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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  The “V” signal became one of the most effective propaganda memes of all time. The Nazis tried to counter it—for a time, Joseph Goebbels pushed a V-für-Viktoria campaign of his own—but to no avail. The seeming irony of the Allied appropriation of a monument of German culture was actually a crucial ingredient in the success of the symbol. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika touted the Fifth as a devilishly effective double agent, a mole in the midst of the Third Reich. “This British ‘V’ Blitz will drive the enemy mad by weapons he is unable to match or even account for,” she wrote. “Nazi concentration camps will hammer ‘V’ rhythm into minds of their slave drivers, and the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth will be sung by children on their way to Nazi schools, whistled in Nazi-dominated factories, played by orchestras tuning their instruments for the Nazi hymn.”69 (The BBC eventually began preceding the four notes with a warning to lower the volume—“This transmission contains music”—a sign of how effectively the propaganda had rebounded against German cultural pride: the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth coming over a radio in Germany was now cause to suspect treason.)70 In her memoir of the Girls’ Orchestra of Auschwitz, French singer Fania Fénelon recalled performing the Fifth, gleefully noting that the players and the guards were, in essence, hearing two different pieces; what was “a monument of German music” to the SS was a message from the Resistance to the inmates.71

  In Europe, the code became a rallying cry; in America, it became something closer to a brand name. A “Bundles for Britain” poster encouraged spreading the propaganda “V” in all its iterations, with helpful illustrations: “use it as a greeting” (the two-finger salute); “wear it on your coat” (a V-pin); and, of course, “whistle the tune of it” (the first four notes of the Fifth). The “V-Club of America” printed the opening of the Fifth on mail-in cards where one could list other prospective members.72 Mail for the overseas troops became V-Mail (converted to microfilm, V-Mail saved space when shipped—and also streamlined censorship); specially recorded music performances, pressed onto vinyl for GI consumption, were labeled V-Discs.

  For Armistice Day, 1943, the New York Philharmonic and conductor Bruno Walter added a musical observation to their scheduled concert: “The ‘Victory’ theme of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony” (the first nine measures) was followed by a minute of silence, then “The Star-Spangled Banner.”73 Beethoven had been fully conscripted into the Allied cause.

  After the war, at least one Ally continued to use the brand. Winston Churchill was not very musical; his onetime son-in-law, comedian and pianist Vic Oliver, recorded a pall being cast over an impromptu wartime musicale at Chequers when Oliver began to play the Appassionata Sonata, only to have Churchill confuse it with Handel: “Nobody plays the Dead March in my house,” the bulldog growled.74 Nevertheless, he made Beethoven’s four-note victory tattoo his personal calling card. When, in 1954, the Houses of Parliament celebrated Churchill’s eightieth birthday, the honoree’s climactic entrance into Westminster Hall was preceded by “an eerily expectant silence broken only by a Guardsman thumping out a repetitive refrain on his big drum: ‘da-da-da-DUM.’ ”75 A good theme is a good theme.

  Even decades later, the V-for-Victory association was still attached to the Fifth. An advertisement from the early 1970s for the “Beethoven Bicentennial Edition,” a mail-order series of LPs from Time-Life Records, used it to tout the music’s power:

  The theme of one work alone—his immortal Fifth Symphony—was an inspiration to millions in World War II who risked their lives in the name of freedom.76

  The performance of the Fifth in the “Beethoven Bicentennial Edition” was conducted by Herbert von Karajan, a onetime member of the Nazi Party.

  WHILE A SNIPPET of Beethoven fueled the Resistance, performances of the full symphony continued throughout the war. In 1939, Adolf Hitler requested a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth for a “Party Conference on Peace,” a conference canceled because the Nazis invaded Poland the day it was scheduled to take place.77 Wilhelm Furtwängler, the German conductor, who had been specified by Hitler to lead the concert, was probably relieved.

