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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  The standard backlash against Adorno’s jazz writing was that he was simply an insufferable elitist, misreading jazz in order to preserve “high” culture. (As one critic puts it: “The aesthetic net must not be cast too wide lest it drag up trash.”106) But to classify Adorno’s criticism as mere snobbery is a misreading as well: Adorno had some regard for the low end of the high-low cultural continuum. In his book on film music, written with fellow émigré Hanns Eisler, Adorno allowed that movies “such as ‘westerns’ or gangster and horror pictures often are in a certain way superior to pretentious grade-A films.”107 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer scolded the “culture industry” for its antipathy to difference, no matter the provenance: “The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg.”108 Even cartoons are made to converge on respectability—browbeaten into insisting on “the very ideology which enslaves them,” audiences end up favoring the properly punished troublemaking of Donald Duck over the consequence-free hedonism of Betty Boop.109

  In other words, Adorno’s problem with jazz is not that it isn’t high culture—it’s that it is neither high-culture nor low-culture enough to elude the culture industry. Only art at the extremes of the high-low continuum could avoid being appropriated: high art because it was transcendent, low art because it was anarchic. Middlebrow culture was Adorno’s real target—all the aura of art, but none of its threat to order. Both critics and apologists have noted that Adorno’s jazz analyses would better correspond to light jazz, “sweet” jazz, the Paul-Whiteman-like arrangements that would have been prevalent on the radio, if not in those clubs where “hot” jazz reigned. Conflating the styles made hash of Adorno’s musicology. But maybe that was part of his point: jazz had been fairly easily defanged for mass consumption. (Ralph Ellison had Invisible Man’s narrator imagine re-creating jazz’s potency in a way reminiscent of Stefan Wolpe’s Dada experiments with the Fifth: “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’—all at the same time.”110)

  It is no wonder that it was in America, where the appropriation of culture was conspicuous, even celebrated, that Adorno was most primed to dialectically expose it, and not just in jazz and popular music. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, which warns of the fetishizing nature of serialism, dates from his exile, as does his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which took Western rationality to similar task.

  But it was also in America that Adorno’s fascination with Beethoven crystallized into a book—one he never finished.111 The surviving fragments of the project are a particularly diffuse constellation; one nevertheless can perceive Adorno trying to carve out space for the exceptional nature of Beethoven’s music.

  THE FRAGMENTATION of the Fifth was, for Adorno, the mechanism by which mass media and mass culture dragged Beethoven toward middlebrow status. “Radio symphonies,” as Adorno called them—an on-air mediation of the canon so thoroughgoing that it created a new genre—promoted a kind of music-as-trivia-answer, substituting recognition for comprehension, encouraged hearing a part to listening to the whole. It was the difference between musical understanding and music appreciation.

  In 1954, the Book-of-the-Month Club introduced “Music-Appreciation Records,” in which recordings of the standard repertoire were backed with spoken analysis and musical examples, “to help you understand music better and enjoy it more.”112 The free, no-obligation tryout record was Beethoven’s Fifth: “You have heard this great work countless times—what have you heard in it? And what may you have failed to hear?” Notice the aim of the two-pronged sales pitch—inducing anxiety that one’s individual experience both requires re-categorization (what have you heard?), and is still somehow lacking in comparison with majority opinion (what may you have failed to hear?).

  Such pressure to conform was at the heart of Adorno’s quarrel with mass media over music, no matter how altruistic mass media’s intent. Adorno once wrote a scathing analysis of NBC’s long-running Music Appreciation Hour, a show aimed at schoolchildren, hosted and conducted by Walter Damrosch. The show’s procedure was familiar—break a symphony down into its constituent themes, and point out structural signposts. But such “atomistic listening,” in Adorno’s reckoning, was a deliberate alienation from music’s power. “While apparently urging recognition in order to help people to ‘enjoy’ music, the Music Appreciation Hour actually encourages enjoyment, not of the music itself, but of the awareness that one knows music.”113 Understanding, as Adorno posits it—what he calls a “life-relationship” with music—is open-ended and individual, and thus far too inefficient for mass media, which relies on the mere illusion of an individual relationship. Recognition, though, is instant gratification; not everyone can experience the Fifth as transcendent, but everyone can recognize when the main theme comes back. It is in such recognition that the media advances its own interests over that of Beethoven’s:

  Here lies the connection between the categories of consumer goods, particularly commercial entertainment, and the sort of practical aesthetics advocated by the Hour. Something must be pleasing and worth its money to be admitted to the market. On the contrary, the work of art really raises postulates of its own, and it is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please the listener.114

  Reducing the Fifth to a parade of themes subordinates it by substituting a kind of musical score-keeping for a true engagement with the musical whole. It was the same sort of bait-and-switch that Adorno sensed in one of Walter Benjamin’s critical experiments: Benjamin had attempted an analysis of Baudelaire consisting solely of juxtaposed quotations of Baudelaire’s own writings, a mosaic list that would, in theory, produce a self-evident argument. Adorno chided him: “You superstitiously attribute to material enumeration a power of illumination that is never kept.”115

  So what? The full Fifth would still remain, available to those who, instinctively or consciously, rejected its division into easily digestible parts. The problem, for Adorno, is that by the time we would know enough to reject such hearing, the damage is already done—and it has flipped Beethoven’s philosophical content upside-down, reversed the music’s dialectic. And it is in that dialectic that Beethoven’s true importance lies. The material enumeration of Beethoven’s symphonies, privileging themes over the whole, irresponsibly makes something out of what Adorno perceives as the core of Beethoven’s music: nothing.

