the marriage market, a form of necessary self-discipline, or an innocent entertainment in an otherwise vacuous existence.”63 As part of the essential finishing of a refined girl’s education, Beethoven’s music became inseparable from Victorian femininity. The progress of one Carrie Crookenden in Lucas Malet’s The Wages of Sin was typical, if wryly observed: “Carrie had lessons every year when the family went up to London. She was working her way through Beethoven; each year she added, with much conscientious labour a sonata or two to her répertoire. She plunged now into the last learned. Her playing was ponderously correct, grandly dull. Meanwhile emotion picked up her trailing skirts and fled.”64 (Lucas Malet was the pen name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, daughter of Charles Kingsley, who had worried so eloquently over the lack of religion among the smarter, younger, Victorians.)

  In John Lane Ford’s 1872 novel Dower and Curse, wealthy Victor Herbston embarks on a Pygmalion-like scheme to prove his theory of “the immense power of education … to modify, even to neutralize, the influence of blood,” adopting the poor orphan Annie Scott. Annie is ostracized by the rest of the Herbstons, and takes comfort in familiar music:

  When the family were out she would steal down from her room with some of her favourite pieces in her hand, and sit down and play. She would flood the room with the deep strong Turneresque music of Beethoven.…65

  Annie’s education has at least produced a quintessential Victorian woman.

  In Mary Braddon’s 1882 Mount Royal, another orphan provides another reminder of Beethoven’s status as an ornament of the upper class. Christabel Tregonell has married into wealth, but when her pianism is put to light-music service at a dinner party, her husband is disconcerted: “Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being indeed, as unmusical a soul as God ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque.”66

  But Beethoven could also gird fictional women against the dual disadvantages of class and gender. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1860 novella Lovel the Widower, Bessy, governess to the title character’s children, harbors a secret—she was once a music-hall dancer—that would horrify Lovel’s priggish, upper-class mother-in-law. Nevertheless, threatened with exposure, Bessy, a veteran of Victorian femininity’s battles with the piano, maintains her equilibrium:

  Bessy was perfectly cool and dignified at tea. Danger or doubt did not seem to affect her. If she had been ordered for execution at the end of the evening she would have made the tea, played her Beethoven, answered questions in her usual voice, and glided about from one to another with her usual dignified calm, until the hour of decapitation came.67

  Her past is revealed, but Lovel asks Bessy to marry him, foiling his mother-in-law, resulting in a happy ending. Well, almost—Thackeray’s narrator was also among Bessy’s suitors; having lost his immortal beloved, he rallies himself to an ersatz-Beethovenian resignation. “I am accustomed to disappointment,” he sighs. “Other fellows get the prizes which I try for. I am used to run second in the dreary race of love. Second? Psha! Third, Fourth.”68 (Or even Fifth.)

  Once in a while, a novelist would take on Beethoven himself. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, whose debut novel Charles Auchester—peopled with roman à clef versions of Victorian musical celebrities, including Mendelssohn—caught the admiration of both Disraeli and, across the Atlantic, Emerson (she had “the courage of genius,” Emerson wrote69), went on to create a Beethoven bewitched by femininity in her 1858 novel Rumour. The book’s Beethoven stand-in, an imperious German composer and organist named Rodomant, vies with Porphyro, a thinly disguised Louis-Napoléon (!), for the hand of one Princess Adelaída (!!). Serving at the court of Adelaída’s father, Rodomant, at the novel’s climax, defiantly violates the law against pulling all the stops on the organ in the royal chapel.

  Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and, as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise … her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves toward the measureless immensity of music at its source.70

  In pursuit of s
ymphonic perfection, a “fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning,” Rodomant finally unleashes the full organ, and, as if in divine retribution, the familiar Beethoven is born: “I have lost my hearing, and it is for ever.”71 Adelaída is crushed when Rodomant leaves the kingdom; but, just as Porphyro is about to propose marriage, the princess’s beloved carrier dove—entrusted to Rodomant—returns (and drops dead, having “won its rest, and earned it”72), with an entreaty from the composer, mistakenly committed to a Prussian asylum. Adelaída abandons her throne to tend the irascible genius: “He adored her—but frequently tormented her—she loved him all the more.”73

  Ridiculous? No less than Sir George Grove himself speculated that the Fifth had a somewhat related origin. Grove subscribed to Thayer’s (erroneous) hypothesis that Beethoven had, for four years, been secretly engaged to Countess Theresa Brunsvik, one of his piano students. Grove noted that the symphony was composed in the middle of what he supposed to be Beethoven’s engagement, and related a story of how, some years prior, Beethoven slapped the girl hard on the hand during a lesson and stormed off in anger, and how Theresa, realizing he had left his hat and coat, ran out into the street after him. “Are not the two characters exactly expressed” by the opening two themes—the first four notes being Beethoven, the major-key second section being Theresa? “It surely would be impossible to convey them in music more perfectly,” Grove insisted, “the fierce imperious composer, who knew how to ‘put his foot down,’ if the phrase may be allowed, and the womanly, yielding, devoted girl.”74

  • • •

  But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

  —E. M. FORSTER, Howards End

  FORSTER, a discerning music lover and fairly accomplished amateur pianist, could make smart use of such Victorian tropes—for Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of A Room with a View, to play Beethoven on the piano might be a contemporary novelistic commonplace, but for her to choose to play the tempestuous squall of the op. 111 piano sonata (in C minor, not coincidentally) is an acute characterization on Forster’s part.75 Likewise, the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth within Howards End provides an opportunity for deft characterizations of the Schlegel siblings: Margaret’s real-world practicality, Helen’s flights of fancy, Tibby’s happy pedantry, following along with the score on his lap. The set-piece also insinuates the atmosphere of English-German rivalry: when Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance concludes the concert, Margaret’s blustery, über-English aunt happily taps her foot, while the Schlegels’ German visitors discreetly slip out.76

  And Howards End also mirrors the structure of the Fifth Symphony as a whole (an idea suggested by more than one scholar).77 One can read, perhaps, the first “movement” as the bringing together of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, and the introduction of Leonard Bast; the second, beginning with the funeral of the first Mrs. Wilcox, unfolds, like Beethoven’s Andante, as a double variation: the growing attraction of Henry Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel, the growing obsession of Helen Schlegel with bettering Leonard Bast’s lot. For a Scherzo, the goblins observe Helen’s antiheroic efforts to sabotage both Margaret’s engagement and Leonard’s marriage. With a double consummation—Margaret and Henry’s marriage, Helen and Leonard’s affair—the Finale commences; Leonard’s death, like Beethoven’s revisit of his Scherzo subject, is an aggressive, desperate interlude encased by a major-key but vaguely hollow triumph.

  What would be the unifying motive, the equivalent of the first four notes? Forster himself suggests one possibility at the novel’s outset. “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,” he begins, and, of course, Helen’s letters begin with their place of origin: “HOWARDS END.”78 As the Victorian Era dovetailed into the Edwardian, prewar twentieth century, Forster looked back and saw how much of England’s identity had become bound up in struggles over real estate, both literal and intellectual: properties, colonies, classes, and movements. Howards End becomes a blessed plot fought over along customary fronts: art and business, reform and tradition, propriety and expression, male and female. That it is the middle-class Schlegels who finally take ownership of the place is a trenchant allegory—only a year after the novel’s publication, the first Parliament Act was passed, limiting the power of the House of Lords and decisively accelerating the decline of the British landed aristocracy.

