The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (24 page)

That disquieting opportunity and peril—the newfound ease with which one could move
up the ladder, or down—was delineated as early as 1833 by the politician and indefatigable
novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He blamed the anxiety of social climbing for English
reserve and arrogance. “Nobody being really fixed in society, except the
very
great,” Bulwer-Lytton observed, “in any advance you make to a seeming equal, you
may either lower yourself by an acquaintance utterly devoid of the fictitious advantages
which are considered respectable; or, on the other hand, you may subject your pride
to the mortification of a rebut from one, who, for reasons impossible for you to discover,
considers his station far more unequivocal than your own.”
⁴⁴
The stiff upper lip was both a shield and a bluff.

In such circumstances, Beethoven’s very lack of Englishness could become a virtue,
a chance for a hemmed-in society to vicariously revel in unfettered foreignness. George
Grove once jotted down these thoughts in a notebook under the heading “Beethoven”:
“Such men cannot be judged by the standard of
ordinary men—of Englishmen particularly. They are free from conventions which bind
us, they are all nerves, they indulge in strange gestures and utter odd noises and
say strange words, and make everyone laugh till we find that the gestures and looks
and words are the absolute expression of their inmost feeling.”
⁴⁵

Beethoven became a proxy, expressing the inmost feelings of Victorians who would never
admit that the feelings were their own. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s son, Robert Bulwer-Lytton,
followed in his father’s literary footsteps, publishing under the pen name of Owen
Meredith. (“Genius does what it must,” Lytton/Meredith famously wrote, “talent does
what it can.”) The younger Bulwer-Lytton—“one of the most amateur of all nineteenth-century
politicians” in the words of British minister and historian Roy Jenkins
⁴⁶
—also became a fixture in Victorian diplomacy; as Viceroy of India, Lytton counted
on his résumé the Great Indian Famine of the late 1870s as well as the Pyrrhically
expensive Second Anglo-Afghan War, the latter decisively contributing to the downfall
of Disraeli’s final premiership in 1880. Falling upward in the peerage, Lytton was
created 1st Earl of Lytton for his efforts. “Never regret, never explain, never apologise,”
as the Oxford Master Benjamin Jowett was said to have encouraged a generation of Victorian
elites;
⁴⁷
but the veneer could crack, as in Robert Bulwer-Lytton’s description of a Beethoven
symphony:

The Victorian stereotype of imperturbable pride was well-earned, but the angst it
covered up was hidden in plain sight, often under Beethoven’s byline.

B
EETHOVEN
’
S MUSIC
became a repository for inchoate Victorian emotions in much the same way that Hoffmann
et al., fueled by the anxieties of the Napoleonic era, had traced Romanticism onto
the outline of the Fifth Symphony—and in much the same way that the products Victorian
factories turned out acquired Romantic mysteries of their own, textiles and patent
medicines taking on trappings previously reserved for symphonies. Even Karl Marx—whose
exile, it should be remembered, made him a Victorian Londoner—couldn’t help but revert
to old Romantic ideas when confronted with the era’s flood of saleable stuff. Assiduously
collecting data, Marx could track how ever-cheaper manufacturing created a growing
disparity between use value (what a thing was worth) and money-form (what it cost
to produce), but quantifying the larger meaning was more difficult. The imbalance
was an opportunity for capitalists—but a philosophical conundrum for Marx.

Romanticism abhors a vacuum, and, much as it colonized the uncharted areas of Enlightenment
aesthetics, it filled in the no-man’s-land between commodities’ use value and their
money-form. Marx’s sketch of what he called the “Fetishism” of commodities is filled
with terminology reminiscent of Hoffmann and Hamann, familiar symbolism papering over
a logical void. To make a table out of wood does not change its substance: “the table
continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood,”
Marx writes. “But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something
transcendent.” A commodity has “mystical character,” it is “enigmatical” and “mysterious,”
it is, “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
Commodities become the ether through which people relate, crowding out the reality
of the human labor that produced them. Their power is so intangible that Marx tries
all sorts of oblique strategies to describe it, finally appealing to a higher power,
or at least its worldly illusion: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must
have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world
the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life,
and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the
world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”
⁴⁹

Perhaps the quintessential Victorian commodity was Beecham’s Pills, the near-ubiquitous
patent medicine. Formulated by Thomas Beecham, a former livestock keeper who enjoyed
experimenting with herbal veterinary treatments, the pills first appeared in the 1840s,
part of a brand lineup that included tooth powders and something called “Female’s
Friend.”
⁵⁰
But it was the pills that became the mainstay of Beecham’s company. They worked as
laxatives—and not much else—but that didn’t stop the company from ascribing to them
an almost universal applicability. “Beecham’s Pills are admitted by thousands to be
worth above a Guinea a Box,” read one typical ad,

That last claim, at least, may have been a deliberately vague accuracy—there is some
evidence that the pills, taken in sufficient quantities, could induce abortions.
⁵¹
“These are ‘facts’ admitted by thousands, in all classes of society,” the pitch continued,
“and one of the best guarantees to the Nervous and Debilitated is that Beecham’s Pills
have the Largest Sale of any Patent Medicine in the World.” In other words, not only
did the pills sell because they worked, they worked because they sold. Other advertisements
for the pills were even more explicit in their commodity fetishism. “Beecham’s Pills
have unfailingly carried the message of health and good cheer to the homes of the
people”—and the evangelists were so good at proclaiming their gospel that they were
self-sufficient. “Personal letters endorsing Beecham’s Pills are received by the thousands,”
the ad goes on, “but it is never necessary to publish them.
The pills recommend themselves
.”

