The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (15 page)

The symphony becomes a very Hoffmann-like tale. The music narrates what is nonetheless
completely encapsulated in the brief, startling opening, a glimpse that our finite
understanding
can’t quite circumnavigate, but that pulls us toward the infinite: a frame of reference
in which we might finally see that the opening and the entire work, seeming doubles,
are in fact one and the same.

Such doubling does not refashion the world so that the world itself makes more sense,
but rather so that its contradictions and irrationalities are more stark, and the
necessity of some higher, unseen unity is more obvious. Hoffmann’s Romantic aesthetic
espouses not an art that resolves the world, but one that shows how the world’s emotional
messiness is a door into a deeper understanding, past logic and reason. The music
of the Fifth—unencumbered by plot or text—bumps the listener to the doorstep. “Every
passion—love—hate—anger—despair etc., such as we encounter in opera, is clothed by
music in the purple shimmer of romanticism, and even that which we experience in life
leads us out beyond life into the kingdom of the infinite.”

Hoffmann shoots the moon with his description, the prose taking on a purple shimmer
of its own:

It is fair to say that the readers of the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
had never seen anything quite like this before. Hoffmann was tossing them out into
the deepest part of the Romantic wilderness; those who found the surroundings congenial
could count themselves among the aesthetic elite. “Romantic taste is rare, Romantic
talent even rarer,” Hoffmann noted; “this is probably why there are so few who can
strike that lyre that opens up the wonderful kingdom of the infinite.” The criteria
for greatness are being deliberately expanded beyond good and bad. Hoffmann reminds
us that “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of the underworld,” and that the door swings
both ways. “[T]he soul of every sensitive listener will certainly be deeply and closely
gripped by a lingering feeling, which is precisely that unnameable, foreboding longing.”

Hoffmann is at pains to demonstrate that the Fifth, as an exemplar of Romantic music
(“this should always be understood to refer only to instrumental music”), tells no
specific programmatic story, nor acts as an allegory for anything other than itself;
nothing even as vague as knocking Fate is mentioned. And yet Hoffmann’s review is
strongly, almost obsessively narrative. His description of the opening gives a taste
of the whole:

 … and so forth. We might chalk up this fanatical play-by-play—which he continues
for all four movements—to the fact that most of Hoffmann’s readers, like Hoffmann
himself, would not have heard the Fifth, nor would have had much prospect to hear
it anytime soon. (Hoffmann was reviewing the published score.) Except that Hoffmann
then reprints, in full score, the entire excerpt he has just walked us through (“the
reviewer inserts it here for his readers to examine”).

Orpheus and his lyre should tip us off, though: Hoffmann is, in essence, retelling
the Fifth Symphony as a heroic myth. The great classicist John H. Finley Jr. mapped
ancient Greek thought into four stages; the first, most basic, was the mythic, what
he called the “heroic mind.” Finley noted how, in Homer’s epics, objects keep their
descriptive epithets—he points to Hector’s helmet, always “all-shining”—even when
the descriptions are irrelevant to the dramatic context. “It is as if in whatever
circumstances [the object] keeps its particular being,” Finley wrote. The object “does
not change because people are sad or happy but remains what it is, one of the innumerable
fixed entities that comprise the world.” Hoffmann, in laying out the Fifth’s fixed
entities, exhibits Finley’s characterization of a mythic-heroic apprehension, “an
outgazing bent of mind that sees things exactly, each for itself, and seems innocent
of the idea that thought discerps and colors reality.”
¹⁴

On the one hand, Hoffmann’s assertion of mythic status fits his Romanticizing agenda
nicely. Dennis Ford, citing Finley’s mythic category, practically spells out the mechanics
of Hoffmann’s review. “The sacred realm as articulated by myth is universal, impersonal,
timeless, and transcendent. As such, it contrasts with the everyday, profane world
that is particular, personal, and time-bound.”
¹⁵
Hoffmann’s repeated longing for the infinite (and/or infinite longing) is reminding
the reader what to be listening for as he spins Beethoven’s tale, a tale immutable
and unchanging in its specific notes and rhythms but, like all
epics, a renewable source of metaphysical energy. On the other hand, that space between
specificity and universality tips the interpretive prerogative back to the listener—which
Romantic aestheticians would have considered a step back.

COMPOSERS
’
CAREERS
are now routinely divided into “early,” “middle,” and “late” periods; this three-bin
laundry sort was first invoked to put a shape on Beethoven’s career. At least with
Beethoven, critics and musicologists could color within somewhat clear biographical
lines: early-period Beethoven starts early; middle-period Beethoven starts with the
Heiligenstadt Testament, a reboot of determination in the face of his approaching
deafness; late-period Beethoven starts when the deafness finally reaches the point
where Beethoven retreats, as the Romantics would eventually portray it, into a world
of pure musical imagination.

It is easy to see why the Romantic musical aesthetic, with its championing of art
as a deeply personal statement, a missive from the unadulterated Divine to an intellectually
qualified reality, would seize on the example of
late-period
Beethoven: the best way to eliminate the messy contamination of the sensed world
is to shut it out. For Hoffmann to take the Fifth—one of the high-water marks of Beethoven’s
middle-period heroic style—as the model for a Romantic symphony is, by comparison,
odd: the sheer force of Beethoven’s heroic music deflects the personal as much as
it amplifies it.

