The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
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The concert, advertised as a “musical Akademie,” was organized by Beethoven himself. The evening had been at least two years in the making: in order to reserve the space, Beethoven needed the permission of Joseph Hartl, the Viennese Court Councillor in charge of the city’s theaters. Hartl also was in charge of Vienna’s public charities, and used access to the theaters as bait in order to lure performers for benefit concerts. Beethoven hated him. In one letter, he complained of having to repeatedly wait on Hartl in order to press his request for an Akademie: “I am so annoyed that all I desire is to be a bear so that as often as I were to lift my paw I could knock down some so-called great ———ass.”6
Beethoven nonetheless lent his talents and compositions to three charity concerts between 1807 and 1808, the last coming on November 15 of that year. (November 15 is the feast-day of Leopold, the patron saint of Vienna.) During rehearsals for this concert, Beethoven somehow enraged the players; according to Joseph Röckel (father of August, who plotted revolution in Dresden with Richard Wagner), the breaking point was a rehearsal where Beethoven pounded with such ferocity that he knocked the candles from the piano. Whatever the cause, the players refused to continue unless Beethoven was banished from the hall; notes were relayed back and forth from rehearsals to composer via the concertmasters.
Such was the atmosphere in which November’s concert proceeded, and it hardly bode well for Beethoven’s own concert a month later, which would necessitate drawing on the same pool of musicians. To make matters worse, another benefit concert, this one benefiting the Widows and Orphans Fund, was also scheduled for December 22. In a letter to the publishers Breitkopf and Härtel, Beethoven sensed a conspiracy, led by his onetime teacher:
The promoters of the concert for the widows, out of hatred for me, Herr Salieri being my most active opponent, played me a horrible trick. They threatened to expel any musician belonging to their company who would play for my benefit—7
If the accusation was not mere paranoia, it would give Salieri the distinction of having intrigued against both Mozart and Beethoven.
Beethoven was writing to Breitkopf and Härtel because he had sold them the Fifth Symphony. It was the second time he had sold it. The symphony had originally been commissioned by Franz von Oppersdorff, a Silesian count wealthy enough to maintain his own private orchestra. For 500 florins, Count Oppersdorff had received the Fourth Symphony—the score along with exclusive rights to it for six months—and liked it so much that he commissioned another, for another 500 florins. However, after collecting 350 of those florins, Beethoven wrote to the Count, “You will look at me in a false light, but necessity compelled me to sell to someone else the symphony which was written for you and another as well”—the Fifth and the Sixth, for which Beethoven had already been negotiating with Breitkopf and Härtel for some months.8
It was a good thing Beethoven had gotten 350 florins out of the Count, as he came out on the short end of the negotiations with Breitkopf and Härtel. After initially proposing a price of 900 florins for “two symphonies, a Mass [in C major], and a sonata for pianoforte and violoncello [op. 69],” Beethoven eventually settled for 600 florins, in return for “two symphonies, a sonata with violoncello obbligato, two trios for pianoforte, violin and violoncello (since such trios are now rather scarce), or, instead of these last two trios, a symphony”—plus the Mass for free. (“I pay attention not only to what is profitable but also to what brings honour and glory,” Beethoven explained, though he may also have felt the need to repair his ego over the Mass, which its dedicatee, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II, had criticized.)9
So Beethoven went into his Akademie with too much music, surly musicians, and the pressure to turn a profit. The result was about as one would expect. The audience grew restless. The singers were noticeably shivering in the winter cold. The Choral Fantasy ran off the rails in performance, and Beethoven was forced to stop the orchestra and start over.
Still, Beethoven convinced himself that the concert had gone over well—“the public nevertheless applauded the whole performance with enthusiasm”—though he expected the worst from the critics. “[S]cribblers in Vienna will certainly not fail to send again to the Musikalische Zeitung some wretched stuff directed against me,” he predicted.10
The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, however, perhaps having caught some glimpse of the Fifth Symphony’s future all-purpose ubiquity, opted for discretion.