  Furtwängler had stayed in Germany after the Nazis took over, his loyalty to the timeless, Romantic Germany superseding his distaste for the new regime. Arnold Schoenberg once called Furtwängler “one of those old-fashioned Deutschnationale” from the nineteenth century, “when you were national because of those Western states who went with Napoleon.”78 The conductor saw his role as preserving German culture from the vagaries of politics, writing in 1944: “I am one of the most convincing proofs that the real Germany is alive and will remain alive. The will to live and work in me is, however critically I view myself, that of a completely unbroken nation.”79 Furtwängler used his status to do what he could for musicians whose careers and lives were targeted by the Third Reich, calling in favors from the Nazi bureaucracy, sending money to exiles. That status, though, was maintained by his being—and staying—Hitler’s favorite conductor; Furtwängler’s own political sense, which tended toward the magisterially blunt, left him unable to notice how effectively his image and music-making were drafted into Nazi propaganda, how, from the Reich’s standpoint, his modest gestures of independence were a small price to pay for the prestige his presence lent the regime. (“He is worth the trouble,” Goebbels once said.80) Still, the conductor’s idiosyncratic loftiness galled some of Hitler’s associates, Himmler in particular; near the end of the war, Furtwängler slipped into Switzerland, fearing possible retribution.81 The Nazis’ actual revenge on Furtwängler would end up being all the more effective for being so subtle—they did nothing. Despite being cleared at his denazification trial, Furtwängler was never able to shake the impression that he had cut some deal with the Nazi regime.

  Beethoven was at the center of Furtwängler’s musical universe. His wartime conception of the Fifth, with the Berlin Philharmonic, was recorded in concert in June of 1943; Furtwängler never conducted a Fifth more fiercely grand. The repetitions of the motive almost step on one another’s heels, goading the music forward; the fermatas sear. The tempo is on the slow side—the first movement hovers around 88 beats per minute—but delivered with energetic weight, Furtwängler enunciating every phrase, the orchestra annealing every note. The flexibility is astounding; after the recapitulation’s oboe solo, the music takes off, 100 half notes per minute, like a dark flock suddenly turning with the wind. Was it a rebuke to the Nazis, underlining and emphasizing Beethoven’s powerful freedom, a forceful reminder of the true Germany Furtwängler was trying to preserve? The Nazis probably just heard it as another expression of their martial ethos.

  Despite their very different temperaments, Arturo Toscanini had nonetheless recommended Furtwängler to replace him as director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936. (It was probably at least partially a ploy to pry him loose from the Nazis; Furtwängler declined, afraid that if he took work outside of Germany, he would not be allowed back in.)82 Ardently anti-Fascist, Toscanini left Italy in 1938 after a skirmish with the Italian government over his passport.

  In 1943, conducting the NBC Orchestra—created for him—Toscanini marked the fall of Mussolini with a concert called “Victory Symphony, Act I”; on it he programmed the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, promising the rest when Germany was defeated. Good as his word, Toscanini conducted a complete Fifth on VE-Day, May 8, 1945. It was his fastest performance: the opening movement actually exceeded Beethoven’s 108-beats-per-minute marking, the orchestra hurtling across the surface of the score. It was as if Toscanini was annexing Beethoven back from the Nazis with a blitzkrieg of his own.

  A MORE EQUIVOCAL settling of accounts with the Fifth would come at the hands of the iconoclastic composer Arnold Schoenberg. Back in 1914, Schoenberg had published a short article called “Why New Melodies Are Difficult to Understand.” It was a defense of the early atonal rhetoric that Schoenberg was busy developing—but also an implicit rebuke to the kind of motivic construction Beethoven’s Fifth exemplified. “The mor
e primitive, the more artless the melody is, then the more modest the variation and the more numerous the repetitions,” Schoenberg wrote. “The lower the demands which may be put upon the capacity for comprehension, the quicker the tempo of repetitions, then the more inferior must be its inner organization.” The newer, more concentrated melodies would require a new kind of listener. “Such ‘brevity’ is disagreeable to him who wants to enjoy his comfort,” he allowed. “But why should the privileges of those who think too slowly be preserved?”83

