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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  In Japan, the Fifth Symphony’s pop infiltration received an assist from California surf culture, namely, the instrumental rock group The Ventures, whose wildly successful 1965 Japanese tour inspired the genre known as eleki (after the electric guitars that defined the sound). One of the leading eleki artists, guitarist Takeshi Terauchi, filled his tenth LP, Let’s Go Classics, with surf-guitar versions of classical themes. The opening track reworked the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth; “Let’s Go Unmei” (“Let’s Go Fate”) won the 1967 Japan Record Prize for Best Arrangement.

  The trend reached Europe the following year. In 1968, the Dutch jazz-rock group Ekseption won an award at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival, the prize being a record contract with the conglomerate Philips; Ekseption recorded two songs by the early jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, which the record company pronounced too old-fashioned and refused to release. Having been impressed by an English group, The Nice, whose organ player, Keith Emerson, liked to combine classical and rock (a combination he would epitomize with his next group, Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Ekseption’s keyboard player, Rick van der Linden, was inspired to work up his own rock-flavored, organ-and-bass-heavy arrangement of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. For fun, he also worked in the theme from the Moonlight Sonata, as well as a 5/4 version of the opening of Beethoven’s op. 2, no. 1 Piano Sonata. The band regarded the arrangement as little more than a novelty, but went along and recorded it.53 “The Fifth”—backed by an arrangement of Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance—spent seven weeks in the top ten in Holland, and was a hit throughout Europe.

  The British group Electric Light Orchestra, another rock outfit that flaunted classical overtones, redeemed an obvious joke by the skill with which they worked the Fifth into their 1973 cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” using the entire opening paragraph as a lead-in, and then contrapuntally threading the four-note motive throughout the arrangement. Yngwie Malmsteen, the Swedish heavy metal guitar hero, signaled the ambition behind his neoclassical style by playing a highly electrified solo arrangement of the Fifth on his 1980s concert tours.

  It was, however, the advent of disco that would allow Beethoven to leave his most indelible mark on the pop music landscape. Disco started off as danceable defiance for a confluence of demographics—black, Latino, gay—shut out from the overwhelmingly white-straight-male world of mainstream rock. Originally limited to underground parties and clubs, disco began to enter the mainstream (and the mainstream pop charts) around 1973. In retrospect, it seems amazing that it took even as long as it did for the disco style—lush, string-laden, with a basic, readily adaptable four-on-the-floor beat—to be applied to the classical repertoire. But it was only in 1976 that a matchmaker emerged in jingle writer and former Tonight Show arranger Walter Murphy.

  Accidentally recapitulating a Hegelian model of progressive German music history, Murphy was inspired to arrange Beethoven by an arrangement of J. S. Bach. In 1972, a fleeting British studio group called Apollo 100 had scored an American hit with a pop-flavored version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”54 Murphy worked up a demo of a disco Beethoven’s Fifth that convinced a short-lived label called Private Stock Records to sign on to the project. (Private Stock’s biggest successes had been Frankie Valli solo albums, but the label also cornered the market on unlikely dance records: another 1976 release was Bicentennial Gold, an album of disco versions of American patriotic songs like “The Marines’ Hymn” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”)55

  “A Fifth of Beethoven,” credited to “Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band,” reached the top of the Billboard singles chart in October 1976.56 (The “Band” was a label-imposed fiction that irked Murphy, who noted, “I wrote the song, arranged it, played most of the parts; it was basically my own doing”57—apparently taking the Fifth’s motive as, essentially, common property.) The acerbic rock critic Robert Christgau admitted that the track was “great schlock, transcendent schlock even,”58 but none of Murphy’s subsequent classical-disco experiments ever approached its success. (As if to amplify its novelty aspects, it was knocked out of the number one spot by radio DJ Rick Dees’s “Disco Duck.”) That didn’t stop producer Robert Stigwood from licensing the track for the soundtrack to his movie project, Saturday Night Fever. “A Fifth of Beethoven” was accorded prime placement in the film, accompanying Tony Manero (John Travolta) and his coterie as we see them enter the 2001 Odyssey club like a prince and his retinue. Again, the song functions as an entrée into the world of disco by way of the most common entrée into classical music. For all its opportunistic sheen, “A Fifth of Beethoven” transcended mere novelty by deftly averaging a host of cultural vectors: inside and outside, black and white, gay and straight, art and commerce, eternal and ephemeral.59

