The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (10 page)

But musical ideas hit a barrier with the final step of the realization of Essence,
Actuality
, a dialectic between Reflection and Appearance. “The utterance of the actual is the
actual itself.”
³⁹
In other words: We are no longer talking about what we, individually or even collectively,
think the meaning of the first four notes might be. We are talking about what the
meaning actually
is
.

Can any interpretation of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth—or, indeed, of
any
piece of music—rise to that level of certainty? The sheer contradictory profusion
of images and agendas surrounding the first four notes alone would indicate otherwise.
In Hegelian terms, the protean nature of such interpretations
is an indication that music and art are still historically stuck in a process of determining
Essence, as the rest of society runs ahead in Hegel’s logical process. Hegel made
this point explicitly all the way back in his inaugural
Difference
essay: “The entire system of relations constituting life has become detached from
art, and thus the concept of art’s all-embracing coherence has been lost, and transformed
into the concept either of superstition or of entertainment.”
⁴⁰
It’s hard to think of
any
nontrivial statement one could make about the Fifth that would make it all the way
to the stage of Actuality, always tripping over the barrier between subjective opinion
and objective statement.

It’s at this point that it becomes obvious just how contrived a target the opening
of Beethoven’s Fifth is for Hegel’s logic, a square peg being crammed into a round
philosophical hole. But it was the ill fit, perhaps, that encouraged Hegel’s ambivalence
about music in his aesthetic thinking. At various points, Hegel seems to be trying
to have it both ways about music’s capacity for meaning.
⁴¹
On the one hand, “[T]he real region of [musical] compositions remains a rather formal
inwardness, pure sound”;
⁴²
on the other hand, without “spiritual content and expression,” music is not true
art, is “empty and meaningless.”
⁴³

At times, Hegel’s definitions of music verge on self-negation. “The meaning to be
expressed in a musical theme,” he writes, “is already exhausted in the theme.”
⁴⁴
The composer’s subject matter is “a retreat into the inner life’s own freedom, a
self-enjoyment, and, in many departments of music, even an assurance that as artist
he is free from subject-matter altogether.”
⁴⁵
Such inherent subjectivity, historically speaking, stalled music’s advance toward
the Absolute in the interpretive free-for-all of Reflection.

Could speculative philosophy ever push our understanding of music past its current
Reflective shambles, past each individual listener privileging their own interpretive
imagination? Hegel thought not—only literature or, even better, philosophy could get
past such subjective “formal inwardness,” get past one’s personal
“feeling” to engage the objective world and, eventually, reach the Absolute Idea,
the ultimate unity, the end-all of Hegel’s historical progress. Hegel admitted the
Romantic idea that art and music could give a
glimpse
of the Absolute, but considered that a symptom of immature systems of religious thought.
“As regards the close connection of art with the various religions it may be specially
noted that
beautiful
art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete
and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute,” he wrote; art’s vision of the divine
is only as clear as an imperfect religion can make it. In the long run, though, art
becomes unnecessary:

The limited, irreverent liberation of art is better than nothing, but only a poor
substitute for the Idea. If Beethoven affords a better-than-average view of the promised
land, it’s only because he can’t cross over.

Nevertheless, other commentators were only too happy to give Beethoven a privileged
place in Hegel-like intellectual hierarchies. American poet Sidney Lanier portrayed
the “satisfying symphonies” as something like dialectic syntheses, soothing those
“thoughts that fray the restless soul,” including “The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate,
/ Whereof both cannot be, yet are.”
⁴⁷
And already by 1867, Ludwig Nohl, in his biography of Beethoven, was opening out
the Fifth’s philosophical playing field toward an encompassed Absolute, extending
the expanded Fate of the first four notes over the whole work:

But the most lasting incursion of Hegelian concepts into Beethoven’s reputation concerned
the composer himself: Beethoven’s career and music, the very fact of his existence,
was interpreted as an unprecedented watershed in a progressive view of music history.
One of the most influential and subtle exponents of this idea was a Berlin-based lawyer-turned-music-critic
named Adolph Bernhard Marx.

IN
1830, the year before he died, Hegel was appointed Rector of the University of Berlin.
The same year, the university offered a chair in music to A. B. Marx, who promptly
put into pedagogical practice what he had already been preaching through journalism:
championing the evident greatness of Austro-German music—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven—in
Hegelian terms. As musicologist Scott Burnham has written, it was a matter “of transforming
the southern currency of the Viennese musical masters into a more fiercely northern
intellectual and political capital.”
⁴⁹

Marx is today primarily remembered for codifying and naming what we now call sonata-allegro
(or just sonata) form, a structural pattern common to works of the mid- to late-eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. The pattern goes like this:

The opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth fits this pattern to a tee. As it should:
sonata form was explicitly modeled on Beethoven’s practice, an after-the-fact attempt
to systematize what the next generation regarded as the apex of Classical composition.
But it also, deliberately, put Beethoven’s music in a privileged position vis-à-vis
history.

