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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  The application of twelve-tone principles in the Ode, though, is unusually loose. The row is hardly consistent: Schoenberg partitions the row into three-, four-, six-note sections, which he then freely reorders. Once Schoenberg preached avoiding octaves, on the ground that they would give too much weight to the pitches being doubled; but the Ode doubles pitches at the octave all over the place. And Schoenberg deliberately flies in the face of the music’s nominal atonality by constantly engineering his row so it throws off old-fashioned triads. The Ode is a twelve-tone piece that is bending over backward to sound tonal. The piece ends on a grand, fat E-flat major chord.

  But the Ode is not really tonal: rather, it is taking the vocabulary of tonality and turning it into disorienting, churning rhetoric; the music runs away from tonal grammar, shifting through harmonies too quickly to allow any sort of anchor. And that may be part of the work’s satiric intent—the Ode does to familiar musical sounds what the Nazis did to language.

  Victor Klemperer was a professor and philologist in Dresden up until 1935, when he was dismissed on account of his Jewish heritage. Since his wife was not Jewish, Klemperer avoided the camps, but spent the rest of the war shuffled between factory jobs. All the while, he kept notes on the Nazis’ gradual appropriation of the German language; after the war, he compiled a book on what he called LTI—“Lingua Tertii Imperii,” the language of the Third Reich. It was a language of distortion, not invention. “The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its language, perhaps—indeed probably—none at all,” Klemperer wrote. “But it changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison.”96

  If Klemperer analyzed a twisted language, Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon critiques a twisted cultural heritage. Since coming to America, Schoenberg had written a handful of works in a traditionally tonal style (a neo-Baroque Suite in G for strings, a modernistic but tonally anchored “Kol Nidre” setting), and many of his dodecaphonic works of the 1930s and ’40s hinted at tonal centers. But the Ode to Napoleon is different, a funhouse mirror of tonality, a familiar language after a breakdown. It is at the original peroration of Byron’s poem, when Napoléon’s once-proud image is rendered most brittle—when Byron most mercilessly dismantles “That spirit pour’d so widely forth— / So long obey’d—so little worth!”—that Schoenberg suddenly wrings a stream of triads from his row: G major, E-flat minor, C-sharp minor, F major, G-flat major, D minor, and so on, the sequence divesting the familiar chords of their familiar meaning. The great inheritance of musical tradition, bequeathed from the Fifth Symphony through the Romantics, through Wagner, through Schenker, had, in the end, done nothing to forestall the conflagration of war. When it came to improving human nature, the edicts of music, so long obeyed, showed, ultimately, little worth.

  The allusions to Beethoven in the Ode are similarly double-edged. The opening of the Fifth is clearly echoing V-themed Allied propaganda—but the poetic “voice of Victory” it underlines is Napoléon’s. The E-flat major ending makes reference to the Eroica Symphony, but the piece it completes is a thorough dismantling of a heroic image. After the war, a generation of European composers would take Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method to extremes, eager to flush from their music any vestige of the nineteenth-century tradition that, in their estimation, had paved the way for war. A piece like the Ode to Napoleon would have been regarded as old-fashioned, but, in a way, the Ode was designed to engineer its own obsolescence. In the Ode, Schoenberg came not to praise the nineteenth century, but to bury it.97

  WHEN SCHOENBERG died, in 1951, Pierre Boulez published a famous left-handed eulogy titled “Schoenberg est mort” (“Schoenberg Is Dead”). Boulez sought polemically to rescue Schoenberg’s fundamental innovation—the twelve-tone method—from Schoenberg’s late-Romantic habits and allusions. Schoenberg’s American period, in Boulez’s opinion, was marked by “utter disarray and the most wretched disorientation”;98 the technique needed to be claimed by a superseding, progressive aesthetic (one, naturally, corresponding to Boulez’s own). Schoenberg would have recognized the gambit; it’s what he himself was trying to do to an earlier master in the Ode. From his expatriate vantage point, Schoenberg was proclaiming that Beethoven—or, at the very least, the truculent nationalism that deified him—was dead.