  “IN BEETHOVEN everything can become anything, because it ‘is’ nothing,” Adorno wrote.116 And the “nothing” Adorno is referring to is not just the silence Beethoven’s music arises out of, but the themes themselves, their brevity, their circumscribed simplicity. Adorno talks of “the nothing of the first bars”117 of the Fifth, of how such themes are “formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own.”118

  The idea connects Beethoven directly to the German idealists. “Being is indeed nothing at all,” Hegel said, but “within becoming, being is no longer simply being; and nothing, through its oneness with being, is no longer simply nothing.”119 Beethoven’s music acts out this genesis: the “nothing” of his themes is transformed into being by the way Beethoven uses the themes to build his musical forms. The theme of the Fifth is nothing by itself; the whole symphony—“not so much the production of forms, as their reproduction out of freedom”120—brings the theme into union with its being through the process of its becoming.

  Freedom is, for Adorno, the key to Beethoven’s music, a freedom both philosophically deep and elemental. Hegel, remember, treated such aspects of music as an analogy to the mechanism of the intellect. For Adorno, it was something more. Musicologist Daniel P. K. Chua puts it this way:

  [I]t is precisely what Adorno calls the “nullity of the particular” that allows the symphonic will to determine the material in any way it chooses; the will is poised at the point of adequation, totally indifferent to the empty plen
itude of the material; the elements merely form a vacuum for the frictionless activity of freedom.121

  In the “empty plenitude” is endless possibility. Everything can become anything: absolute freedom.

  Thus, in Beethoven’s music, German idealism is taken back from Hegel’s circumspect complexities to its revolutionary origins. Adorno’s Beethoven, in fact, echoes one of Hegel’s earliest writings, a fragmentary note, sometimes attributed to Friedrich Hölderlin, the so-called “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism”—probably a memorandum of student conversations with Hölderlin and Schiller: “The first idea is, of course, the representation of myself as an absolutely free being. With this free, self-conscious being a whole world comes into existence—out of nothing—the only true and conceivable creation from nothing.” The “Programme” goes on to advocate enlightened anarchy. “We must thus also progress beyond the state” to “absolute freedom of all spirits, who carry the intelligible world in themselves and may seek neither god nor immortality outside of themselves.”122

  This foreshadows the words of a fictional Adorno, the Devil in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, just before he transforms into a very Adorno-like manifestation: “Take Beethoven’s notebooks. There is no thematic conception there as God gave it. He remoulds it and adds ‘Meilleur’ ”123—(“better”). (Adorno and Mann, fellow temporary Californians, had discussed music as the book was being written.) Where the fictional Adorno had Beethoven improving on God, the real Adorno had him improve on society—again, in terms that echo the “Oldest Programme”:

  Let us reflect on Beethoven. If he is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer.… The central categories of artistic construction can be translated into social ones.… It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that [Beethoven’s] movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world.124

  Beethoven’s music has progressed beyond the state—“its social tutelage”—and carries the intelligible world in itself.

  But Beethoven’s music is, nevertheless, in the world, the historical world, and that is where the freedom at its core becomes troublesome. “[T]he works themselves are not self-sufficient, are not indifferent toward the time,” Adorno warned. “Only because they transform themselves historically, unfold and wither in time; because their own truth-content is historical and not a pure essence, are they so susceptible to that which is allegedly inflicted on them from outside.”125 This is why Adorno so insistently harangued against their fragmentation. Hearing the Fifth as quotations from the Fifth was not just a trivializing annoyance but struck directly at the heart of Beethoven’s power to resist appropriation. It asserted something-ness for Beethoven’s themes while denying them their Hegelian becoming. It turned the music’s absolute freedom into a liability.

  “The primal cells in Beethoven are nothing in themselves, mere concentrates of the tonal idiom to which only the symphony lends voice,” Adorno warned. “Torn from their context, their artful irrelevance becomes the commonplace which, as the initial motif of the Fifth, was to be exploited up to the hilt by international patriotism.”126 The war conveniently acted out a negative dialectic on this point: in his notes for his Beethoven book, Adorno saved a newspaper cutting, an Associated Press report, dateline Bonn, March 10, 1945:

  The birthplace of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, the opening notes of whose Fifth Symphony have been used by the Allies as a symbol for victory, was virtually destroyed in the fight for this old university city.127

  SINCE HIS DEATH, in 1969, Adorno’s reputation has waxed and waned—mostly the latter. The complexity of his writing was a persistent barrier. His analysis of the way societies leveraged enjoyment to maintain control was all too easily read as an indictment of enjoyment itself. His German Idealist lineage did not endear him to the rising post-modernist school. His Marxism, however idiosyncratic, eroded his prestige as international Communism collapsed under the weight of its own corruption.

