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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  Thus we assist at a show that would appear comic, if not for the tremendous tragedy it involves.

  —HERMANN KEYSERLING,

  “A Philosopher’s View of the War”

  THE ROMANTICISM that made Beethoven an honorary Victorian would be mercilessly exposed as a placebo by the war. In the introduction to his play Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw took both the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes of prewar society to task, scolding the latter as incompetent and the former as too polite to point it out. “Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud,” Shaw looked back, “England showed no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness.”86 It was a consequence of the unfavorable intellectual economics of politics: “Nature’s way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis.”87

  Heartbreak House brings all the strains of prewar society together for a country weekend where, under Shaw’s richly bleak administration, they show themselves incapable of managing their own fates. The industrial machinery of history has made the characters its servants. Mangan, the pompous businessman, is goaded into admitting that he only runs the factories he has pretended to own; Mazzini, the hapless intellectual, having expected revolution, finds that “nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It’s amazing how well we get along, all things considered.” The roaring, doddering Captain Shotover casts his gimlet eye on fate. “Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence,” he pronounces. “But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.”

  When the bombs start falling, the party’s female poles, the overbearing Mrs. Hushabye and the dreamy Ellie Dunn, claim the drama as their familiar, feminine birthright:

  MRS. HUSHABYE … Did you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it’s splendid: it’s like an orchestra: it’s like Beethoven.

  ELLIE By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.88

  The women’s admiration is topically accurate. (And Shavian—a not insignificant part of Shaw’s literary output was music criticism.) Beethoven’s prewar universality was such that, even in the midst of subsequent wartime anti-German indignation, the indignant could still occasionally forget where Beethoven was from—take Sir Arthur Markham, for instance. In 1915, Markham (a grandson of Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace) rose in the House of Commons to denounce Sir Edgar Speyer, Baronet, Privy Councillor, and a patron of music who had personally funded the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall for a number of years. Speyer had been born in America to German-Jewish immigrants, and was made a British subject in 1892; but he remained connected to Germany through his family’s banking concern. Anti-German activism targeted Speyer early in the war, and after the Armistice, he would be stricken from the Privy Council—a rare occurrence—and lose his British citizenship. For now, though, Markham seized on Speyer’s musical activities:

  I suppose it is because he is of German origin that we in this country are to be treated during the next few weeks by Sir Henry Wood to a series of concerts entirely composed of German music. I have the whole of the programmes here, from which it will be seen that some of the concerts are to be devoted entirely to Wagner’s music.… I cannot understand how people can go to listen to German music, when every people in the world, except ourselves, would not tolerate during a time of war that they should be entertained by German music. But as the Queen’s Hall belongs to him, I suppose we in this country are to be instilled with German virtues.

  For Markham, however, there was German and then there was German. Markham’s rebuke prompted an exchange:

  MR. R. MCNEILL: Is there no Beethoven in the programme?

  SIR A. MARKHAM: No, the whole of the programme at some of these concerts contains no music except German.

  SIR F. BANBURY: Beethoven was a German.89

  Edward Goldbeck was less inclined to neutralize Beethoven’s Germanic soul. A Berlin native and a German Army veteran, Goldbeck emigrated to the United States, where he wrote theater criticism and cultural commentary. In the shadow of war, Goldbeck took seriously Beethoven’s boast that, had he a military rather than musical mind, he could have defeated Napoléon; the music hovered pointedly between imperious and imperial. The Fifth’s opening portrayed a Fate to be overcome through a superior musical offensive: “It is one of his most beautiful and impressive ideas that the ‘motive of Fate,’ thundering at first, grows more and more muffled, until we hear it only far off and drowned by the trumpets of triumph.” No wonder Germany so proudly claimed him as its own. “I doubt very much, however … that Beethoven would be a pacifist today.… Beethoven had the temperament of a warrior, and music is nothing but architectural and dynamic ‘organization’ ”—the stereotypical wellspring of Prussian military prowess. “The Germany of today is not separated by an abyss from the Germany of the classics,” Goldbeck concluded, “the spirit is the same, only the material on which it works is different: it was imagination once, now it is reality.”90