  Musically, “A Fifth of Beethoven” domesticates the Fifth Symphony while subverting its accumulated history. Murphy changes the meter from 2/4 to 4/4; the three eighth notes become three sixteenth notes, the entire anacrusis falling within a single beat, rather than across the center of the original’s ambiguously fast two-beat bar. This makes the fourth note of the motive proportionally longer, almost like a fermata every time, but the continuing steady changes of harmony leave no doubt as to the underlying grid of time. After a somewhat faithful rendition of the original’s first paragraph, Beethoven’s contribution is boiled down to merely the four-note riff, punctuating sections that venture ever further from the symphony’s material.

  The only real vestige of Beethoven’s ambiguity is in the opening, a fairly literal quote of the first five bars, but the context mitigates that original disorientation; “A Fifth of Beethoven” both plays upon and depends on the Fifth Symphony’s celebrity. With the same passage with which Beethoven sought to jolt and confuse listeners, Murphy draws them into comfortable familiarity. Those inclined to dance will wait through the opening because it’s Beethoven; those inclined toward Beethoven will, maybe, stay through the dance because it’s Beethoven.

  Much of the effectiveness of “A Fifth of Beethoven” vis-à-vis Beethoven’s original derives from how much the disco sound, with its swooping strings and hypnotically incessant beat, already matches the Romantic descriptions of the Fifth Symphony that would become music-appreciation boilerplate: transcendence, otherworldliness. (English critic Richard Dyer once wrote of how disco creates a Hoffmann-like “ ‘escape’ from the confines of popular song into ecstasy.”60) The seeming juxtaposition of high and low is an illusion, even a ruse; disco and Beethoven are revealed as long-lost cousins. One of the cousins just happens to be gay.

  In much the same vein as avowals of an African ancestor for Beethoven, there have been periodic speculations that Beethoven was a deeply closeted homosexual. The most famous claim was made by psychoanalysts Editha and Richard Sterba in their 1954 analysis Beethoven and His Nephew, citing Beethoven’s repeated self-sabotage of his relationships with women, his unhealthily intense obsession with his nephew, even the cross-dressing at the center of the plot of Fidelio.61 The claim is most assuredly questionable. “A Fifth of Beethoven” is much more shrewd in its appropriation: rather than Beethoven himself, it is Beethoven’s music that is conscripted into gay culture, polishing another facet of the Fifth’s universality. In the words of Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, it was in “A Fifth of Beethoven” that “the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic masculinity, met its gay destiny.”62

  The Fifth also fulfilled its black destiny by gaining a place, via “A Fifth of Beethoven,” in hip-hop and R&B. The VHB—the Vintertainment House Band, the production team for Vincent Davis’s Brooklyn-based Vintertainment Records, which featured the influential DJ Chuck Chillout—produced a 1984 hip-hop adaptation, “Beethoven’s Fifth (Street) Symphony,” that relied heavily on Murphy’s framework. (And if “A Fifth of Beethoven” counted on the listener to remember the actual Fifth, “Beethoven’s Fifth (Street) Symphony” alters the source material in a way that sounds like the musicians them
selves were trying to remember how the piece goes.)

  The Fifth has been sampled, looped, and layered into other songs’ backing tracks. The music could lend weight, either ironic (the British rap group Gunshot used the opening to kick off their debut single, “Battle Creek Brawl,” in suitably imposing style) or earnest (producer Antoine Clamaran, under the name Omega, had a French club hit with “Dreaming of a Better World,” making a transition in the middle of the song with a swath of the Fifth, much as another DJ might use a sampled drum break). “A Fifth of Beethoven” specifically could signify both sophistication and retro connoisseurship, as when the rapper A+ (Andre Levins) used Murphy’s version as the foundation of his 1999 single “Enjoy Yourself,” a night-out boast that updates Tony Manero’s entrance into the 2001 Odyssey for a hip-hop generation.

