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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  “Don’t hear nuttin’,” said Prophet.

  “Sound like music,” said Lincoln.

  “Shut up and listen for that bloodsucker death,” I yelled again.

  “Yeah, I hear ’im,” Mary said.

  “Me, too,” a couple of the others agreed.

  Finally, everyone was hearing old death rapping at the door. Once we labeled death and identified him for all time, I switched to the Triumphal March from Aida.24

  The scene touches on every aspect of the Death story that made it particularly resonant in America. There are the religious overtones, the revivalist style that Lorenz promoted, and also the call-and-response traditions of the African-American church. The repertoire of Negro spirituals often opts for similar imagery; Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a cousin of the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) recorded one such spiritual during his Civil War days as the colonel of a black regiment:

  For Death is a simple ting,

  And he go from door to door,

  And he knock down some, and he cripple up some,

  And he leave some here to pray.25

  There’s also the point that Horace was trying to make: death’s universality. That, too, would have taken on special meaning in the United States, a country where the ideal of democracy was perpetually celebrated, if only intermittently realized. If the fate knocking at the door was to be specified, Americans might well imagine it as death, the most democratic fate of all.

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1863, a jubilant crowd of Boston abolitionists celebrated the arrival of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with a concert featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.26 Ralph Waldo Emerson read a new poem, called “Boston Hymn”:

  To-day unbind the captive,

  So only are ye unbound;

  Lift up a people from the dust,

  Trump of their rescue, sound!27

  The novelist Ralph Ellison was named for Emerson. In a 1955 article for High Fidelity magazine, Ellison recalled his days as an aspiring writer living in a noisy apartment. The Basie fan next door and the singing barflies who would stumble into the backyard court were profound annoyances, but there was another musical intrusion that provoked “feelings of guilt and responsibility”: an opera singer, practicing hour after hour. This “more intimate source of noise … got beneath the skin and worked into the very structure of one’s consciousness—like the ‘fate’ motif in Beethoven’s Fifth or the knocking-at-the-gates scene in Macbeth.”28

  The feelings were rooted in the past. Before turning to writing, Ellison had aspired to music. A budding trumpeter, he hung around Oklahoma City’s vital jazz scene, yearning for entry. At the same time, he nurtured a desire to be a great Negro composer, bringing black American vernacular sounds into the temples of European high art. “[H]ere I was with a dream of myself writing the symphony at twenty-six which would equal anything Wagner had done at twenty-six,” he recalled. “This is where my ambitions were.”29 Ellison took lessons in trumpet, analysis, and composition from Ludwig Hebestreit, a German immigrant, music educator, and conductor, who founded the Oklahoma City Junior Symphony Orchestra. (Since Hebestreit taught at a segregated high school, Ellison’s lessons were, by necessity, private; he got a break on the fees by mowing Hebestreit’s lawn.)30 He enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute as a music major, to study with the conductor and composer William L. Dawson, whom Ellison ranked as “the greatest classical musician in that part of the country.”31

  Ellison may have imagined that he would satisfy mind and soul by pursuing both jazz and classical music; instead, all he felt was tension. Hence the unease that his opera-singer neighbor brought flooding back, along with Ellison’s recollection of his own obsessive practicing (and of the discomfort it caused his own neighbors) in pursuit of a troublesome goal: “For while our singer was concerned basically with a single tradition and style, I had been caught actively between two: that of Negro folk music, both sacred and profane, slave song and jazz, and that of Western classical music. It was most confusing.”32

  It is at a point of acute confusion that Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony enter Ellison’s most famous piece of writing, his 1954 novel Invisible Man. The protagonist, once a favored standout at a black college, is working at a paint factory after a series of disillusioning setbacks; after causing a boiler explosion, he wakes up in a hospital, in the middle of shock treatment.

  Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and woman above me.

  They were holding me firm and it was fiery and above it all I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth—three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in varying volume, and I was struggling and breaking through, rising up, to find myself lying on my back with two pink-faced men laughing down.

  “Be quiet now,” one of them said firmly. “You’ll be all right.” I raised my eyes, seeing two indefinite young women in white, looking down at me. A third, a desert of heat waves away, sat at a panel arrayed with coils and dials. Where was I? From far below me a barber-chair thumping began and I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound from the floor. A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning. A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling. Two forces tore savagely at my stomach and back. A flash of cold-edged heat enclosed me. I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands. My lungs were compressed like a bellows and each time my breath returned I yelled, punctuating the rhythmical action of the nodes.

  “Hush, goddamit,” one of the faces ordered. “We’re trying to get you started again. Now shut up!”33

  The Beethoven reference is not just a throwaway; as in the symphony, Ellison builds his gambit into a whole movement, the entire experience itself echoing the opening of the Fifth. The opening rest (“Be quiet now,” one of them said firmly); the initial attack (I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound); the repetitive anacrusis (A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning); and then the held note, the fermata, delivered with the drawn-out excess recommended by Wagner: I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling.… My lungs were compressed like a bellows (Wagner: “Then shall life be drained to the last blood-drop”). Eventually, though, the fermata yields (We’re trying to get you started again).