Middle-period Beethoven is not necessarily Heroic Beethoven, but all of Beethoven’s
heroic works date from the middle period: the
Eroica
, the
Emperor
Concerto, the less sitcom-like portions of
Fidelio
, the
Appassionata
and
Waldstein
Piano Sonatas, and, of course, the Fifth Symphony. From the beginning of his career,
Beethoven had a reputation as an innovative rule breaker, and it was the heroic works,
especially the Third and Fifth Symphonies,
that cemented that image. But to convince an audience that you’re breaking the rules,
you have to establish a context in which the rules still apply; in Classical terms,
Beethoven’s heroic music is some of his most conformist, the better to highlight where
he goes off script—the “false” horn entrance in the
Eroica
; the distant-key entrance of the second theme in the
Waldstein;
the incursion of the third movement’s march into the finale of the Fifth. Even that
incursion can be subsumed into an operation that audiences accustomed to Mozart and
Haydn would have recognized—just as the end of the third movement dovetails into the
finale with a sudden burst of volume, the self-quotation explodes into a repeat of
the finale’s opening, fulfilling the formal requirement for a recapitulation of the
movement’s primary theme.

Where the heroic Beethoven breaks from his predecessors is in rhetorical tone. “Heroism
is assertive,” is how musicologist Michael P. Steinberg puts it. “The heroic style
is a style of assertion.”
¹⁶
Steinberg contrasts that with the Classical pattern of dialogue, themes juxtaposed
so that they seem to question and answer each other. Assertion would, at first glance,
seem to aid the Romantic program of shifting aesthetic power away from the listener
and toward the creator. But Beethoven’s assertive style also pushes forward a musical
surface so insistent that it becomes something of a firewall—and shifts the power
back
to the listener. The surface energy prevents us from peering behind its curtain,
but because we nevertheless want to sense something behind that curtain, we make an
educated guess, based on our own emotional experience.

In other words, Beethoven’s heroic music is a lot like Steve McQueen’s acting. In
films such as
The Great Escape
,
Bullitt
, or
The Getaway
, McQueen offered probably the purest example of a post-1960 Hollywood tough guy;
physically dynamic, emotionally inscrutable, stoically cool. Do McQueen’s characters
have deep reserves of imagination? An internal, intricately interwoven
matrix of memory and doubt? Complicated, conflicted inner lives? Who can tell? Novelist
and screenwriter William Goldman once described the movie star’s preference for an
implacable surface over a complex interior: “I don’t want to be the man who learns—I
want to be the man who knows.”
¹⁷
(Compare Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is
always right.”
¹⁸
)

The Fifth Symphony knows. Beethoven doesn’t so much take the listener on the journey
with him as return from the journey and start telling war stories. Both the first
movement’s struggle and the finale’s triumph are very public demonstrations. The energies
are directed outward, at the listener, not inward, drawing the listener. This is not
to say that Beethoven’s
effect
—or McQueen’s for that matter—is unemotional, but that, rather than transporting the
viewer/listener into a new emotional consciousness, the experience is rather that
of a provocative outline for the viewer/listener to fill in. It shifts the determination
of musical substance back to the listener.

Besides, Beethoven could eschew action movies when he wanted to. Throughout the middle
period, one can almost sense Beethoven alternating between heroic and intimate on
a piece-by-piece basis, much like a star following up a blockbuster with that more
“personal” project. This, too, would seem to violate the Romantic stricture of organic
unity. Intriguingly, variants of the four-note motive turn up in other middle-period
works, leaving one to wonder whether it is a coincidence, a stylistic tic, or a deliberate
sign of Beethoven’s putting asunder a narrative that the Romantic aesthetic would
see joined.

Owen Jander
¹⁹
has noted how Beethoven’s superimposition of stylized quail and cuckoo songs (so
labeled in the score) in the “Scene by the Brook” of the
Pastoral
Symphony produces both the three repeated notes and the falling third; taking the
Schindler-sourced “Fate” interpretation at face value, he reads
the Sixth Symphony, as well as the Fifth, as an autobiographical essay on the composer’s
advancing deafness. Raymond Knapp goes further,
²⁰
noting numerous similarities of structure between the Fifth and the Sixth (for example,
the Sixth’s opening phrase, like the Fifth, begins with a three-note pickup and ends
with a fermata), and proposing that the Fifth and the Sixth Symphonies be heard as
a giant whole. The gentle, caressing classicism of the opening of the Fourth Piano
Concerto might be the emotional opposite of the Fifth’s haymaker gambit, but a closer
look reveals, again, parallel features: three unaccented notes leading into the downbeat,
an initial avoidance of the tonic note in the melody, a rhythmically ambiguous held
note—we are approaching movie-star catchphrase territory here. And all three of these
works had their public premieres in the same concert: first the Sixth, then the concerto,
then the Fifth.

Considering the three works as a speculative trilogy at least points up why the Fifth
Symphony alone might have made a less awkward soapbox for Romantic proselytizing.
The Sixth Symphony’s literalism would have put off Romantic proponents (Hoffmann took
part of his review of the Fifth to dismiss those of Beethoven’s contemporaries who
trafficked in such imitative effects); as would, perhaps, the concerto’s retro-Mozart
tone of Apollonian reticence (when the Romantics finally got around to programmatizing
the concerto, they heard in its slow movement, again, the story of Orpheus opening
the gates of the underworld). Moreover, taken as a trilogy, one could even read the
three-act whole in Kantian terms: raw sense information (the Sixth’s naturalism) is
processed by the rational mind (the concerto’s classicism) by which it is raised beyond
the subjective into universal knowledge (the Fifth’s singular absoluteness). No wonder
the Romantics, their collective eyebrow cocked at Kant’s compartmentalization, focused
their attention on the Fifth as a self-contained whole.