  Heinrich Schenker, despite having once taken no less than Wagner to task for succumbing to the comfort of repetition, took what (for Schenker) might rank as mild offense at Schoenberg’s article, calling Schoenberg “this Don Quixote of compositionally undeveloped chords,” comparing him to Paul Bekker—poor company indeed, in Schenker’s eyes. “Never once in his unspeakably miserable incompetence does he recognize the repetitions in the works of our masters; there he flails at all those who cannot or will not sink as rapidly with him into the depths of ignorance,” Schenker wrote.84

  In 1939, Schoenberg stumbled across a copy of Schenker’s riposte, and jotted down his thoughts. He was no longer so down on short, digestible motives as he once was. And, with Schenker dead, Schoenberg could afford a bit of magnanimity—but only a bit. “Enough,” he sighed. “He is defenseless today. Indeed, I am, too, for who still reads this sort of thing?”85

  By that time, Schoenberg was living in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; he had wasted no time in emigrating once Hitler took power, arriving in America in the fall of 1933. The twelve-tone music that Schoenberg pioneered had not exactly taken America by storm—“a new chaos, without form, and void,” commented the New York Sun86—but the presence of Schoenberg himself was an ideological victory. “Germany’s loss will be this country’s musical gain,” commented George Gershwin.87

  When, in 1942, Schoenberg received a commission from the League of Composers for a chamber work, he decided that the times justified what was, for him, a novelty: an explicitly political piece. At first, he considered writing something about bees. “I could not see,” Schoenberg considered, “why a whole generation of bees or of Germans should live only in order to produce another generation of the same sort, which on their part should also fulfill only the same task: to keep the race alive.” Schoenberg rather thought that bees and Germans were in the thrall of a more ominous fate, surmising that bees “instinctively believed their destiny was to be successors of mankind, when this had destroyed itself”; only “a goal of world domination” could sufficiently explain why Germans had willingly let their society be transformed into a hive of discrimination, subordination, and killing.88

  For a text, Schoenberg first considered the Dutch writer Maurice Maeterlinck, a playwright whose conception of Fate was so capitalized that he once said he preferred marionettes to actors. In his 1901 book-length essay, The Life of the Bee, Maeterlinck, an amateur beekeeper, arranged his observations of his hobby into elegant philosophical allegory. At times, the dramatization rises to a sort of expressionist pitch that Schoenberg might have found appropriate:

  Where the path once lay open to the kindly, abundant reservoirs, that so invitingly offered their waxen and sugary mouths, there stands now a burning-bush all alive with poisonous, bristling stings. The atmosphere of the city is changed; in lieu of the friendly perfume of honey, the acrid odour of poison prevails; thousands of tiny drops glisten at the end of the stings, and diffuse rancour and hatred. Before the bewildered parasites are able to realise that the happy laws of the city have crumbled, dragging down in most inconceivable fashion their own plentiful destiny, each one is assailed by three or four envoys of justice; and these vigorously proceed to cut off his wings, saw through the petiole that connects the abdomen with the thorax, amputate the feverish antennae, and seek an opening between the rings of his cuirass through which to pass their sword.89

  But ultimately, Maeterlinck’s description of apian society, however apposite, just wasn’t edgy enough: “Maeterlinck’s poetic philosophy gilds everything.”90 Instead, Schoenberg had his UCLA student Leonard Stein drive him to Campbell’s Bookstore in Westwood Village, where he bought a volume of poetry by Lord Byron.91 In it was Byron’s fevered 1814 “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.”

  At the outset, Byron had been as enamored of Napoléon as Beethoven had been, but Byron’s crush proved more ironclad. Where Beethoven judged Napoléon in absolute terms—taking an emperor’s crown was an irrevocable break with democratic ideals—Byron’s point of view was more pragmatic: crown or no crown, as long as Napoléon continued to frighten and disturb the rest of conservative Europe, he retained his heroic stature. What finally disillusioned Byron was not Napoléon’s imperial ambitions or his cult of personality, but his abdication and exile to Elba; better that he had died, a martyr in battle, than to have capitulated.

  The aristocratic Byron cultivated a revolutionary enthusiasm that bore more than a whiff of radical chic, but he held the pose impressively well, rarely missing a chance to rhetorically and poetically castigate what he saw as reactionary power (the Tory government’s foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, was a favorite target), and inventing that enduring personification of brooding antiauthoritarianism, the Byronic hero. Byron’s own persona was both model for and modeled after his template; given how much he identified with Napoléon as well, for the former First Consul to quit the field of battle anticlimactically, to reveal his “fronts of brass, and feet of clay,” as Byron put it, felt like unusually personal treachery.