[This] new, grand symphony by Beethoven … in its fashion, in accordance both with the ideas and with their treatment, once again stands so much apart from all others that even the trained listener must hear it several times before he can make it his own and arrive at a definite opinion.11
APPENDIX: Eight Interesting Recordings
BERLIN PHILHARMONIC
Arthur Nikisch, conductor
(HMV 040784/91, recorded 1913)
Originally released on eight single-side 78 rpm discs (and now available on multiple CD transfers), Nikisch’s complete Fifth is a remarkable glimpse of Romantic extravagance, alternating between intemperate languor and impetuosity. Phrases ebb and flow; Nikisch repeatedly draws out the tempo to an organ-like sustain and then slams on the gas. More indulgence than modern ears might be accustomed to, but more flair, too.
BERLIN PHILHARMONIC
Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor
(recorded June 30, 1943)
Furtwängler’s live, wartime recording of the Fifth (available on at least six different labels) is heightened on so many levels that even Furtwängler’s other recordings of the symphony don’t quite match its overwhelming impact. The fervency of the interpretation, the brilliance of the playing, and the ominous shadow of the Third Reich troubling every note: the struggle between Beethoven’s music and the darkest impulses of humanity is palpable. (Arturo Toscanini’s VE-day performance with the NBC Philharmonic is also available, on Music & Arts 753: disciplined and astonishingly, relentlessly fast—the Toscanini style at its most zealous.)
GLENN GOULD
piano
(Columbia MS 7095, 1968)
Gould revived Franz Liszt’s piano solo transcription of the Fifth as, maybe, a wry play on of his reputation as a hermit, but the result is thrilling and surprising. The first movement has hammered force, Gould reveling in the heavy crush of the piano’s bass, while his eccentric exaltation comes to the fore in the Andante: he takes a tempo far slower than any orchestra could ever hope to sustain, and both he and we get wondrously lost in it. Worth seeking out on LP for Gould’s hilarious parody-review liner notes.
THE NEW PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA
Pierre Boulez, conductor
(Columbia M 30085, 1970)
To hear Boulez’s infamous reading of the Fifth requires a bit of searching; it was left out of Sony Classical’s “Pierre Boulez Edition” of reissues (although a CD reissue was released in Japan). Often criticized as temperamentally slow and dryly unidiomatic, Boulez’s long march through the Fifth nonetheless uncovers new shadings, a modern reading full of modern bleakness, a giant machine both inexorable and imprisoning.
VIENNA PHILHARMONIC
Carlos Kleiber, conductor
(Deutsche Grammophon 2530-518, 1975)
For many years, this was considered the gold standard of the Fifth on record, and it’s not hard to hear why: the playing is gorgeously plush, the reading is full of charging momentum. If Beethoven’s Fifth were the golden age of luxury jet travel, this is what it would sound like, hurtling forth in grand style.
ORCHESTRE RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE ET ROMANTIQUE
John Eliot Gardiner, conductor
(Archiv 447062, 1995)
Gardiner founded this group to explore the musical echoes of the French Revolution on period instruments; their Fifth is one of the best of the historically informed performances, being dedicated to speed, élan, and the pursuit of unabashed rabble-rousing. As a description of the Fifth, “revolutionary” has become a bland commonplace, but Gardiner and his cadres make you want to go
out and guillotine an aristocrat.
ENSEMBLE MODERN
Peter Eötvös, conductor
(BMC Records CD 063, 2001)
A recording that ropes the microphone into its conspiracy; Eötvös and the chamber-sized Ensemble Modern, new-music specialists, amplify every instrument in close-up, then remix and balance the sound into a coordinated assault. The rock-style sonic punch is matched by the interpretation, lean and solidly muscular.
THE PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA
on The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics
(Columbia KC 33049, 1973)
Formed by students at England’s Portsmouth School of Art in 1970, spearheaded by the experimental composer Gavin Bryars, the Sinfonia eschewed technical skill: members were either non-musicians or musicians playing unfamiliar instruments. Their recording of the Fifth—a medley of all four movements, in 1-4-2-3 order—is a glorious mess of wrong notes, fudged rhythms, and untrammeled enthusiasm. That it is still recognizably the Fifth is part of the cheeky point.
