The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination
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40. Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Der freie Satz): Volume III of New Musical Theories and Fantasies, Ernst Oster, trans. (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 3.
41. Alpern, “Music Theory as a Mode of Law,” pp. 1474–75.
42. See, for instance, this passage from Schenker’s Harmony: “The relationships of the tone are established in its systems.… A tone dominates the others if it subjects them to its superior vital force, within the relationship fixed in the various systems. In this sense, a system resembles, in anthropomorphic terms, a constitution, regulation, statute, or whatever other name we use to grasp conceptually the manifold relationships we enter.” (Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, Oswald Jonas, ed.; Elisabeth Mann Borgese, trans. [University of Chicago Press, 1954], p. 84.)
43. Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre (Berlin: Verlag von O. Häring, 1905), p. 49. (Emphasis added.) (“Die Staatsrechtslehre ist … eine Normwissenschaft. Ihre Normen sind von den Aussagen über das Sein des Staates als sozialer Erscheinung scharf zu trennen.”)
44. Georg Jellinek, Introduction à la Doctrine de L’État, Georges Fardis, ed., trans. (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1904), pp. 84–85. (“Veut-on se placer dans le domaine de l’esthétique? Le point de vue devient tout autre.… Il existe ainsi, dans le monde des sensations d’art, une vérité qui n’a rien de commun avec celle du monde des connaissances naturelles. La symphonie en ut mineur de Beethoven est, au point de vue du sentiment et de la perception musicale, la réalité la plus profonde, la plus indiscutablement vraie, la plus puissante: toute la science naturelle ne peut rien contre la conscience de cette réalité…. Les choses se comportent d’une manière analogue eu matière de droit.… Le monde juridique est un monde d’idées, il se comporte vis-à-vis du monde tangible comme le monde de l’art vis-à-vis du monde des sciences naturelles.”)
45. Cook, The Schenker Project, p. 212.
46. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 99–100.
47. Heinrich Schenker, Der Tonwille, vol. 1, p. 27.
48. Ibid., pp. 27–29.
49. Ibid., p. 29.
50. Ibid., p. 187.
51. Ibid., p. 187.
52. Ibid., p. 196.
53. Ibid., p. 30.
54. Henrich Schenker, Counterpoint, John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym, trans., Book 1 (New York: Schirmer Books, 1987), p. xviii.
55. Ibid., Book 2, pp. xiii.
56. Ibid., Book 2, p. xvi.
57. Cook, The Schenker Project, p. 150.
58. Quoted in Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, p. 147.
59. Ibid., p. 149.
60. Schenker’s argument might also be read as an example of a Teutonically heavy sense of humor; see Cook, The Schenker Project, p. 148.
61. “Reunion in San Francisco,” Billboard, May 5, 1945, p. 9.
62. Paul Johnson, “When Daring Dons Sported Through the Unguarded Groves of Academe,” The Spectator 282, no. 8914 (June 12, 1999): 29.
63. As related in “Tam-tam-tam-ta,” Der Spiegel (Sept. 3, 1970). See also Jeremy Bennett, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement, 1940–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 40.
64. C. E. Stevens, “Gildas Sapiens,” The English Historical Review 56, no. 223 (July 1941): 358.
65. See, for example, Sir John Lawrence’s version of the story in Anthony Rudolf, Sage Eye: The Aesthetic Passion of Jonathan Griffin (Berkeley, CA: Menard Press, 1992), p. 61. Lawrence attributes to Stevens the notion of an audible signal, but credits the Morse Code idea to “a large cigar smoking man from the Ministry of Warfare, whose name I forget.”
66. James Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970), p. 68.
67. See Franklin Leonard Pope, “The American Inventors of the Telegraph,” The Century 35, no. 6 (April 1888).
68. Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States: The Numbers Under the Signature of Brutus, Originally Published in the New York Observer (“Seventh Edition”) (New York: American and Foreign Christian Union, 1855), pp. 33–34.
69. Quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, A Thing or Two About Music (New York: Allen, Towne, & Heath, 1948), p. 81.
70. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, p. 170.
71. Ibid., p. 173. A 1953 episode of the television program This Is Your Life, telling the story of Hanna Bloch Kohner, a Holocaust survivor, would use the Fifth to underscore the liberation of Hanna and the other inmates from the Mauthausen concentration camp. See Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30–32.
72. Both the poster and the card are reproduced in Diane DeBlois and Robert Dalton Harris. “Morse Code V for Victory: Morale through the Mail in WWII,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, September 27, 2008, http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/symposium2008/DeBlois-Harris-V_for_Victory-paper.pdf.
73. The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, program for November 11–12, 1943. (Thanks to Will Robin for finding this program in the New York Philharmonic’s digital archives: http://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/2e25ab01-fdca-416e-9d2a-dfae3ddf78b8.)
74. Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers: The Ever-Widening War, 1941, vol. 3 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), p. 705.
75. Jonathan Aitken, Heroes and Contemporaries (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 22.
76. As in Life magazine, vol. 73, no. 1 (July 7, 1972), p. 21.
77. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, p. 166.