  The symbolism, too, becomes more nuanced on closer inspection. At first, it seems a wedge, a bit of white, European culture meant to torture a black man into docility, for his own good. But in bringing in the Fifth, Ellison also brings in all of the symphony’s encrusted narratives: fate, struggle, defiance.

  Ellison’s idea of art was decidedly Beethovenian. In one famous description of another musical touchstone, the blues, Ellison’s language might have come directly from a description of the Fifth Symphony: “Their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit.”34 As the civil rights movement picked up steam, Ellison stood outside it, defending his Beethoven-like retreat into his art; the social impact of Invisible Man was “the result of hard work undertaken in the belief that the work of art is important in itself, that it is a social action in itself.”35 Critic Jerry Gafio Watts writes of Ellison in a way that recalls Beethoven’s complicated pas de deux with Napoléon: “Heroic individualists, like most ambitious fine artists, are not fundamentally democratically minded. They may espouse democratic ideology, but they tend to view themselves as a select group, select by virtue of talent but more importantly by virtue of their sheer artistic willpower and bravery.”36

  Ellison once wrote that “being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures.”37 (Muss es sein? Es muss sein!) In that sense, Beethoven’s cameo in Invisible Man echoes Ellison’s individualism, echoes his protagonist’s need to find an id
entity that transcends the preexisting roles in which both blacks and whites would cast him.

  Nevertheless, Ellison is also picking a fight with Beethoven, and Ellison’s Sunday punch is the way he rewrites the recognized instance of the Fifth Symphony’s opening as an expansive, intricate description, neutralizing the music’s temporality by lingering over each moment. Early in the book, the protagonist muses on what he’s learned from listening to Louis Armstrong, likening it to a boxing match between a skilled pro and an amateur. Like the first movement of the Fifth, the prizefighter’s body “was one violent flow of rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise.” But the yokel, coming from outside the world of tradition and conventional tactics, lands his blow. “The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.”38 Retelling his protagonist’s experience as a stretched-out version of the Fifth’s opening, Ellison could get inside Beethoven’s sense of time.

  • • •

  The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognises it.

  —NADINE GORDIMER,

  Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories

  IN THE STORY “Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black,” by South African writer Nadine Gordimer, that particular assertion of Beethoven’s heritage, heard by a white former antiapartheid activist and slightly alienated academic, prompts a reflection on the unknowable distance between him and his own ancestors, and how the needs of the present shape the perception of the past. “Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white,” he notes. “Now there’s a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It’s the same secret.”39

  The idea of Beethoven having African ancestry inched into the mainstream along with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Malcolm X often claimed that Beethoven was black, as in a 1963 Playboy interview: “Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the blackamoors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was of African descent.”40

  Haydn’s alleged blackness didn’t make much of a ripple, but Beethoven’s did, even reaching the ears of Schroeder, the Beethoven-idolizing pianist of Charles Schulz’s comic Peanuts: “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that all these years I’ve been playing ‘soul’ music?”41

  The classification of Beethoven as some fraction black—one-sixteenth, or one-sixty-fourth, or even one-fourth, depending on where one reads—is often traced back to J. A. Rogers. A journalist, historian, and quintessential “race man” of the first half of the twentieth century, Rogers made the assertion that Beethoven was of African ancestry in the 1940s, in a three-volume study titled Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands, citing numerous descriptions of Beethoven’s swarthy complexion and curly hair, hinting at Moorish ancestors, going so far as to assert that “there is not a single shred of evidence to support the belief that he was a white man.”42

  That sort of burden-of-proof fallacy might give rational pause, though perhaps it helped make Rogers the go-to source on Beethoven’s blackness: for those inclined to believe, a published reference; for those inclined to doubt, an argument that never ventured beyond the circumstantial. And Rogers’s contention was not new. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had asserted a black Beethoven, sardonically noting that “if the greatest of all musicians were alive today, he would find it somewhat difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities.”43

  There is no positive evidence to support African ancestry for Beethoven. There is always the possibility that Beethoven’s Flemish ancestors deliberately obscured the documentation; perhaps the Eighty Years’ War, which dominated the Dutch Renaissance, occasioned a dalliance between one of Beethoven’s forebears and an occupying Spanish sailor, one with Moorish or African blood, a connection whitewashed for the sake of propriety. But, given its fundamental reliance on speculation, the idea of a black Beethoven ends up as something like the Fifth Symphony: a convenient screen onto which anyone can project their own concerns.

  Those concerns came into conflict in 1988, at Stanford University. During a freshman orientation at Ujamaa House, an African and African-American-focused dormitory, two white students got into an argument with a black student over Beethoven’s alleged blackness; later, the white students drunkenly defaced a Stanford Symphony poster featuring a picture of Beethoven, coloring it brown, giving it frizzy hair, big lips, red eyes—Beethoven in blackface—and then hung it up outside the black student’s room. Tensions rose and feelings frayed amid charges of overt and covert racism.