Acknowledgments
The book was Marty Asher’s idea, and he shepherded it through with enthusiasm and editorial focus. Andrew Carlson and Jeff Alexander conscientiously and thoughtfully brought the manuscript through the final stages of publication. Alex Ross vouched for the author, and vouchsafed the author by generously reviewing drafts of the book, as did Jeremy Eichler, Marti Epstein, Katie Hamill, Phyllis Hoffman, Robert Hoffman, Rebecca Hunt, Ethan Iverson, Mark Meyer, and Jack Miller; any remaining errors—factual, interpretive, or stylistic—are mine alone. Moe distracted the author into crucial, enforced, procrastinatory reflection.
Lucy Kim made the entire book possible, just as she has made possible every other even remotely worthwhile thing I have ever done. To journey with someone of such beauty, discernment, and resilience is a joy that the word “love” can only begin to encompass.
FRAMINGHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
MARCH 4, 2012
Notes
PREFACE
1. Jeph Jacques, “Number 1336: Canathesia,” Questionable Content, http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1336.
2. Robert Haven Schauffler, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1944), p. 217.
3. According to the poet Christoph Kuffner. See Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, Elliot Forbes, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 674. (Hereafter “Thayer-Forbes.”)
4. James F. Green, “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: A Forgotten Anecdote Discovered,” The Beethoven Journal, 25, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 36–37. Upon the death of Albert, King of Saxony, in 1902, a correspondent to The Spectator recalled the ruler telling a similar story: “Beethoven, said the King, was once asked by a profound thinker the ‘meaning’ of the mysterious opening notes of the C Minor Symphony. The composer replied in a drastic German phrase (which has its equivalent in other languages) whose four monosyllables fitted the four quavers, and, at the same time, were a suitable reply to an asinine question.” (“X.Y.Z.,” “The King of Saxony. [To the editor of the ‘Spectator.’]” The Spectator [London], no. 3861 [June 28, 1902]: 1005–6.)
CHAPTER 1. Revolutions
1. David Cairns, Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist 1803–1832 (University of California Press, 2000), p. 268.
2. Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 205.
3. Austin Clarkson, “Lecture on Dada by Stefan Wolpe,” The Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1986): 213–14.
4. See, most notably, Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), pp. 11–31.
5. See, for example, Nicky Lossoff, “Silent Music and the Eternal Silence,” in Silence, Music, Silent Music, Nicky Lossoff and Jenny Doctor, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 205–22.
6. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Geoffrey Bennington and Ian Macleod, trans. (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 61. See also Robin Marriner, “Derrida and the Parergon,” in Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, eds., A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 349–59. For another musical view, see Richard C. Littlefield, “The Silence of the Frames,” Music Theory Online 2.1 (1996), http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.96.2.1/mto.96.2.1.littlefield.html. Critic Winthrop Sargeant told this story: “A friend of mine took a Buddhist monk to hear the Boston Symphony perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His comment was ‘Not enough silence!’ ” Sargeant, “Musical Events,” The New Yorker 47, no. 52 [February 12, 1972]: 73.
7. Wesley Wehr, The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, & the Wicked Witch of the West (University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 236.
8. See Eric Johnson, “A Composer’s Vision: Photographs by Ernest Bloch,” Aperture 16, no. 3 (Nov. 1972).
9. Richard Wagner, On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren), Edward Dannreuther, trans. (London: William Reeves, 1887), p. 30.
10. Felix Weingartner, On the Performance of Beethoven’s Symphonies, Jessie Crosland, trans. (London: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1907), p. 61.
11. Norman Del Mar, Conducting Beethoven. Volume I: The Symphonies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 71.
12. Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 119.
13. Del Mar, Conducting Beethoven, p. 74.
14. Emily Anderson, ed. The Letters of Beethoven, Collected, Translated and Edited with an Introduction, Appendixes, Notes and Indexes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), vol. 1, p. 217.