  But as remixed culture evolved into something more fluid, the disco Fifth found a niche in which the symphony’s more deep-rooted celebrity could also be acknowledged: an ironic counterpoint of history and parallel musical tradition. A pair of related dance tracks from the vibrant mash-up community that sprung up in San Francisco in the 2000s made especially trenchant commentary: first the DJs Adrian & Mysterious D mixed the Fifth and Kanye West’s 2005 single “Gold Digger”; in tribute to that track’s popularity, fellow DJ Party Ben worked the Fifth into a more elaborate collage built around Kanye’s “Love Lock-down.” Beethoven’s monumentality made fluent combination with Kanye, a rapper and producer whose musical ambition and self-regard (he once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus in a crown of thorns)63 might well be called Beethovenian. The grandeur suits him.

  Hip-hop artist Bonita “D’Mite” Armah used the Fifth’s theme as a backing for his 2007 single “Read a Book,” which recast basic self-improvement advice—brush your teeth, take care of your kids, invest in real estate—as a full-on, thumping crunk anthem, redolent with profanity (“read a muh’fuckin’ book”). Satire with an edge that fine was bound to offend, especially after Black Entertainment Television turned the song into an animated short that showcased seemingly every negative hip-hop stereotype extant; a crowd five hundred strong protested outside the home of BET’s chairperson.64 But Beethoven’s presence was one key to Armah’s intent, to parody a style that had grown so focused on style that any content would fit. “People tell me all the time, ‘You know, I’m thrown off by how ridiculous the song is,’ ”Armah said. “I was like, yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It shows kind of where we’ve gone as a culture, and as an art.”65

  It was the brilliantly edgy Irish band A House that had, perhaps, the best take on pop Beethoven, with their 1992 single “Endless Art.” The verses—lists of deceased artists, writers, and musicians, often cited with their birth and death dates—lead into the chorus, built on a sample of the first movement of the Fifth: “All dead, yet still alive.”66

  “HOW DIFFERENT life must have been before the tape-recorder. Fine things evaporated like rain drops. Nowadays, even rubbish has a chance of immortality. That is progress indeed.”

  The words of Stephen, a music critic, “dictating into the latest Japanese device” in Peter Ustinov’s play Beethoven’s Tenth. Later, Beethoven himself shows up at Stephen’s house (knocking on the door in predictable rhythm) and, after being outfitted with a hearing aid, spends three days listening to his own works—many for the first time—via Stephen’s record collection. Beethoven notes the productive virtue of his shelved expanse of vinyl: “From there to there,” he boasts.67

  Beethoven’s Fifth had been a soundtrack for the recording industry’s technological milestones—the 1910 Fifth by Friedrich Kark and the Odeon-Orchester had been the first complete symphony put on record, while RCA Victor had introduced the long-playing record with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the Fifth, conducted by Leopold Stokowski—but, with the advent of the LP era, Beethoven’s Fifth itself could make the pitch, and cheaply. In 1940, for example, the Southern California Gas Company began sponsoring nightly programs of classical music on radio station KFAC; a report in Public Utilities Fortnightly explained the rationale: “The theory: That people who like classical music are mostly nice people, who like nice things, have nice homes, constitute a sort of upper crust to the community pie—and therefore should be the folks to talk about the latest appliances.”68

  The programs actually exceeded that demographic, drawing a cross-section that would be any marketer’s dream. “The listening audience is large, includes all population and economic groups, commands attention longer than any other form of advertising, and gets close to its audience, as a very personal thing,” the report noted. “As a friend-maker, it is in its own class.”69

  But, with the advent of rock-and-roll, Beethoven-as-pitchman could go back to courting that theoretical, upper-crust (or upper-crust-aspiring) audience. Thus, for instance, Orson Welles—from 1978 until 1981, the television spokesperson for the California winemaker Paul Masson—was, in one ad, discovered by the camera listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the stereo:

  It took Beethoven four years to write that symphony. Some things can’t be rushed. Good music … and good wine: Paul Masson’s Emerald Dry—a delicious white wine. Paul Masson’s wines taste so good because they’re made with such care. What Paul Masson himself said nearly a century ago is still true today: We will sell no wine before its time.70

  In theory, that was the place of Beethoven’s Fifth in advertising—as a kind of underhanded appeal to snobbery, a shorthand for good taste. In practice, though, it was the Fifth’s sheer recognizability that won out.

