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

by Matthew Guerrieri

  20. A. W. Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Briefe (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1962), vol. 4, p. 37. See also Nicholas A. Germana, The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009).

  21. Friedrich Schiller, “The Mission of Moses,” in Schiller’s Complete Works, C. J. Hempel, ed. and trans. (Philadelphia: I. Kohler, 1861), vol. 2, p. 359.

  22. Thayer-Forbes, p. 240.

  23. See Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry, and the Tagebuch of 1812–1818,” Beethoven Forum 8 (2000): 101–46.

  24. Malcolm C. Duncan, Duncan’s Masonic Ritual and Monitor (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1866), pp. 59–60.

  25. August von Kotzebue, Theater von August v. Kotzebue (Verlag von Ignaz Klang in Wien und Eduard Kummer in Leipzig, 1841), vol. 35, p. 17.

  26. Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), p. 230.

  27. See Frithjof Haas, Hans von Bülow: Leben und Wirken (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag, 2002), pp. 332–33.

  28. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron’s Cain: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations, Truman Guy Steffan, ed. (University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 163.

  29. Ibid., p. 254.

  30. Richard Wagner to Hans von Bülow, October 10, 1854, in Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, Band VI, Hans-Josef Bauer et al., eds. (VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig, 1986), Band VI, pp. 257–61.

  31. C. A. Barry, “Hans von Bülow’s ‘Nirvána,’ ” Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 2, no. 9 (June, 1901): 298.

  32. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, S. W. Dyde, trans. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), p. xxvii.

  33. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, E. S. Haldane, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1955), vol. 1, p. 279.

  34. As translated in Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 29, 90.

  35. See Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris, trans. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977). In time, Hegel’s reputation would eclipse both subjects of his initial foray into philosophy. Schelling, who outlived his onetime friend, would bitterly claim to have taught Hegel everything he knew. Fichte’s revenge was more subtle—the simple thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic so often and somewhat inaccurately associated with Hegel’s thought was originally popularized by Fichte.

  36. Ibid., p. 172.

  37. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 466.

  38. Ibid., p. 212.

  39. Ibid., p. 257.

  40. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, p. 92.

  41. For a discussion that analyzes Hegel’s ambivalence as an attempt to dialectically mediate between formalism and anti-formalism, see Richard Eldridge, “Hegel on Music,” in Hegel and the Arts, Stephen Houlgate, ed. (Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 119–45.

  42. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 2, p. 895.

  43. Ibid., p. 902.

  44. Ibid., p. 896.

  45. Ibid., p. 895.

  46. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, pp. 172–74.

  47. Sidney Lanier, “To Beethoven,” in Poems of Sidney Lanier (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), p. 98.

  48. Ludwig Nohl, Life of Beethoven, John J. Lalor, trans. (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1881), p. 97. (Emphasis added.) (Originally published in Germany by Ernst Julius Günther, Leipzig, in 1867.)

  49. Scott Burnham, “Introduction” to A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, Scott Burnham, ed. and trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.4.

  50. A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, p. 66.

  51. Ibid., p. 63.

  52. Ibid., p. 92.

  53. Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 292.

  54. A. B. Marx, “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievements in This Field,” in Senner et al., The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 59–77, 66.

  55. Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–1818,” in Beethoven Studies 3, Alan Tyson, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 239.

  56. Friedrich Engels to Marie Engels, late 1838, in Marx and Engels, Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 403.

  57. Friedrich Engels to Marie Engels, March 11, 1841, in ibid., p. 430.

  58. Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), pp. 28–29.

  59. Friedrich Engels to Schlüter, May 15, 1885, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Letters to Americans, 1848–1895, Alexander Trachtenberg, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1953), p. 145.

  60. Hunt, Marx’s General, p. 45.

  61. Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs, Ernest Untermann, trans. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906), pp. 146, 149.

  62. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Salo Ryazanskaya, trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 20.

  63. Marx never finished his critical survey of Hegel’s philosophy; the project’s endpoint receded from Marx the more he worked on it. He did publish, in 1844, an Introduction to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” which, its tentative title notwithstanding, finds Marx in his best pugilistic, aphoristic style. It is here that, combating Hegel’s focus on the Absolute, Marx tosses his most famous antireligious grenade, calling religion “the opium of the people.” But the next sentence makes it clear that what Marx is really against is the false comfort he senses in Hegel’s history, how it seems to let the present off the hook in favor of an Ideal in the future. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people,” Marx writes, “is a demand for their true happiness” (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” Joseph O’Malley, trans. and ed. [Cambridge University Press, 1977], p. 131.) Feuerbach’s subject-predicate stratagem fits hand in glove with Marx’s disdain for religion: Hegel’s insistence on the agency of the Absolute is inverted into man’s invention of the divine.