  Equally apt is the conclusion’s ambiguous tone. Forster’s ending has, in fact, long bothered critics; after Leonard’s death, Charles’s imprisonment, Helen’s pregnancy, and the near scuttling of Margaret and Henry’s marriage, Forster’s abrupt string of reconciliations—Margaret reunited with Helen, Margaret preserving her marriage, Margaret joining the families and perpetuating them, in the form of Helen and Leonard’s son, whom Margaret and Henry will raise, and who will ultimately inherit Howards End—has seemed, to many readers, unearned and false. Stephen Spender referred to “the curious unreality” of the last scene: “[S]o many social skeletons rattle in the cupboards of Howards End that the reader, surely, finds this conclusion almost irrelevant.”79 A. S. Byatt recorded her own disillusionment with the novel: “One used to think: ‘This is wonderful, here is a novelist who says we must connect the businessman with the world of the arts,’ then you slowly realise that E. M. Forster actually can’t do it.”80

  But that is to assume that a connection between business and art is something that Forster himself wants, and not just his characters.81 To take the ending at face value is to suppose that the reader is not supposed to hear its rattling skeletons. The novel’s real truth-teller is Beethoven and the Fifth. Forster’s ending is Beethoven’s ending: nominally happy, but undermined by the violence and darkness that has preceded it, darkness that even explicitly returns to invade it. “Beethoven chose to make all right in the end,” Forster writes, just as the fag-end Victorians chose whatever myth offered the comfort of jubilee, be it England, Progress, Commerce, or even the notion that Beethoven and his music could express the ideals and aspirations of nineteenth-century Britain. Schlegels and Wilcoxes alike settle on the myth of Howards End, but Forster’s language gives the game away—Howards End is ending; Helen’s concluding announcement of “such a crop of hay as never” casts the whole place and story into the realm of fairy tale with its final word. The “red rust” is creeping across the meadows from London, and both the substance and the color are notable. The goblins are there.

  That the characters don’t notice is typical of the novel, which makes the overarching presence of Beethoven even more rueful. Beethoven was literally exceptional, in Forster’s opinion, in being able to size up a larger conception of Fate in whole. “[T]his musician excited by immensities is unique in the annals of art,” Forster once wrote. “No one has ever been so thrilled by things so huge, for the vast masses of doom crush the rest of us before we can hope to measure them. Fate knocks at our door; but before the final tap can sound, the flimsy door flies into pieces, and we never learn the sublime rhythm of destruction.”82 Beethoven is a double-edged sword, his singular glimpse of the infinite so celebrated that, coupled with the era’s inclination to blithe confidence, it inspired lesser men to think they, too, could square the immeasurable circle of fate. In Howards End, the Schlegels’ German-English father—a veteran of Sedan, disillusioned “when he saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey”—is introduced, in flashback, warning his native and adopted races: “No … your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.”83

  As if to drive home the inadequacy of mere mortals to comprehend Beethoven’s vision, Forster seasons his narrative with dashes of the accrued nineteenth-century imagery surrounding the Fifth—dropped music-appreciation hints that the characters
utterly fail to pick up on. Reunited at Howards End, Margaret and Helen fall into reminiscence, but Helen—always the transmitter for Romantic impulses—mixes present and past in the house’s garden, via a familiar avian messenger:

  “Ah, that greengage tree,” cried Helen, as if the garden was also part of their childhood. “Why do I connect it with the dumbbells? And there come the chickens. The grass wants cutting. I love yellow-hammers—”

  Margaret interrupted her.84

  And, at the novel’s denouement, when Margaret finally comes into possession of Howards End, it is Paul Wilcox—whose impetuous kiss of Helen Schlegel set the plot in motion, who has disappeared to Nigeria to make his fortune for the bulk of the story, and who appears again now, hostile to Margaret’s presence, “manly and cynical” with the habitual intolerance of empire—it is Paul who provides the well-known signal, not with a knock, but a desultory kick: “Clumsy of movement—for he had spent all his life in the saddle—Paul drove his foot against the paint of the front door. Mrs. Wilcox gave a little cry of annoyance. She did not like anything scratched.”85

  Writing on the eve of the Great War, Forster’s little detail is prophetic: Fate as the uncoordinated by-product of imperial ambition. Margaret, again, misses its significance. But in her own way, Margaret has fulfilled the symphonic structure, in quintessentially Romantic terms. That Margaret has achieved the novel’s final, forced connection within the walls of the novel’s titular property is the ultimate mirror of the Fifth Symphony: the opening motive—Howards End itself—becomes the means for realizing organic unity. It just turns out not to be the cure-all everybody thought it would be.