78. Schoenberg to Kurt List, January 24, 1946, in Schoenberg, Arnold Schoenberg: Letters, Erwin Stein, ed. (University of California Press, 1987), p. 238.
79. Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 280.
80. Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History 1800–1996: From Unification to Reunification (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 192. Furtwängler was on Goebbels’ Gottbegnadeten (“God-gifted”) list, a register of those artists the Reich Minister of Propaganda deemed irreplaceable to the regime and, thus, exempt from military service.
81. How much danger from the Nazi regime Furtwängler was ever in is not clear. Both Shirakawa and German musicologist Fred K. Prieberg have proposed that Himmler actively sought Furtwängler’s arrest, suspecting him of being sympathetic to the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler; but Michael H. Kater, in particular, has strongly doubted this theory: see Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 202.
82. Harvey Sachs, Toscanini (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 244.
83. As translated in Bryan R. Simms, “New Documents in the Schoenberg-Schenker Polemic,” Perspectives of New Music 16, no. 1 (Autumn-Winter 1977): 115–16.
84. Ibid., p. 113.
85. Ibid., p. 124.
86. Quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 162.
87. “Funds for Study with Schoenberg,” The New York Times, Sept. 26, 1933.
88. Arnold Schoenberg, “How I Came to Compose the Ode to Napoleon,” in Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 290–91.
89. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, Alfred Sutro, trans. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1903), pp. 351–52.
90. Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, p. 291.
91. Leonard Stein, “A Note on the Genesis of the Ode to Napoleon,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute II, no. 1 (Oct. 1977), p. 52.
92. According to one report, Schoenberg at first worked with a German translation of the poem, which lacked the final verses, and was “thrilled immeasurably” when he saw the complete version’s reference to Washington; see Walter H. Rubsamen, “Schoenberg in America,” The Musical Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Oct., 1951): 478. However, Schoenberg’s typed copy of the poem in English, with extensive pre
compositional notes, indicates that Schoenberg was in possession of the full version before starting work on the piece. See Martha M. Hyde, “The Format and Function of Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Sketches,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 468–70.
93. After Napoléon’s return from exile—the adventure of the Hundred Days—Byron renewed his affection, hoping that a victory might produce a radical shift in European society. Napoléon’s final defeat forestalled that possibility. The Boston-based scholar George Ticknor was visiting the poet when the news arrived:
After an instant’s pause, Lord Byron replied, “I am d——d sorry for it”; and then, after another slight pause, he added, “I didn’t know but I might live to see Lord Castlereagh’s head on a pole. But I suppose I sha’n’t, now.” And this was the first impression produced on his impetuous nature by the news of the battle of Waterloo.
Napoléon himself might have long since ceased to be anything but a symbol to Byron, but the collapse of what he symbolized—the prospect of a fit retribution for a conservative Europe—crushed the Emperor’s onetime castigator. See Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), vol. 1, p. 60.
94. Hyde, “The Format and Function of Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Sketches,” pp. 468–70.
95. Stein, “A Note on the Genesis of the Ode to Napoleon,” p. 53.
96. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, Martin Brady, trans. (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 16.
97. Schoenberg’s unease was, perhaps, anticipated by that of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. In 1900, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was invited to visit the great man (it was the composer’s second meeting with Tolstoy). Asked to play something, Rachmaninoff and Feodor Chaliapin performed Rachmaninoff’s song “Fate” (op. 21, no. 1), the music of which liberally quotes the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. As Rachmaninoff later recalled:
When we finished, we felt that all were delighted. Suddenly the enthusiastic applause was hushed and everyone was silent. Tolstoy sat in an armchair a little apart from the others, looking gloomy and cross. For the next hour I evaded him, but suddenly he came up to me and declared excitedly: “I must speak to you. I must tell you how I dislike it all!” And he went on and on: “Beethoven is nonsense, Pushkin and Lermontov also.” It was awful. (Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music [New York University Press, 1956], p. 89.)
The following year, Tolstoy would be excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for his espousal of anarcho-pacifist principles.
98. Pierre Boulez, “Schoenberg Is Dead,” Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Paule Thévenin, ed.; Stephen Walsh, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 213.
99. Wilhelm Langhans, Die Geschichte der Musik des 17. 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Verlag von F. E. C. Leuckart, 1887), Zweiter Band, p. 232.
100. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, p. 8.
101. Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War (Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 431–32.
CHAPTER 7. Samples
1. W. P. Lehmann, “Decoding of the Martian Language,” The Graduate Journal (University of Texas at Austin) 7, no. 1 (Dec. 1965): 269. The December 1965 issue of The Graduate Journal of the University of Texas at Austin was dedicated to “Planets and People”; Lehmann’s contribution was this speculative article disguised as a science-fiction story, detailing the efforts of future humans to decipher the musically based missives of Martians.
2. Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror. Dir. John Rawlins. Universal Pictures, 1942.