  Nevertheless, there is at least one aspect of Adorno that deserves a continuing place in human thought: his optimism. It is odd to think of Adorno, the virtuoso of the negative dialectic, the scold who insisted on the objectivity of suffering, as an optimist, but he was. There is a transcript of a conversation between Adorno and Horkheimer in which Adorno defends himself from a criticism that his ideas are naïve:

  ADORNO: … Is not this criticism already an admission that one no longer believes in happiness? Is not [my] naïveté a higher form of knowledge than the unnaïve knowledge of analysis?

  HORKHEIMER: I have not given up the claim to happiness, but I do not believe in happiness. Whoever really believes in happiness is in the worst sense naïve.

  ADORNO: We must be at once more naïve and much less naïve.128

  It was this optimism that led Adorno back to Beethoven again and again: he heard in the music a way past the modern world—his modern world—of war and exile and totalitarianism. Beethoven achieved in music what the world forever tries and fails to achieve: the better society. “[T]his is imprinted in Beethoven’s music, the sublime music, as a trait of esthetic untruth: by its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure.”129 And: “That Beethoven never goes out of date is connected, perhaps, to the fact that reality has not yet caught up with his music.”130

  That is itself an optimistic statement—one might just as plausibly say that reality has caught up with the Fifth all too well, forever smudging it with two centuries of interpretive fingerprints. The list of those who have tried to claim it—revolutionaries and reactionaries, Hegelians both Right and Left, radical Transcendentalists and proper Victorians, the Nazis and the Allies—is forbiddingly long and frequently contradictory. But, if we believe Adorno, it is in contradiction that reality can again break into the mind. Adorno’s dialectic puts the lie to any single reading of the Fifth by allowing the measure of all of them—the sheer number of attempted appropriations is a testament to the persistent power of Beethoven’s reality.

  Can that reality break through again? “The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, properly performed,” Adorno insisted, “must be rendered with the character of a thesis, as if they were a free act over which no material has precedence.”131 Even after all the intrusions of poetics, programs, sentiment, and technology, he thought it could still be done. To know what the Fifth has been burdened with is to know what to clear away. You have to start somewhere.

  Epilogue

  THE PREMIERE, incidentally, was something of a disaster. The most famous account of the concert comes from Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a composer and writer who lived a virtual summation of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century European history. As a teenager, he was encouraged to study philosophy by Immanuel Kant; as a composer, he set texts and libretti by Goethe, and was also friends with Herder and Schiller. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Bettina von Arnim’s husband and brother, respectively) dedicated their famous collection of German folk poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, to Reichardt (although Brentano later soured on Reichardt, on account of his incessant social climbing and gossiping).1 He supported the French Revolution (for which he was fired) before turning against Napoleon (for which he was exiled).

  Toward the end of his life, Reichardt was trying to make a career in Vienna; on December 22, 1808, he found himself sitting in the box of Prince Lobkowitz, Beethoven’s patron, at the Theater-an-der-Wien. “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten,” he recalled, “and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing—and still more of a loud.”2 The concert included:

  the Sixth Symphony;

  the concert aria “Ah! Perfido”;

  the “Gloria” fro
m the Mass in C Major, op. 86;

  the Fourth Piano Concerto, with composer at the keyboard;

  the Fifth Symphony;

  the “Sanctus” from the Mass in C Major;

  a piano improvisation;

  and, finally, the Choral Fantasy for piano, orchestra, and chorus, op. 80.

  At one point, Beethoven had considered ending the concert with the Fifth, but, in the words of Alexander Thayer, “to defer that work until the close was to incur the risk of endangering its effect by presenting it to an audience too weary for the close attention needful on first hearing to its fair comprehension and appreciation.”3 Beethoven’s response to that dilemma was to make the concert longer: the Choral Fantasy was a last-minute addition, written for the concert.

  Reichardt enjoyed the Fourth Piano Concerto, especially the slow movement; Beethoven “sang on his instrument with deep melancholy feeling.” But as for the Fifth:

  A large, very elaborate, too long symphony. A gentleman next to us assured us that, at the rehearsal, he had seen that the violoncello part, which was very busy, alone covered thirty or forty pages.4

  Reichardt nevertheless allowed that music copyists were doubtless as skilled as their legal counterparts in stretching out their work and boosting their per-page fees. And even after four hours of difficult music in a freezing hall, Reichardt was sympathetic: “Poor Beethoven, who from this, his own concert, was having the first and only scant profit that he could find in a whole year, had found in the rehearsals and performance a lot of opposition and almost no support.”5