  At the climax of the “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” Byron imagines Napoléon stewing in exile:

  Thou Timour! in his captive’s cage

  What thoughts will there be thine,

  While brooding in thy prisoned rage?

  Byron compares the fate to that of Prometheus, that favorite figure of the Romantics, what with his Beethoven-like combination of daring, divine access, and subsequent suffering:

  Or like the thief of fire from heaven,

  Wilt thou withstand the shock?

  And share with him, the unforgiven,

  His vulture and his rock!

  But such approbation as afforded Prometheus (and Beethoven) is denied the compromised Napoléon:

  Foredoomed by God—by man accurst,

  And that last act, though not thy worst,

  The very Fiend’s arch mock

  To drive home the extent of the betrayal, the reference—“O, ’tis the spite of hell, the fiend’s arch-mock, / To lip a wanton in a secure couch, / And to suppose her chaste!”—is from Shakespeare: Iago in Othello.

  Such was the poem’s original ending. But as the editions piled up—the anonymously published “Ode” was a literary hit—Byron’s publisher requested a few more stanzas to fill out the pages. Byron obliged him with a Gallant to Napoléon’s Goofus:

  The Cincinnatus of the West,

  Whom envy dared not hate,

  Bequeath’d the name of Washington.

  The poem’s reference to both Schoenberg’s original home (“And she, proud Austria’s mournful flower, / Thy still imperial bride; / How bears her breast the torturing hour?”) and his adopted one completed the allegorical circle.92 But if the poetic content of Schoenberg’s Ode was a rather obvious appropriation of Byron into the fight against perverted German nationalism, the musical content would make subtle but pointed use of another mascot: Beethoven.93

  Schoenberg set Byron’s poem not in melody but in Sprechstimme, a rhythmically specified and melodically contoured declamation, somewhere between singing and oratory. The speaker was accompanied by string quartet and piano. Schoenberg thoroughly plotted the piece: he typed out the poem and then annotated it in extensive precompositional detail, mapping out motives, planning musical connections between distant stanzas.94 The music is dense, chromatic, mercurial.

  But then, about a quarter of the way in, as the speaker ruefully recalls Napoléon’s former martial glory—“The t
riumph, and the vanity, / The rapture of the strife— / The earthquake voice of Victory”—the violins and piano offer an eminent bit of commentary: the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. The speaker echoes it:

  of Victo- | ry

  Schoenberg makes the connection between the Napoleonic era and World War II in a single stroke.

  Schoenberg attached great import to the quotation, which provocatively yoked so much history into one charged gesture. He showed Leonard Stein “with barely concealed pride and excitement” the “serendipitous discovery.” “Now it was rather unusual for Schoenberg to show anybody his works in progress,” Stein remembered, “so he must have been struck by the remarkable inspiration which produced in combination the ‘Marseillaise’ and the motive of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony.”95 The revolutionary echoes could be remastered in service of another century’s struggle. But Beethoven’s appearance in Schoenberg’s Ode is by no means a moment of unclouded triumph. The entire piece, in fact, is arguing with history, undermining the privileges of a civilization that, in Schoenberg’s opinion, thought too slowly to be preserved. The friction can be heard in the way Schoenberg applies the technique he was most identified with: the twelve-tone method.

  The twelve-tone method was originally conceived, in part, as a systematic way to remove any hint of nineteenth-century tonality from a work’s musical vocabulary. By basing a piece around a row—the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, rearranged and permutated, but threaded through a piece consistently, such that no one pitch took precedence over the other eleven—a composer could escape the fetters of a tonal center, a tonal point of departure and return (C, for instance, in the case of Beethoven’s Fifth). Triads—the familiar harmonies of tonal music—were to be avoided, lest they set up aural expectations of resolution and arrival. The idea was to make sounds, structures, and rhetoric more fluid, their expressivity more instantaneous and powerful.