The self-recommending pills were nevertheless the beneficiaries of a startling amount
of marketing: appearing before a parliamentary committee in 1913, Sir Joseph Beecham,
the founder’s son, admitted that the company’s spending on advertising had reached
£100,000 a year.
⁵²
Among the advertising was a series of
Beecham’s Music Portfolios
, cheap songbooks leavened with tunes extolling the benefits of Beecham’s Pills. One
of the most well known of these set new words to a Mendelssohnian Victorian favorite:

Authorship of the carol was claimed by Sir Joseph’s son Thomas. “Look here, my lad,”
he recalled his father telling him, “I’ve been spendin’ a lot o’ brass on your musical
education, and now Ah wants you to help me.” Even late in life, Sir Thomas Beecham,
the greatest British conductor of his time, who went through an estimated hundred-million-pound
inheritance founding orchestras and opera companies, remained cheekily proud of his
early effort. “These sentiments … especially the ellipsis, seemed to me admirably
to express the rapture which is occasioned by a good effortless release.”
⁵³

Beecham’s father, Sir Joseph, was a music lover himself, and something of an impresario—late
in life, he bankrolled a “Grand Season of Russian Opera and Ballet” that included
the British premiere of Stravinsky’s
Le Sacre du Printemps
. In 1899, for his inauguration as mayor of the town of St. Helens (where he had built
the enormous Beecham’s factory), Sir Joseph hired the Hallé Orchestra, under director
Hans Richter, to play a special gala concert. “Almost at the eleventh hour,” Thomas
recalled, “the devastating intelligence arrived that Richter could not appear: my
father was in despair, his magnificent entertainment seemed threatened with disaster.”
Sir Joseph asked his son what to do. “I made the suggestion,” the son replied, “that
I should take the absentee’s place.” Sir Joseph eventually came around to the idea
of a twenty-year-old neophyte taking the podium in front of one of the country’s most
accomplished professional orchestras, and it was thus that Thomas Beecham made his
professional debut, conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His father, the venerable
pill seller, had spied a marketing
opportunity—realizing, in his son’s words, “being the astutest advertiser of his day,
that what had looked like a possible reverse might be worked up to a definite advantage.”
⁵⁴

The marketing extended to the music. Beecham’s branding had so saturated Victorian
life that a story went around of an English explorer, deep in uncharted Africa, coming
across a tree painted with an advertisement for Beecham’s Pills.
⁵⁵
The Fifth Symphony was similarly established in the Victorian imagination. In Robert
Louis Stevenson’s 1894 novel
The Ebb-Tide
(written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne), the poetically named Robert Herrick,
bright and cultured, but “deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood,” initially
embodies his namesake’s
carpe diem
reputation—“While Fates permit us, let’s be merry; / Passe all we must the fatall
Ferry.”
⁵⁶

Herrick has abandoned a string of financial failures in England and America, fleeing
to Tahiti; as the book opens, he is sick and homeless, sheltering in an abandoned
jail. Struck by an acute sense of rootlessness and transition, Herrick decides to
add a memorial of his own presence to the building’s mass of graffiti:

The symphony recommends itself.

• • •

THE MOST FAMOUS
Victorian advertisement (in the word’s original sense) of Beethoven’s Fifth actually
appeared nearly a decade after Victoria’s reign ended. E. M. Forster’s novel
Howards End
was published in 1910, the year Victoria’s son and successor Edward VII died, taking
with him, perhaps, the notion that royal bonhomie, strategic marriage, and noblesse
oblige could, on their own, hold civilization together.
Howards End
is Forster’s tone poem of the era’s fade-out, and the tone is telling: tragedy and
farce, jostling for position. Forster—who lived until 1970—would have a chance to
observe the twentieth century’s harrowing pageant, but his point of view was forever
attuned to Victorian shades. Humanist, leftist, and homosexual, Forster made his intellectual
home in that English specialty, the curiously central margin—he was a member of the
Bloomsbury group, the quintessential band of inside outsiders. “I belong to the fag-end
of Victorian liberalism,” he noted.
⁵⁸

In the fifth chapter of
Howards End
, the middle-class, intellectually inclined, late-Romantic Schlegels—Margaret, Helen,
their brother, Tibby—attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Queen’s
Hall; even in that “dreariest music-room in London,” as Forster judged it, the Fifth,
“the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man,” is “cheap at
two shillings.”
⁵⁹
(The room was, indeed, cheap: while the Crystal Palace offered season tickets for
reserved stalls at two guineas, Queen’s Hall undercut that price by half—there, at
least, Beethoven was worth a guinea a box.)