15. Ibid., p. 60.
16. Ibid., p. 217.
17. Quoted in Thayer-Forbes, p. 373.
18. Ibid., p. 358.
19. Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 93.
20. A. McCombe et al., “Guidelines for the Grading of Tinnitus Severity, the Results of a Working Group Commissioned by the British Association of Otolaryngologists, Head and Neck Surgeons, 1999,” Clinical Otolaryngology & Applied Sciences 26, no. 5 (Oct. 2001): 388–93.
21. [Alexander Wheelock Thayer], “From My Diary. No. XVI,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 2, no. 19 (Feb. 12, 1853): 149.
22. Annette Maria DiMedeo, Frances McCollin: Her Life and Music (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), p. 5.
23. Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven, A Study in Mythmaking (Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2008), p. 160.
24. William McGuffey, McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader (American Book Co., 1879), p. 303. The Crofton Boys was first published in 1842, only fifteen years after Beethoven’s death, making Hugh’s mother pretty culturally hip for a London druggist’s wife. Martineau was a pioneering journalist and sociologist who advocated for feminism, abolitionism, and the positivist theories of August Comte, whose popular historical “law of three stages” (theocratic, metaphysical, scientific) was another manifestation of the nineteenth-century fetish for three-part intellectual structures that also gave us the early-middle-late division of Beethoven’s career.
25. For example, on page 27 of Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett’s Just Curious About History, Jeeves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), a collection of historical trivia: “[B]y the time [Beethoven] reached his early thirties his hearing was gone, and he could no longer play the piano properly.” In a teaching guide called Breaking Away from the Textbook: The Enlightenment through the 20th Century (by Ron H. Pahl [Lanham, MD: R&L Education, 2002], p. 90), one reads that “[Beethoven] called himself a ‘tone poet’ and he was deaf by the time he was thirty, but that did not stop him from reinventing music.” Another educational workbook, Editing Skills: Practical Activities Using Text Types, Ages 11+ (Balcatta, Australia: R.I.C. Publications, 2005, p. 83), designed to train students to spot errors of spelling and grammar, reiterates the trope in a convincingly imitated semiliterate style: “By the age of 30, Beethoven was profowndly deaf yet he still managed to compose brilliant music examples of these works are the symph
ones, ‘Eroica’ and ‘Pastoral.’ ”
26. Ludwig van Beethovens Konversationshefte, Band 9, Grita Herre, ed. (VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig, 1988), pp. 290–91.
27. Owen Jander, “ ‘Let Your Deafness No Longer Be a Secret—Even In Art’: Self-Portraiture and the Third Movement of the C-Minor Symphony,” The Beethoven Journal 8 (2000): 25.
28. Quoted in Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (University of Rochester Press, 2002), p. 111.
29. Ibid., p. 231.
30. Ibid.
31. Thayer-Forbes, p. 209.
32. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Review,” in Wayne M. Senner, translator, and Robin Wallace and William Meredith, editors. The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, 2 vols. (University of Nebraska Press, 1999 [vol. 1], 2001 [vol. 2]), vol. 2, p. 98.
33. See Michael C. Tusa, “Beethoven’s ‘C-minor Mood,’ Some Thoughts on the Structural Implications of Key Choice,” Beethoven Forum 2 (1993): 6–10.
34. Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), p. 89.
35. Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics, pp. 232–33.
36. See Konrad Ulrich, “Mozart’s Sketches,” Early Music 20, no. 1 (Feb., 1992), for a useful overview.
37. The best survey of Landsberg 6 is Rachel W. Wade, “Beethoven’s Eroica Sketchbook,” Fontes artis musicae XXIV, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1977): 254–90. Dating the sketches can be a tricky business, but the presence of early sketches for Fidelio—which Beethoven first turned his attention to at the end of 1803—makes early 1804 a plausible date for the sketches of the Fifth. See also the detailed discussion of the sketchbook in Douglas Johnson, et al., The Beethoven Sketchbooks (University of California Press, 1985), pp. 137–45.