  It was in America that anti-German sentiment would most translate into cultural chauvinism, as German music, operas, and theater—not to mention German names, words, and accents—were cleansed from American life. One of those leading the charge against German repertoire was the New York socialite Mrs. William Jay. (Her husband, a great-grandson of the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was a lawyer and the founder of the New York Coaching Club, which, according to his 1915 obituary, “gave a great impetus to the breeding of harness horses in this country, and kept alive a sport which even the automobile has not yet succeeded in killing.”91) Mrs. Jay, a member of the New York Philharmonic’s Board of Directors, headed a wartime group called the Intimate Committee for the Severance of All Social and Professional Relations with Enemy Sympathizers, which advocated the elimination of German repertoire from concert halls and opera houses, “part of a movement directed toward the complete extinction of German influence in this country.”92 The Metropolitan Opera did eliminate German-language repertoire during the war, having decided that productions “might enable Germany, by garbling and patching, to print ‘news’ dispatches for home consumption which would tend to put heart in the German people.”93

  Even in Boston, the American port of entry for German Romanticism and the birthplace of the American Beethoven cult, German repertoire would nearly vanish during the war. German and Austrian composers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programming in the 1916–17 season; in the 1918–19 season, the proportion was less than half that.94 Along the way, Mrs. Jay and her ilk claimed a particularly valuable scalp: Karl Muck, the orchestra’s conductor.

  Henry Lee Higginson, still running the orchestra as his personal fiefdom, had first hired Muck, a veteran of Bayreuth and the Royal Opera in Berlin, to lead the group in 1906; Muck opened his tenure with a “brilliant and effective” rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth.95 Higginson convinced him to return for a second tenure in 1912. Muck conducted with an almost stereotypically Prussian demeanor, sober and disinclined to interpretive fantasy, but his authority and discipline raised the Boston Symphony to the pinnacle of American orchestras. Hearing Muck conduct Beethoven’s Fifth at Carnegie Hall, critic Frederic Dean pronounced him “the Wendell Phillips of the orchestra—willing to sacrifice sonority to sentiment.… He weighs the meaning of a musical phrase as he chooses the exact word for his sentence.”96

  But after the opening concert of the BSO’s 1917–18 season—once again featuring the Fifth Symphony—Higginson and the orchestra came under criticism after the American flag was inadvertently left off the Symphony Hall stage. “Until lately my loyalty has never been questioned,” Higginson grumbled.97 The incident may have exacerbated his intransigence when, prior to an October 1917 performance in Providence, Rhode Island, a coterie of local women’s and musical clubs
sent a telegram to BSO management insisting that the group preface its concert with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Higginson—not about to let anybody tell him how to run his concern—ignored the demand; but the press painted Karl Muck as the villain, a German interloper arrogantly insulting American pride, and the story blossomed into a full-blown scandal. As the orchestra’s publicity manager remembered, “The fat was in the fire and blazing high.”98

  In March of 1918, Muck was arrested under the terms of a presidential proclamation regulating enemy aliens. With an unwitting sense of symbolic martyrology, the officials made their move on the eve of Muck’s long-awaited performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; having seized Muck’s score of the piece in a raid on his house (apparently without warrant), the police pored over the music, sure that the conductor’s markings were coded espionage.99 (Recall Mrs. Jay’s alleged “ ‘news’ dispatches.”) A series of indiscreet love letters to a twenty-year-old aspiring singer were also found, and, fanned by Boston Post reports fulminating against Muck’s supposed corruption of American womanhood, resulted in an indictment for violation of postal laws. Faced with prison, Muck opted for internment and eventual deportation.