  Sometimes, when Germans had bristled at using the Italian term Eroica, the equivalent word, Heldenhafte, was instead applied to Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In the 1880s, the composer and historian Wilhelm Langhans had used the term to rate the Fifth Symphony higher than the Third: the Fifth described “the heroic [heldenhafte] struggle of man with an overpowering destiny, and victory over it, in even more poignant way than the Eroica.”99

  Victor Klemperer later recorded the Nazi destiny of heldenhaft:

  In December 1941 Paul K. returned from work one day beaming. En route he had read the military despatch. “They are having a terrible time in Africa,” he said. I asked whether they were really admitting it—usually they only report victories. “They write: ‘Our troops who are fighting heldenhaft.’ Heldenhaft sounds like an obituary, you can be sure of that.”

  Subsequently heldenhaft sounded like an obituary in many, many more bulletins and was never misleading.100

  The German army’s defeat at Stalingrad, in February of 1943, was too great even to euphemize. German radio announced that “all theatres, cinemas, and variety halls in the Reich were to close for three days.” The announcement was followed by a broadcast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.101

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  Schoolchildren sing the theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, the Allies used it in propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War, and it has been made into a best-selling pop record. But its familiarity cannot be expected to trouble the extraterrestrial listeners for whom the Voyager record was intended, and it doesn’t much bother us here on Earth either.

  —TIMOTHY FERRIS, “Voyager’s Music” (1978)

  Because pronouns involve repeating the first tone of a sequence thrice, Martians were greatly delighted by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for it seemed to them a toying talk in praise of the ego.

  —W. P. LEHMANN,

  “Decoding of the Martian Language” (1965)1

  IT TOOK the Second World War to find a steady movie role for the Fifth Symphony. It had not been used very often, possibly being already too much of a cliché even for Hollywood. But the success of the “V-for-Victory” meme gave the Fifth its big break: war movies. The four-note motive, along with the Marseillaise and “Rule Britannia,” became an essential tool for cinematic pro-Allied sentiment. (It even worked its way into the plot on occasion: in Universal’s 1942 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, which brought the Victorian detective forward thirty years to battle the Nazis, Holmes [Basil Rathbone] analyzes radio broadcasts of the Fifth with an oscilloscope in order to unmask a Lord Haw-Haw–like propagandist.)2

  Animated cartoons, already a playground for free-floating semiotic bits of music, seized on the association. Fifth Column Mouse (1943) brings in the theme to punctuate the war effort success of a group of mice, shaving a Hitleresque cat’s fur into a dot-dot-dot-dash pattern.3 In Scrap Happy Daffy (1943), newspaper reports of Daffy Duck’s Brobdingnagian pile of Allied-bound scrap metal inspire a burst of the Fifth on the soundtrack, the combination driving a cartoon Hitler into an unintelligible fury.4 Carl Stalling, the longtime music director for the Warner Bros. animation department, had the particularly apt idea of matching the Fifth’s incessant motivic rhythm to modern, mechanized war production; both 1942’s Ding Dog Daddy (in which a none-too-bright dog falls for a bronze-sculpture counterpart, only to see her carted off in a scrap drive) and 1943’s The Home Front (one of a series of cartoons prod
uced for the U.S. Army starring the irrepressibly irresponsible Private Snafu) featured factories that hummed to Beethoven’s beat.5

  Dramatic films about the war made during the war had a tendency to use the Fifth to send the audience out with a dose of Allied resolve—as in Jules Dassin’s 1942 Reunion in France, which ends with Michele de la Becque (Joan Crawford) and her double-agent fiancé (Philip Dorn) gazing up as a defiant skywriter offers occupied France COURAGE, to the accompaniment of familiar, pealing Fate.6 Postwar, Beethoven could be drafted for more casual purposes: Max Steiner’s score for William Wellman’s 1958 Darby’s Rangers reorchestrates the Fifth’s theme for flutes and muted trumpets, a comic sting for an American lothario (Corey Allen) knocked out by a British soldier after trying to steal his girl.7 (Allen collapses under a poster reading “Be Kind to Our Allies.”)