  64. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, C. P. Dutt, trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1960), p. 27.

  65. Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, W. H. Kerridge, trans. (http://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​kautsky/​1919/​terrcomm/​index.​htm), chapter 8.

  66. Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to Karl Kautsky (New York: Workers Party of America, 1922), p. 45.

  67. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1922), as quoted in Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), p. 313.

  68. A. B. Marx, “A Few Words on the Symphony and Beethoven’s Achievements in This Field,” in Senner et al., The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions, vol. 1, p. 75.

  69. Anatoly Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art, Avril Pyman and Fainna Glagoleva, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 112.

  70. Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 187.

  71. Richard Taruskin, “Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony,” in Shostakovich Studies, David Fanning, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 29.

  72. Quoted in Alan N. Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989 (University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 77.

  73. “Back Into the Darkness,” Time, September 6, 1968, http://​www.​time.​com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,​9171,​900324,​00.​html.


  74. See Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004), pp. 231–34.

  75. Ibid., p. 266.

  76. This particular power struggle was Jiang Qing’s yearlong “Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius” movement, the “Lin” being Lin Biao, the former army chief who had died in a 1971 plane crash, apparently fleeing a failed anti-Mao coup, and the ancient Chinese sage Confucius being recast as a reactionary who supported landowners against the centralized control of Shang Yang during the Qin dynasty.

  77. Xiyun Yang, “U.S. Orchestra Performs in China, in Echoes of 1973,” The New York Times, May 7, 2010.

  78. Melvin and Cai, Rhapsody in Red, p. 286.

  79. “Beethoven’s 5th—Courtesy of the Police.” Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor Newsletter (July 1997). At http://​www.​hkhrm.​org.​hk/​english/​reports/​enw/​enw0797a.​htm.

  80. Leon Trotsky, “In ‘Socialist’ Norway” (1936), http://​www.​marxists.​org/​archive/​trotsky/​1936/​12/​nor.​htm.

  81. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 581.

  82. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 258.

  83. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 273–74.

  84. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 178–79.

  85. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), p. 54.

  86. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 65.

  87. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 281.

  88. Joachim Köhler, Richard Wagner: Last of the Titans, Stewart Spencer, trans. (Yale University Press, 2004), p. 508.

  89. As translated by Malcolm Brown in his online Nietzsche Chronicle (http://​www.​dartmouth.​edu/​~fnchron/​1872.​html).

  90. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 247.

  91. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 97–98.

  92. Ibid., pp. 99, 100.

  93. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, R. J. Hollingdale, trans.; Daniel Breazeale, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 91.

  94. As translated in Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 57.

  95. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 91.

  96. Ibid., p. 92.

  97. The quotation comes from Leopold von Ranke, Fürsten und völker von Süd-Europa, vol. 2 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1834), p. 34.

  98. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, p. 105.

  99. Ibid., p. 97.

  100. Ibid., p. 93.

  101. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 243.

  102. Münzer, Mademoiselle, pp. 129–30. (“Von neuem klang das geheimnisvolle, strenge, drohende Motiv auf. Unvorgeschriebene Dissonanzen erhöhten seine Schauerlichkeit.… ‘Ich weiß nicht,’ sagte aber da ihr harmloser Gatte. ‘Mir klingt es mehr falsch als sozusagen pikant.’ ‘Adolf,’ rief die Justizrätin entrüstet, ‘das ist eben das Unglück deiner einseitigen juristischen Ausbildung. Du hast nie etwas für deine musikalische Erziehung getan. Jetzt rächt es sich und du vermagst nicht, der künstlerischen Einsicht deiner Familie zu folgen.’ Der Schluß des ersten Satzes übertraf den vom Mittag noch um ein beträchtliches an ungelöster Dissonanz, denn diesmal spielte das Fräulein richtig, und nur Eduard geriet plötzlich in Fis-dur hinein. Der Justizrat zuckte empfindlich zusammen und stöhnte hörbar, aber die Justizrätin wand sich sozusagen vor Wonne und sagte im Tone tiefster Verachtung: ‘Richard Strauß!!’ ”)

  103. Ibid., p. 132. Ellipsis in the original. (“Da lächelte sie und öffnete leise, gütig und liebevoll die unverschlossene Tür des Knabenzimmers.…”)

  CHAPTER 3. Infinities

  1. Karl Marx, “Neumodische Romantik,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung, Band 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), p. 675. (“Das Kind, das, wie ihr wißt, an Göthe schreib, / Und ihm weis machen wollt’, er hab’ sie lieb, / Das Kind war einst im Theater zugegen, / ‘ne Uniform thut sich bewegen. / Es blickt zu ihr gar freundlich lächelnd hin: / ‘Bettina wünscht, mein Herr, in ihrem Sinn, / Das Lockenhaupt an sie zu lehnen, / Gefaßt von wundersamem Sehnen.’ / Die Uniform erwiedert gar trocken drauf: / ‘Bettina laß dem Willen seinen Lauf!’ / ‘Recht, spricht sie, weißt du wohl, mein Mäuschen, / Auf meinem Kopf giebts keine Läuschen!’ ”)

  2. As translated in Maynard Solomon, “Beethoven’s Tagebuch of 1812–1818,” in Beethoven Studies 3, Alan Tyson, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 261.

  3. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, James Creed Meredith, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 60.

  4. Ibid., p. 89.

  5. Ibid., p. 82.

  6. For a particularly good analysis of this idea, see James Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant: A Critique (London: Continuum, 2004).

  7. Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 19–20.

  8. Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London: John Murray, 1993), p. 20.

  9. J. G. Hamann, “Aesthetica in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose,” Joyce P. Crick, trans., in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, J. M. Bernstein, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 13.

  10. Ibid., p. 4.

  11. Quoted in Berlin, The Magus of the North, p. 99.

  12. Quoted in Oscar Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), p. 49.

  13. Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 236.

  14. John H. Finley, Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 3–4.

  15. Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History (University of California Press, 2008), p. 30.

  16. Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 71.

  17. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner Books, 1983), p. 134.

  18. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903–04), p. 250.

  19. See Owen Jander, “The Prophetic Conversation in Beethoven’s ‘Scene by the Brook,’ ” The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 508–59.

  20. See Raymond Knapp, “A Tale of Two Symphonies: Converging Narrative of Divine Reconciliation in Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 291–343.

  21. Hoffmann’s habit of cherry-picking to suit his Romanticism is the most common criticism of his review of the Fifth. Robin Wallace refers to the “almost irrational consistency” of Hoffmann’s focus on the kingdom of the infinite, saying that Hoffmann’s “foremost aim was always to explain how the music worked upon his emotions, and he chose to do so as directly as possible, even when that meant overlooking important passages in favor of those which suited him best.” And Abigail Chantler notes how Hoffmann isolated and rhetorically amplified certain features of the symphony—the somewhat unusual key relationships in the Andante, the use of the timpani in bridging the last two movements—in order to shoehorn everything into his organically unified whole, how he “attributed to unrelated musical features an extra-musical kinship in order to justify their inclusion in the work.” (See Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics [Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 24, 26; Chantler, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics [Ashgate Publishing, 2006], p. 75.)

 
22. Stephen Rumph, “A Kingdom Not of This World: The Political Context of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism,” 19th-Century Music 19, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 51. Steven Cassedy has speculated that Hoffmann’s formulation may be echoing a rather casual reading of Kant; see his “Beethoven the Romantic: How E. T. A. Hoffmann Got It Right,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (Jan. 2010): especially pp. 2–4.

  23. After Napoléon’s exile, Hoffmann’s criticism of the French would be more explicit. In 1814, he would chastise the “unutterable sacrilege of that nation [France]” that “led finally to a violent revolution that rushed across the earth like a devastating storm”; by 1821, he could disdain the operas of the great French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, wondering “how it was that this empty, monotonous sing-song … could be regarded as music for almost a hundred years, at least by the French.” (Hoffmann, “Alte und neue Kirchenmusik,” as translated in Rumph, “A Kingdom Not of This World,” p. 56; Hoffmann, “Further Observations on Spontini’s Opera Olimpia,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, David Charlton, ed. Martyn Clarke, trans. [Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 435.)

  24. Rumph, “A Kingdom Not of This World,” p. 61.

  25. Johann Gottfried Herder, “An die Deutschen,” as translated in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 53.

  26. Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany 1750–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 60–61.

  27. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 134.

  28. Ibid., p. 123.

  29. Ortiz M. Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and Western Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, Addison Gayle Jr., ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971), p. 165.

  30. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p. 135.

  31. Hoffmann to Carl Friedrich Kunz, August 19, 1813, in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Briefwechsel, Erster Band, Friedrich Schnapp, ed. (München: Winkler-Verlag, 1967), p. 409 (“so wird es Ihnen nicht sehr darauf ankomme[n]”).

  32. Hoffmann, “The Poet and the Composer,” Martyn Clarke, trans., in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, pp. 189–90.