The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (38 page)

So what? The full Fifth would still remain, available to those who, instinctively
or consciously, rejected its division into easily digestible parts. The problem, for
Adorno, is that by the time we would know enough to reject such hearing, the damage
is already done—and it has flipped Beethoven’s philosophical content upside-down,
reversed the music’s dialectic. And it is in that dialectic that Beethoven’s true
importance lies. The material enumeration of Beethoven’s symphonies, privileging themes
over the whole, irresponsibly makes something out of what Adorno perceives as the
core of Beethoven’s music: nothing.

“
IN
B
EETHOVEN
everything can become anything, because it ‘is’ nothing,” Adorno wrote.
¹¹⁶
And the “nothing” Adorno is referring to is not just the silence Beethoven’s music
arises out of, but the themes themselves, their brevity, their circumscribed simplicity.
Adorno talks of “the nothing of the first bars”
¹¹⁷
of the Fifth, of how such themes are “formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness
as things of their own.”
¹¹⁸

The idea connects Beethoven directly to the German idealists. “Being is indeed nothing
at all,” Hegel said, but “within becoming,
being is no longer simply being; and nothing, through its oneness with being, is no
longer simply nothing.”
¹¹⁹
Beethoven’s music acts out this genesis: the “nothing” of his themes is transformed
into being by the way Beethoven uses the themes to build his musical forms. The theme
of the Fifth is nothing by itself; the whole symphony—“not so much the production
of forms, as their reproduction out of freedom”
¹²⁰
—brings the theme into union with its being through the process of its becoming.

Freedom is, for Adorno, the key to Beethoven’s music, a freedom both philosophically
deep and elemental. Hegel, remember, treated such aspects of music as an analogy to
the mechanism of the intellect. For Adorno, it was something more. Musicologist Daniel
P. K. Chua puts it this way:

In the “empty plenitude” is endless possibility. Everything can become anything: absolute
freedom.

Thus, in Beethoven’s music, German idealism is taken back from Hegel’s circumspect
complexities to its revolutionary origins. Adorno’s Beethoven, in fact, echoes one
of Hegel’s earliest writings, a fragmentary note, sometimes attributed to Friedrich
Hölderlin, the so-called “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism”—probably
a memorandum of student conversations with Hölderlin and Schiller: “The first idea
is, of course, the representation
of myself as
an absolutely free being. With this free, self-conscious being a whole
world
comes into existence—out of nothing—the only true and conceivable
creation from nothing
.” The “Programme” goes on to advocate
enlightened anarchy. “We must thus also progress beyond the state” to “absolute freedom
of all spirits, who carry the intelligible world in themselves and may seek neither
god nor immortality
outside of themselves
.”
¹²²

This foreshadows the words of a fictional Adorno, the Devil in Thomas Mann’s novel
Doctor Faustus
, just before he transforms into a very Adorno-like manifestation: “Take Beethoven’s
notebooks. There is no thematic conception there as God gave it. He remoulds it and
adds ‘Meilleur’ ”
¹²³
—(“better”). (Adorno and Mann, fellow temporary Californians, had discussed music
as the book was being written.) Where the fictional Adorno had Beethoven improving
on God, the real Adorno had him improve on society—again, in terms that echo the “Oldest
Programme”:

Beethoven’s music has progressed beyond the state—“its social tutelage”—and carries
the intelligible world in itself.

But Beethoven’s music is, nevertheless, in the world, the historical world, and that
is where the freedom at its core becomes troublesome. “[T]he works themselves are
not self-sufficient, are not indifferent toward the time,” Adorno warned. “Only because
they transform themselves historically, unfold and wither in time; because their own
truth-content is historical
and not a pure essence, are they so susceptible to that which is allegedly inflicted
on them from outside.”
¹²⁵
This is why Adorno so insistently harangued against their fragmentation. Hearing
the Fifth as quotations from the Fifth was not just a trivializing annoyance but struck
directly at the heart of Beethoven’s power to resist appropriation. It asserted something-ness
for Beethoven’s themes while denying them their Hegelian becoming. It turned the music’s
absolute freedom into a liability.

“The primal cells in Beethoven are nothing
in themselves
, mere concentrates of the tonal idiom to which
only the symphony
lends voice,” Adorno warned. “Torn from their context, their artful irrelevance becomes
the commonplace which, as the initial motif of the Fifth, was to be exploited up to
the hilt by international patriotism.”
¹²⁶
The war conveniently acted out a negative dialectic on this point: in his notes for
his Beethoven book, Adorno saved a newspaper cutting, an Associated Press report,
dateline Bonn, March 10, 1945:

SINCE HIS DEATH
, in 1969, Adorno’s reputation has waxed and waned—mostly the latter. The complexity
of his writing was a persistent barrier. His analysis of the way societies leveraged
enjoyment to maintain control was all too easily read as an indictment of enjoyment
itself. His German Idealist lineage did not endear him to the rising post-modernist
school. His Marxism, however idiosyncratic, eroded his prestige as international Communism
collapsed under the weight of its own corruption.