Marx took pains to present sonata form as the culmination of a Hegelian process. In
his 1856 essay “Form in Music,” Marx starts at the formal level of the motive (“Only
the succession of two or more tones … shows the spirit persisting in the musical element”
⁵⁰
) and works his way up through a series of dialectical oppositions to the “greater
whole” of the sonata. “The evolution of this series of forms,” he summarizes, “has
been the historical task of all artists faithful to their calling.” Unlike Hegel,
however, Marx’s ladder never runs out of rungs, for music is inseparable from the
human spirit: “[T]he series of forms may be deemed
infinite
; at least no one can point to an end, or cut-off point, of the series, as long as
music maintains its place in the realm of human affairs—that is, forever. For that
which the human spirit
has begotten in accordance with the necessity of its essence is created forever.”
⁵¹
The difficulty of Hegel’s theory of Essence is (perhaps dialectically) also an opportunity,
a vacuum that Marx fills with a more exalted view of music than Hegel himself ever
took—a vacuum that (as we shall see) the Romantics would fill with similar enthusiasm.

Marx’s most complete exegesis of sonata form came in the third volume of his four-volume
Practical and Theoretical Method of Musical Composition
. Again, Hegelian hints abound, with Marx seeing a fundamental process of theme-digression-return
rising through five levels of rondo form to arrive at sonata form, where the multiplicity
of themes is fodder for synthesis: “the
whole
in its inner
unity
 … becomes the main concern.”
⁵²

Marx formulated his definition of sonata form primarily from Beethoven, yet he spends
even more space exploring all those instances where Beethoven seems to push the definition
to its breaking point. Marx is, in fact, engaged in an exercise more subtle than just
demonstrating Beethoven’s music to be a Hegelian culmination; he is defining sonata
form as something that Beethoven has already surpassed. The laws are set down in order
that Marx can show how Beethoven rendered the laws obsolete. Sonata form is a concept
through which Beethoven’s essence can shine forth. The implicit lesson for any composition
students who happened to be reading: surpass the previous generation and keep history
on the move.

But Marx’s Hegelian definition of sonata form forever closed it off from the possibility
of Hegelian progress. “When sonata form did not yet exist, it had a history,” Charles
Rosen once noted. “Once it had been called into existence by early nineteenth-century
theory, history was no longer possible for it; it was defined, fixed, and unalterable.”
⁵³
But that was, perhaps, the point all along. Early on in his career, Marx had already
cast the Fifth as “the first [symphony] to advance beyond the Mozartian point of view.”
⁵⁴
In Marx’s analysis, sonata form changed
from a basic, flexible framework into a historical boundary for Beethoven’s genius
to vault over.

There is a bit of a full-circle aspect to Marx’s formulation. Beethoven thought in
terms of a personal Fate to be surmounted: in his
Tagebuch
Beethoven copied down lengthy excerpts from Zacharias Werner’s dramatic poem
Die Söhne des Thals
(
The Sons of the Valley
). Like much of the rest of Beethoven’s journal, the drama is steeped in Masonic atmosphere—it
retells one of the more popular legends of Freemasonry’s origins, tracing the order
to the fourteenth-century suppression of the Knights Templar. And it also poeticizes
a Hegelian transcendence of Fate:

A generation later, with Hegel as an enabler, Marx portrayed Beethoven as surmounting
historical
, rather than personal, Fate.

But such projecting of the Fifth’s narrative onto the whole of human society raises
a question, one that parallels the subsequent nineteenth-century rumpus over Hegel’s
concept of history: Is the Fifth’s fateful struggle and eventual exultation a mirror
of civilization, or its unrealized blueprint? Both explanations came into play as
Hegel’s legacy bifurcated; Hegel’s rational-is-real formulation produced competing
claimants to Hegel’s mantle. The teams even acquired their own names, at least in
hindsight: the Right-, or Old Hegelians versus the Left-, or Young Hegelians. (Both
terms proved more useful to historians than to the players themselves: the Right-Hegelians
never used the name themselves, and the Young Hegelians, like many
intellectual blocs, spent as much time arguing amongst themselves as they did taking
on their Old counterparts.)

Putting it somewhat simply, a Right-Hegelian could argue that if the real is rational,
then the way things are, right now, falls somewhere along Hegel’s path to the absolute,
the implication being that the way things are—economically, socially, politically—is
as good, and as moral, as it could possibly be. But a radical Left-Hegelian could
counter that the continuing existence of societal divisions was clear evidence that
Hegel’s Absolute remained unfulfilled, that change is always necessary, that the work
goes on.

IN
1839, eighteen-year-old Friedrich Engels was working as an unpaid clerk for a linen
exporter in Bremen. Bored and antsy, he passed the time by writing letters to his
sister. In one letter, he showed off his burgeoning composing skills with a two-part
harmonization of Luther’s chorale
“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”;
Marie Engels must have given her brother some grief over it. “Listen,” Friedrich
protests, “composing is hard work; you have to pay attention to so many things—the
harmony of the chords and the right progression, and that gives a lot of trouble.”
⁵⁶