  The strength of wartime V-for-Victory associations initially put a damper on the Fifth’s mass-media advertising presence. In the early 1950s, the fledgling jingle-writing team of Bobby Cassotto (who would later adopt the stage name Bobby Darin) and Don Kirshner (who would later produce the Monkees) had used the opening of the Fifth Symphony as the basis of a radio ad for a German airline; not surprisingly, the pitch was rejected.71 By the 1970s, though, an ad for the pain reliever Vanquish could successfully commercialize the war, with the Fifth ringing out as a construction worker flashed the V sign to indicate the defeat of his headache. (Churchill might have demurred, but Sir Thomas Beecham would have been proud.)

  A 1990 television spot for Nike shoes, starring NBA center David Robinson, used a nifty remix of the Fifth to set up Robinson’s dig at fellow Nike spokesman Bo Jackson: “Bo may know Diddley, but Mr. Robinson knows Beethoven.” It was a widespread intelligence, and one that became the Fifth’s main selling point—what better way to drill a name or a product or a slogan into the customer’s head than to leash it to a tune that seemingly everybody already knew?

  The association could be positive—as in an Italian television commercial for the cleaner Vim (“vi-vi-vi-Vim”)—or negative, as in a Swedish radio commercial for Nicorette gum, starring a choir coughing out the Fifth. Then there was Hyundai’s 2007 “Big Duh” campaign, in which the glossy poetry-in-motion images of automobiles standard to such commercials were backed by famous songs, “remixed” into a cappella renditions consisting solely of the word “duh”—“based on the idea that it’s a no-brainer to pick a Hyundai,” according to Jeff Goodby, chairman and chief creative officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who came up with the ads. Among the songs was, perhaps inevitably, the Fifth Symphony. “Beethoven would be rolling over in his grave,” reported Advertising Age magazine.72 Nevertheless, the campaign “earned the highest ranking for consumer recall,” according to the advertising analysts IAG Research.73 The quartus paeon still works.

  The Fifth Symphony also became a calling card for the composer, especially in Japan, where Beethoven himself (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) was often pressed into advertising service. In a 2006 commercial for Tokyo Gas, a Japanese Beethoven bursts out of an armoire, announcing himself by singing the first four notes of the Fifth. (After cajoling the armoire’s owner into letting him use the shower, and learning he can simultaneously wash his clothes without losing
hot water—thanks to Tokyo Gas and its new “Eco-Jozu” water heater—Beethoven runs to the piano, clad in a towel, shampoo in his hair, and pounds out the motive in triumph.)

  A commercial for NewTouch Sugomen, a line of frozen noodle bowls manufactured by the Yamadai corporation, showed Beethoven enjoying the product in question in rhythm—slurp, slurp, slurp, sluuurrrrp. Beethoven expressing his satisfaction by shouting “Unmei” (Fate), the popular Japanese name for the Fifth, but also aurally close to “umai”—“excellent.”74

  In South America, the advertising agency W/Brasil ingeniously used the motive to hint at Beethoven’s presence as part of a television commercial for the French-based media/electronics retailer Fnac: an overhead shot showed a customer flipping through a rack of compact discs, the plastic cases clacking in the Fifth’s opening rhythm, until the desired Beethoven album is located and retrieved. (The campaign won a 2003 Gold CLIO award.)

  The Fifth could even stand in for the customer rather than Beethoven, at least over the phone. In 1986, composers and recording engineers Mitch and Ira Yuspeh produced and marketed “Crazy Calls,” songs in various styles with lyrics designed to work as outgoing messages on tape-based telephone answering machines. Promoting the collection through television commercials, the brothers sold over a million cassettes. The message utilizing the Fifth Symphony’s opening theme was probably the best-known of the set. “Nobody home,” it sang, “nobody home.”