Nevertheless, there is at least one aspect of Adorno that deserves a continuing place
in human thought: his optimism.
It is odd to think of Adorno, the virtuoso of the negative dialectic, the scold who
insisted on the objectivity of suffering, as an optimist, but he was. There is a transcript
of a conversation between Adorno and Horkheimer in which Adorno defends himself from
a criticism that his ideas are naïve:

It was this optimism that led Adorno back to Beethoven again and again: he heard in
the music a way past the modern world—his modern world—of war and exile and totalitarianism.
Beethoven achieved in music what the world forever tries and fails to achieve: the
better society. “[T]his is imprinted in Beethoven’s music, the sublime music, as a
trait of esthetic untruth: by its power, his successful work of art posits the real
success of what was in reality a failure.”
¹²⁹
And: “That Beethoven never goes out of date is connected, perhaps, to the fact that
reality has not yet caught up with his music.”
¹³⁰

That is itself an optimistic statement—one might just as plausibly say that reality
has caught up with the Fifth all too well, forever smudging it with two centuries
of interpretive fingerprints. The list of those who have tried to claim it—revolutionaries
and reactionaries, Hegelians both Right and Left, radical Transcendentalists and proper
Victorians, the Nazis and the Allies—is forbiddingly long and frequently contradictory.
But, if we believe
Adorno, it is in contradiction that reality can again break into the mind. Adorno’s
dialectic puts the lie to any single reading of the Fifth by allowing the measure
of all of them—the sheer number of attempted appropriations is a testament to the
persistent power of Beethoven’s reality.

Can that reality break through again? “The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, properly
performed,” Adorno insisted, “must be rendered with the character of a thesis, as
if they were a free act over which no material has precedence.”
¹³¹
Even after all the intrusions of poetics, programs, sentiment, and technology, he
thought it could still be done. To know what the Fifth has been burdened with is to
know what to clear away. You have to start somewhere.

THE PREMIERE
, incidentally, was something of a disaster. The most famous account of the concert
comes from Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a composer and writer who lived a virtual summation
of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century European history. As a teenager, he was encouraged
to study philosophy by Immanuel Kant; as a composer, he set texts and libretti by
Goethe, and was also friends with Herder and Schiller. Achim von Arnim and Clemens
Brentano (Bettina von Arnim’s husband and brother, respectively) dedicated their famous
collection of German folk poems,
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
, to Reichardt (although Brentano later soured on Reichardt, on account of his incessant
social climbing and gossiping).
¹
He supported the French Revolution (for which he was fired) before turning against
Napoleon (for which he was exiled).

Toward the end of his life, Reichardt was trying to make a career in Vienna; on December
22, 1808, he found himself sitting in the box of Prince Lobkowitz, Beethoven’s patron,
at the Theater-an-der-Wien. “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from
half past six to half past ten,” he recalled, “and experienced the truth that one
can easily have too much of a good thing—and still more of a loud.”
²
The concert included:

At one point, Beethoven had considered ending the concert with the Fifth, but, in
the words of Alexander Thayer, “to defer that work until the close was to incur the
risk of endangering its effect by presenting it to an audience too weary for the close
attention needful on first hearing to its fair comprehension and appreciation.”
³
Beethoven’s response to that dilemma was to make the concert longer: the Choral Fantasy
was a last-minute addition, written for the concert.

Reichardt enjoyed the Fourth Piano Concerto, especially the slow movement; Beethoven
“sang on his instrument with deep melancholy feeling.” But as for the Fifth:

Reichardt nevertheless allowed that music copyists were doubtless as skilled as their
legal counterparts in stretching out their work and boosting their per-page fees.
And even after four hours of difficult music in a freezing hall, Reichardt was sympathetic:
“Poor Beethoven, who from this, his own concert, was having the first and only scant
profit that he could find in a whole year, had found in the rehearsals and performance
a lot of opposition and almost no support.”
⁵

The concert, advertised as a “musical
Akademie
,” was organized by Beethoven himself. The evening had been at least two years in
the making: in order to reserve the space, Beethoven needed the permission of Joseph
Hartl, the Viennese Court Councillor in charge of the city’s theaters. Hartl also
was in charge of Vienna’s public charities, and used access to the theaters as bait
in order to lure performers for benefit concerts. Beethoven hated him. In one letter,
he complained of having to repeatedly wait on Hartl in order to press his request
for an
Akademie:
“I am so annoyed that all I desire is to be a bear so that as often as I were to
lift my paw I could knock down some so-called great ———ass.”
⁶

Beethoven nonetheless lent his talents and compositions to three charity concerts
between 1807 and 1808, the last coming on November 15 of that year. (November 15 is
the feast-day of Leopold, the patron saint of Vienna.) During rehearsals for this
concert, Beethoven somehow enraged the players; according to Joseph Röckel (father
of August, who plotted revolution in Dresden with Richard Wagner), the breaking point
was a rehearsal where Beethoven pounded with such ferocity that he knocked the candles
from the piano. Whatever the cause, the players refused to continue unless Beethoven
was banished from the hall; notes were relayed back and forth from rehearsals to composer
via the concertmasters.