  Muck was transported to a military base in northern Georgia that became as unapologetic an enclave of German culture as ever existed. For the duration of the war, Fort Oglethorpe (built on the Chickamauga battlefield) was home to every German-born businessman, intellectual, artist, or musician in America deemed dangerous enough—that is, German enough—to be interned. A combination of detained cruise ship musicians and military band members provided the camp with performances of Beethoven and the rest of the canon.100 But the orchestra could only coax a single performance out of Muck; on December 12, 1918, he led the group in works of Brahms and Beethoven. Muck chose not to conduct the Fifth; the accepted narrative of individual struggle and triumph was, perhaps, too much of an irony. Instead, he opted for the anti-Napoléonic Eroica—a better outlet for a man whose brief relationship with a powerful republic had turned sour. Muck and his wife were put on a boat in August of 1919; he never again conducted in America. In 1939, a year before he died, Muck appeared in public one last time, accepting the Order of the Golden Eagle from Adolf Hitler.

  The same summer Karl Muck sailed back to Europe, Mrs. William Jay announced a cease-fire. “Germany is on her knees before outraged but forgiving humanity,” she wrote. There was no need for further protest, “for I know that henceforth materialism will weigh too heavily against a pro-German attitude, and I pray that the former friends of German Kultur will uphold the principles of freedom, honesty, and justice, which they now see triumphant and everlasting.”101 Her ultimately unwarranted optimism was hardly uncommon. (Mrs. Jay, incidentally, was the former Lucy Oelrichs. Her father was a German immigrant, the New York agent for the Norddeutscher Lloyd line of steamships.)

  For a time, Henry Lee Higginson had stuck by his Prussian conductor out of pride and stubbornness, but was scandalized by the revelations of possible moral misconduct. In the last year of Higginson’s life, the Boston Symphony would decisively pivot away from Germany and toward French and Russian influence. Muck’s replacement was Henri Rabaud, a Parisian. When asked whether he would program German composers in Boston, Rabaud was nonplussed. “Such questions are never asked in Paris,” he remarked. “Why should we not play beautiful music like Beethoven’s C minor Symphony?”102

  BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC would soon enough retake its place at the center of the canon. But the war—an upheaval to bookend the Industrial Revolution—meant that a catholic narrative of the Fifth could no longer be taken for granted; the supposedly universal truths had proven hazardously malleable.

  Or maybe a different, unpalatable truth had been there all along. At the height of Victoria’s reign, a Manchester journalist, Henry Franks, recalled sitting next to a blind man at a performance of the Fifth. “That blind man, with the fine instincts of culture, listened to Beethoven’s symphony in C minor with an upturned face, upon which the emotions played as visibly as the ripples play upon a lake,” Franks reported. “I begged him to tell me what he conceived to be the meaning of the theme which recurs so often. After much hesitation, he said that it meant a warning which has come too late.”103 Distracted by the spectacle, most everybody else had only heard what they wanted to hear.

  6

  Earthquakes

  The failing foothold as the shining goal

  Appears, and truth so long, so fondly sought

  Is blurred and dimmed. Again and yet again

  The exulting march resounds. We must win now!

  —CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH,

  “Sonnet XXIII: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” (1878)

  IF LUCY HONEYCHURCH’S predilection for Beethoven made for awkward parlor atmosphere in A Room with a View, the outbreak of World War I only increased the consternation. In 1958, E. M. Forster revisited the novel’s characters in a little sequel called “A View Without a Room”; Lucy and George, we learn, were both conscientious objectors during the war, exacerbating suspicion over Lucy’s musical taste: “Hun music! She was overheard and reported, and the police called.” But also woven into his fictional reminiscence was an actual experience of Forster’s, somewhat closer to the front: an encounter with Beethoven in Egypt, where Forster had spent the bulk of the war working for the Red Cross.

  A quiet little party was held on the outskirts of [Alexandria], and someone wanted a little Beethoven. The hostess demurred. Hun music might compromise us. But a young officer spoke up. “No, it’s all right,” he said, “a chap who knows about those things from the inside told me Beethoven’s definitely Belgian.”1

  Forster playfully attributed the propaganda to Cecil Vyse, A Room with a View’s self-absorbed, amused aesthete. But tweaking German superiority with Beethoven’s Flemish heritage was hardly new: the French had already jumped on that bandwagon, insisting that Beethoven exemplified not German genius, but the “génie flamand,” as the poet and critic Raymond Bouyer wrote in his 1905 examination, Le secret de Beethoven.2 Bouyer’s selective genealogy was only a particularly flagrant example of French efforts to pry Beethoven’s image from the clutches of his German identity. It worked: as Europe stumbled into a second, more destructive reckoning, in the face of the ne plus ultra of German nationalism, Beethoven’s Fifth would be brazenly enlisted on the side of the Allies—appropriately, by way of Belgium.