3. Fifth Column Mouse. Dir. I. Freleng. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1943.
4. Scrap Happy Daffy. Dir. Frank Tashlin. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1943.
5. Ding Dog Daddy. Dir. I. Freleng. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1942; The Home Front. Dir. Frank Tashlin. Warner Bros./U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1943.
6. Reunion in France. Dir. Jules Dassin. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1942.
7. Darby’s Rangers. Dir. William Wellman. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1958.
8. Verboten! Dir. Samuel Fuller. RKO Pictures, 1959.
9. Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 208–9. Fuller returned to the scene in his 1974 black-comedy thriller Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street.
10. The Longest Day. Dir. Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, and Bernhard Wicki. 20th-Century-Fox, 1962.
11. Alan Sillitoe, The General (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), pp. 126–27.
12. Counterpoint. Dir. Ralph Nelson. Universal Pictures, 1967.
13. Celebrity. Dir. Woody Allen. Miramax Films, 1998.
14. L.A. Story. Dir. Mick Jackson. TriStar Pictures, 1991.
15. Un Grand Amour de Beethoven. Dir. Abel Gance. Général Productions, 1936.
16. Immortal Beloved. Dir. Bernard Rose. Columbia Pictures, 1994.
17. “Occasional Notes,” The Musical Times (Feb. 1, 1911), p. 88.
18. Horace, The Works of Horace, Christopher Smart, trans., vol. 1 (London: W. Flexney; Mess. Johnson and Co.; T. Caslon, 1767), p. 23.
19. Horace, A Poetical Translation of the Works of Horace, Philip Francis, trans. (Edinburgh: Alexander Donaldson, 1779), p. 11.
20. For instance, compare Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s version, dating from 1769: “Früh und spat pochet der Tod mit mächtigem Fuss an Fürstenschlosser / Und Schäferhütten.” Horace, Horazens Oden, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, trans. (Berlin: Sandersche Buchhandlung, 1818), p. 11.
21. Quoted in Colin Roth, “Carl Nielsen and the Danish Tradition of Storytelling,” Carl Nielsen Studies, vol. 4 (2009): 178.
22. In Samuel Annesley, ed., A Supplement to the Morning-Exercise at Cripple-Gate (London: Thomas Cockerill, 1674), p. 93. Jenkyn was nearly executed for his part in Christopher Love’s plot to restore Charles II to the throne. Samuel Annesley was the grandfather of John and Charles Wesley.
23. Edmund S. Lorenz, Practical Church Music: A Discussion of Purposes Methods and Plans (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1909), p. 65.
24. Pat Conroy, The Water Is Wide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972), pp. 53–54.
25. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1900), p. 286.
26. John Sullivan Dwight, “Music in Boston,” in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, Including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630–1880, vol. 4 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883), p. 436.
27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884), p. 177.
28. Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 189.
29. James Alan McPherson, “Indivisible Man” (1969), in Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, eds., Conversations with Ralph Ellison (University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 181.
30. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 41–42.
31. Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act, p. 135.
32. Ellison, “Living with Music,” in ibid., p. 190.
33. Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 232.
34. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act, p. 94.
35. Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in ibid., p. 137.
36. Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 110.
37. Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act, p. 132.
38. Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 8.
39. Nadine Gordimer, “Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black,” in Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 7.
40. Alex Haley, “Playboy
Interview: Malcolm X,” Playboy (May 1963), p. 53.
41. Charles Schulz, Peanuts, July 7, 1969.
42. J. A. Rogers, Sex and Race: Volume III: Why White and Black Mix in Spite of Opposition (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1944), p. 306.
43. Quoted in Dominique-René de Lerma, “Beethoven as a Black Composer,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 120.
44. And, perhaps, a specifically American clash; a 2004 advertisement for the Belgian radio station Klara similarly put Beethoven in blackface (with the tagline “New, Jazz on Your Classical Radio”), with apparently little or no outcry. See Corey Keating, “WEBeethoven: Advertimento,” The Beethoven Journal 25, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 44.
45. Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” Transition 58 (1992): 20.
46. Hoffmann, E. T. A., “Review,” in Senner et al., The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, vol. 2, p. 98.
47. Steve Cannon et al., “A Very Stern Discipline: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, p. 132.
48. Nathan Hare, “The Black Anglo-Saxons.” Negro Digest 11, no. 7 (May 1962): 55.
49. LeRoi Jones, Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969), pp. 76, 83.
50. de Lerma, “Beethoven as a Black Composer,” p. 120.
51. Martin Luther King Jr., “Some Things We Must Do,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958, Clayborne Carson et al., eds. (University of California Press, 2000), p. 338. King also used the trope in his sermon “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” He credited it to one of his mentors, Dr. Benjamin Mays.
52. “Spotlight Winners of the Week,” Billboard, May 1, 1961, p. 21.
53. For the history of Ekseption, see Alex Gitlin’s Nederpop page on Trace (Rick van der Linden’s follow-up band): http://www.alexgitlin.com/trace.htm. See also Ralf Hoffmann, “Der Grenzgänger” (interview with Rick van der Linden), Okey!, July-August 2001, http://www.okey-online.com/artikel/041_report/index.html.