  Samuel Fuller’s 1959 Verboten! uses the Fifth Symphony for dread rather than uplift, ominously setting the film’s opening scene: a burned-out German town, an American platoon trying to flush out a Nazi sniper.8 (The sequence of the first few minutes is positively surreal: the Fifth’s opening bars over the RKO logo, a fade-in to gunfire, then Paul Anka’s syrupy title song, then back to the story and the Fifth.) Fuller builds the entire sequence around the symphony’s first movement, and any intended sense of victory is undermined, as two American soldiers are killed and a third wounded before the threat—and the music—is over. (Fuller, a veteran of the U.S. Army, 16th Infantry, once told of billeting on the floor of Beethoven’s house in Bonn; to Fuller, who idolized the composer, it was like “finding an oasis in the desert.”9)

  Producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day managed to be sparing yet unsubtle in its use of the Fifth, opening with a stark, BBC-style drumbeat of the motive over a close-up shot of an army helmet upturned on a Normandy beach.10 Like one of the film’s roll call of big stars in small roles, Beethoven’s Fifth appears fleetingly, and reduced to its most familiar essence, never getting any further than the first eight notes.

  And, like Verboten!, The Longest Day almost seems to give Beethoven’s Fifth back to the Germans, associating it more with Nazi foreboding than Allied triumph. The motive only appears in full orchestral guise twice: near the beginning, just after Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel (played by Werner Hinz) promises the Allies, should they invade, the titular ordeal; and then just before the German Major Werner Pluskat (Hans Christian Blech) memorably spots the invading force itself (“Auf mich zu direkt!”).

  Alan Sillitoe’s 1960 novel The General, about a traveling orchestra captured by an enemy during war, specified neither the war nor the orchestra’s repertoire; but, as the enemy general, “dwelling on one of the mass surprise attacks for which he had become famous,” listens to the concert he forces the orchestra to play, the images are familiar: “The music illuminated his vision, and its final symphonic beats synchronized his resignation to the slow steps of advancing fate.”11

  When The General was made into a movie, it became very specific indeed: Counterpoint (1967, directed by Ralph Nelson) takes place during World War II; the orchestra is an American group on a USO tour; their captor is the German General Schiller (played by Maximilian Schell), who engages in a battle of wills with his egotistical equal, conductor Lionel Evans (Charlton Heston).12 Evans’s conducting bona fides are established at the outset with a performance of the Fifth; at movie’s end, with Evans left behind at the now-abandoned German headquarters, Allied artillery coming ever closer, the four-note motive again emerges from Bronislau Kaper’s score, eventually swelling into full, grim Beethovenian force.

  Inevitably, though, memories of the war faded, and the Fifth would accompany situations that could simultaneously utilize and satirize its distracting familiarity. Woody Allen’s 1998 Celebrity opened with a funhouse version of Reunion in France: the Fifth comes crashing in as a skywriter over New York spells out HELP.13 (It turns out to be part of a movie shoot.) Playing a neurotic Californian in 1991’s L.A. Story, Steve Martin, showing an English journalist played by Victoria Tennant around the city, takes her to the “Museum of Musicology,” which proudly displays Verdi’s baton, Mozart’s quill, and (da-da-da-dum) “Beethoven’s balls,” a donation from “The Austrian School of Castration”—a common allegorical Hollywood fate, one surmises.14

  The other place the Fifth Symphony turned up in movies was, of course, in movies about Beethoven himself. Abel Gance’s Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) plays it over the opening credits, almost as if to get it out of the way.15 The 1994 biopic Immortal Beloved, directed by Bernard Rose, also opens with it, but under much more appropriately fateful circumstances: Beethoven (Gary Oldman), on his deathbed, expiring to an impeccably timed clap of thunder—and the first five bars of the Fifth Symphony.16

  Immortal Beloved’s MORTAL BEGINNING echoes a variant of Schindler’s story of Fate knocking at the door, one that replaces Fate with Death. The Musical Times used it in 1911, for instance, mocking the new fad of adapting classical themes into popular songs with a most inappropriate hypothetical: “We would not, for instance, like to hear the low comedian chanting his quips, say, to the ‘death-knocking-at-the-door’ theme in Beethoven’s C minor.”17

  It’s possible the knock of Death was appropriated from a work that Romantic opinion often heard as a direct precursor to Beethoven: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which death (in the form of the Commendatore’s statue) really does knock at the door. But the notion is an old one, going back to the Roman poet Horace:

  Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turris (Odes 1.4)

  As translated by Christopher Smart in 1767:

  Pale death alike knocks at the poor man’s door … and the royal dome.18

  The image made its way into the repertoire of English allusion, and thereafter nudged its way into the lore surrounding the Fifth Symphony. There are even translations that hint at the crossover, such as that by Philip Francis, first published in 1742: “With equal pace, impartial Fate / Knocks at the palace as the cottage gate.”19

  With the Fate/gate rhyme foreshadowing Schindler and/or Beethoven’s Schicksal and Pforte, one can almost imagine some product of an English education, somewhere along the line, making the unconscious transfer from Horace to the Fifth. (It’s tempting to make the connection between Horace and Beethoven himself—the poet was one of Beethoven’s favorites from among antiquity—but the German translations Beethoven would have read are nowhere near as close to the Schindler/Beethoven formulation.20)

  The Death-at-the-door interpretation gained traction around the turn of the twentieth century, a reflection of the heightened emotional stakes of art and music in the wake of the Romantic era. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen salted his Sixth Symphony, premiered in 1925, with versions of Beethoven’s motive; in the final movement, a theme-and-variations, a near-quotation is thwacked out by a large drum. Nielsen told a friend that this particular variation was, indeed, meant to symbolize “Death knocking at the gate.”21 (Nielsen had suffered a series of heart attacks after completing his own Fifth Symphony; the Sixth would be his last. In a bit of defiance, Nielsen followed his Death-knocking Variation IX with a brash, concluding Fanfare.)

  Replacing Fate with Death also brought Beethoven’s Fifth into the fold of old-time, fire-and-brimstone religion. The image had long been a favorite of preachers (such as seventeenth-century Presbyterian William Jenkyn: “Death may knock next and remember he will easily break into thy body, though thy Minister could not get into thy soul”22); as Schindler’s tale became commonly known, enterprising proselytizers seized on the resemblance. Edmund S. Lorenz, composer of such favorite revivalist hymns as “There’s Power in Jesus’ Blood” and “Tell It to Jesus,” provided this exhortation in 1909, illustrating “Why a Minister Should Study Music”:

  Who can hear the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven with its motif of Death knocking at the door without being deeply impressed, and stimulated to an intense degree? Now with one instrument, now with
another, the hand of Death is heard knocking, knocking, persistently knocking. The phrase is mysterious, haunting, ever recurring, sometimes sweet and plaintive, sometimes with the roar of the ocean sounding through its measures, sometimes crashing and pounding with brass and cymbal as though siege guns were being trained upon the heart.23

  A good example of the Death-at-the-door variant is found in Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide, his memoir of a year spent teaching on an isolated island off the coast of South Carolina. One day, Conroy decides to play for his poor, undereducated Gullah students—descendants of freed slaves—a record of Beethoven, whom the students promptly dub “Bay-Cloven.”

  “Now one of Beethoven’s most famous songs was written about death. Death knocking at the door. Death, that grim, grim reaper coming to the house and rapping at the door. Does death come to everybody’s door sometime?”

  “Yeah, death come knocking at Dooney’s door last year,” Big C said.

  “Well, Beethoven thought a little bit about death, then decided that if death were really knocking at the door, he would sound something like this: da-da-da-da. Now I am going to place this little needle on this valuable record and we are going to hear death knocking at Bay Cloven’s door.”

  The first notes ripped out. Ol’ death, that son of a bitch.

  “Do you hear that rotten death?” I yelled.