  The Ujamaa Incident, as it came to be known, engendered passionate if somewhat predictable reaction from all shades of the political spectrum—from grim denunciations of political correctness run amok to reinterpretations of legal case theory that attempted to square regulation of hate speech with the First Amendment. Nobody, though, mentioned the curiosity of finding Beethoven, a long-dead product of long-dead German city-states, at the center of a late twentieth-century American clash over race and prejudice.44

  On the one hand, the incident was a warped tribute to Beethoven’s iconic status; how many other figures would inspire such a heated reaction? (One commentator asked if the reaction would have been the same if one insisted that Beethoven was Danish; the better comparison would be a claim of blackness for someone as obscure as, say, Jean-François Le Sueur.)45 But the incident also hinted at how the direction of Beethoven’s fame had shifted from the music to the man. It was the figure of Beethoven, not the music, that was still potent enough to occasion both the black student’s debate trump card and the white students’ ill-considered response.

  Critics of the hand-wringing the incident produced suggested that black students overreacted; but one might also wonder what it was about the possibility of Beethoven being black that so unnerved the white students. How much difference would an African ancestor make in the way we hear the Fifth Symphony? The notes would still be the same. Schroeder wondered if he had been playing soul music; but the whole idea that music has soul only gained traction with Beethoven in the first place. (Hoffmann, writing of the Fifth’s innovatory nature: “Beethoven bears musical romanticism deep within his soul and expresses it in his works with great genius and presence of mind.”46) Ralph Ellison once cautioned blacks that they didn’t have a monopoly on soul: “Anyone who listens to a Beethoven quartet or symphony and can’t hear soul is in trouble.”47 In light of the Ujamaa Incident, Ellison’s warning might be extended to all races.

  The Stanford Symphony poster the students defaced was, in fact, a recruitment poster—an ironic footnote to the whole saga of Beethoven’s blackness, since at the heart of the matter was the question of who got to claim Beethoven. Even as Malcolm X extolled Beethoven’s blackness, other radical black activists saw Beethoven as recruiting for the other side, seeing the music-appreciation idolization of Beethoven as a kind of propaganda designed to assimilate blacks into white modes of living. The Howard University sociologist Nathan Hare regarded Beethoven as an affectation of “black Anglo-Saxons,” as he put it; Hare told of a party where “the guests sighed with boredom amid strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” until Hare surreptitiously put on a record by Little Richard.48 The poet and playwright LeRoi Jones was, not surprisingly, even more harsh; in his 1966 black-power “Morality Play” Madheart, an archetypically posited Black Man speaks of “the nightmare in all of our hearts. Our mothers and sisters groveling to white women, wanting to be white women.” Later, one of those mothers prays to the idols of the (white-controlled) media: “Tony Bennett, help us please. Beethoven, Peter Gunn … deliver us in our sterling silver headdress … oh please deliver us.”

  “This is enough of this stuff,” the Black Ma
n scolds.49

  Dominique-René de Lerma, one of the great scholars of black music, was scholastically compelled to dismantle the Beethoven-is-black theory as unsupported conjecture, but found one equally compelling benefit in engaging with Rogers and the idea of Beethoven’s African-tinged features. “No matter how circumstantial or speculative Rogers’s arguments might be,” he wrote, they “are most provocative for those who still think of a black/white dichotomy.”50 (Go back far enough, and we are all African.)

  The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had a musical taste that ran more to opera, and was more likely to cite spirituals than symphonic composers, though King would occasionally mention Beethoven as part of a sequence directed at seemingly more humble toilers: “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures; sweep streets like Michelangelo carved marble; sweep streets like Beethoven composed music.”51 But Beethoven made it into King’s movement, wittingly or not; it was at the 1963 March on Washington—a century after the Boston abolitionists had celebrated Emancipation with the Fifth—that King honed to perfection a piece of rhetoric he had been trying out for some weeks, a peroration built on the power of a short, repeated theme, perhaps the most famous quartus paeon in oratorical history:

  I have a | dream

  As Ellison said, the motive does get beneath the skin.

  A 1987 PROMOTIONAL AD for ABC network programming found Beethoven hammering out the Fifth at a piano: “If Beethoven were alive today, could he make it in the music business?” Beethoven dons sunglasses, electric guitars wail. “Find out what it takes … this week on Good Morning America!”

  The first attempt at cross-fertilizing Beethoven’s Fifth and rock-and-roll didn’t make that much of a splash. “Rock and Roll Symphony,” in two movements (the A and B sides of a 45), was released in 1961, credited to “The Back Beat Philharmonic.” The Fifth’s opening is duly invoked before the piece slides into a string-laden, light-rock instrumental—only to come back around to quote a version of the Fifth’s ending. The Philharmonic was a one-off, the product of accordionist Frank Metis and guitarist Randy Starr (the pseudonym of a Manhattan dentist, Dr. Warren Nadel). As The Islanders, Metis and Starr had previously scored a hit with their instrumental “The Enchanted Sea.” Billboard highlighted the record as one of its “Spotlight Winners of the Week”—“Both sides come across well and should make strong instrumentals”—but “Rock and Roll Symphony” failed to chart.52