  WHEN FRANCE finally got around to revering Beethoven, it did so with zeal, but on French terms. The story was that, at the French premiere of the Fifth Symphony, an old veteran of Napoléon’s army was moved to stand up and cry out, “C’est l’Empereur! vive l’Empereur!”3 Beethoven might have appreciated the sentiment—he had, after all, bragged of his ability to meet Napoléon in battle—but casting Beethoven as a new Napoléon was also a way to bring him into the French fold.

  The history of Beethoven in France is that of a hesitant courtship followed by a torrid affair. According to Schindler (and with the requisite accompanying grain of salt), the ice was broken via a blind date with the Fifth. Schindler tells of Louis Sina, a French-born violinist who, as part of Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s string quartet, had performed at the Viennese apartments of Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lichnowsky. In 1820, Sina returned to Paris, then largely bereft of Beethoven’s music (the conductor of the Conservatoire orchestra, François-Antoine Habeneck, had, in Schindler’s telling, introduced the Eroica at a rehearsal, only to be met with laughter from the players). Sina sent an anonymous letter to Habeneck extolling enough virtues of the C-minor symphony to fire the conductor’s curiosity. Schindler: “After considerable hesitation, the symphony was rehearsed. Its reception was favorable! … Without losing any time, other symphonies that had likewise remained unknown were tried, and lo! to everyone’s surprise they were as well received as the C minor!”4

  Sina’s matchmaking aside, there were institutional reasons for Beethoven’s neglect as well. French concertgoers would have had little to no oppo
rtunity to hear Beethoven until 1828, the year after Beethoven died: that was when the administration of Charles X (the last of the Bourbon kings of France, whose reign was the high-water mark of post-Revolution French ultraroyalism) subsidized a new concert series at the Paris Conservatoire. Ardor for Beethoven erupted almost overnight. For the second program of the Société des Concerts, Habeneck programmed the Eroica; the third program opened with the Fifth.5 Driven by a “Jeune France” claque of young, passionately zealous artistic types, audiences reportedly reacted with such fervor that overwhelming, transporting enthusiasm became almost a fad. (The Fifth became a perennial favorite at the Société des Concerts, programmed forty times between 1828 and 1848—more than any other symphony.)6

  Running with the Jeune-France crowd was Hector Berlioz, the composer who dragged his teacher Le Sueur to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, and who considered it

  the most famous of all his symphonies, [and] also the one in which I think Beethoven first gave free rein to his vast imagination, without recourse to any idea but his own to guide him.… It is his intimate thoughts that he means to develop, his secret sorrows, his pent-up anger, his dreams full of dejection, his nocturnal visions, and his outbursts of enthusiasm. Melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation take forms as individual and original as they are noble and powerful.7

  Berlioz’s description is Hoffmannesque,8 but he is on a different mission. Hoffmann pointed toward a transcendent clarity; Berlioz remains focused on vagueness. Hoffmann was promoting Romanticism; Berlioz is leveraging it.

  Some hint at what Berlioz is up to comes in his comparison of the Fifth with the Eroica. Beethoven’s Third, Berlioz proposes, was inspired by the composer’s readings of Homer: “[M]emories of the Iliad evidently play a beautiful role.” (This was both canny publicity—Leo Schrade, author of the pioneering study Beethoven in France, noted that a connection with antiquity “has always been in France the best letter of recommendation”9—and, no doubt, a projection of Berlioz’s own obsession with the ancient epics.) The Fifth, by contrast, “seems to spring solely and directly from Beethoven’s own genius.” Except when it doesn’t: