The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Part 1

The first four notes.

Beethoven's fifth and the human imagination.

by Matthew Guerrieri.

For my father, who let me steal his books and records.

FORD: ... here, how about this ... "Da da da dum!" Doesn't that stir anything in you?

f/x airlock door opens VOGON GUARD: 'Bye, I'll mention what you said to my aunt.

f/x airlock door closes FORD: Potentially bright lad I thought.

ARTHUR: We're trapped now, aren't we?

FORD: Errrrr ... yes, we're trapped.

-DOUGLAS ADAMS.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series).

Preface.

MARTEN: What about you? Do you have any big nostalgia-inducing songs?

HANNELORE: Beethoven's Fifth reminds me of Canada. I don't know why. I've never been to Canada.

-JEPH JACQUES, Questionable Content1.

In his best seller Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music, first published in 1929, the poet and essayist Robert Haven Schauffler polled a parade of opinions of Beethoven's Fifth from a pool of straw men: To Brown it may signify a fierce conflict with a s.e.xual obsession. To Jones a desperate campaign against an inferiority complex. To Robinson an old-fas.h.i.+oned pitched battle a la "Paradise Lost," between the forces of good and evil. To a victim of hysteria it may depict a war between sanity and bedlam. To a neurasthenic a struggle between those two mutually exclusive objectives: "To be, or not to be?" To an evolutionist it may bring up the primordial conflict of fire and water, of man with beast, of civilization with savagery, of land with sea.2 Such mutable celebrity had already long surrounded the symphony. Beethoven's Fifth, the Symphony in C minor, op. 67, might not be the greatest piece of music ever written-even Beethoven himself preferred his Third Symphony, the Eroica3-but it must be the greatest "great piece" ever written, a figure on which successive mantles of greatness have, ever more inevitably, fit with tailored precision. And its iconic opening is a large part of that: short enough to remember and portentous enough to be memorable, seeming to unlock the symphony's meaning but leaving its mysteries temptingly out of reach, saying something but admitting nothing.

This is a book about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. More specifically, it is a book about the opening notes of that symphony; and more specifically than that, it is a book about what people have heard in those notes throughout history, and how history itself has affected what was heard. It is, then, history viewed through the forced perspective of one piece of music; though, to be fair, there is only a handful of pieces of music that could yield a comparable view, and most of them are by Beethoven. And, even within the subject's limited parameters, it is hardly a comprehensive history. Any writing on Beethoven is an exercise in selection, and the selection says at least as much, if not more, about the writer's obsessions as it does about Beethoven. This is only one possible path through the biography of the Fifth Symphony; there could be many others.

To say a piece of music has meaning is to say that it is susceptible to discussions of meaning; by that standard, Beethoven's Fifth is easily one of the most meaningful pieces of music ever written. The number and variety of the interpretations a.s.signed to the Fifth, the creativity with which the piece has been invoked in support of countless, often contradictory, causes-artistic, philosophical, political-all this is a tribute to its amorphous power. It is also, on the side of the interpreters, a testament to human creativity, ingenuity-and folly. The vaunted universality of Beethoven's achievement encompa.s.ses the sublime and the ridiculous.

Not that he didn't try to warn us. In 1855, an unknown writer felt compelled to make a handwritten addition to a copy of Anton Schindler's biography of Beethoven: Something about the beginning of the C minor Symph[ony]. Many men were disturbed over the beginning of the Fifth. One of them ask[ed] Beethoven about the reason for the unusual opening and its meaning. Beethoven answered: "The beginning sounds and means: You are too dumb."4

1.

Revolutions.

The first thing to do on arriving at a symphony concert is to express the wish that the orchestra will play Beethoven's Fifth. If your companion then says "Fifth what?" you are safe with him for the rest of the evening; no metal can touch you. If, however, he says "So do I"-this is a danger signal and he may require careful handling.

-DONALD OGDEN STEWART, Perfect Behavior (1922).

JEAN-FRANcOIS LE SUEUR was not quite sure what to make of Beethoven's Fifth. Le Sueur was a dramatic composer, a specialist in oratorios and operas, and the Parisian taste for such fare (along with Le Sueur's career) had persisted from the reign of Louis XVI through the Revolution, through Napoleon, through the Restoration. For audiences suddenly to be whipped into a frenzy by instrumental music-as they were in 1828, when a new series of orchestral concerts brought Paris its first sustained dose of Beethoven's symphonies-was something curious. Le Sueur, nearing seventy, was too refined to fulminate, but he kept a respectful distance from the novelties-that is, until one of his students, an up-and-coming enfant terrible named Hector Berlioz, dragged his teacher to a performance of the Fifth. Berlioz later recalled Le Sueur's postconcert reaction: "Ouf! I'm going outside, I need some air. It's unbelievable, wonderful! It so moved and disturbed me and turned me upside down that when I came out of my box and went to put on my hat, for a moment I didn't know where my head was."

Alas, in retrospect, it was too much of a shock: at his lesson the next day, Le Sueur cautioned Berlioz that "All the same, that sort of music should not be written."1 IN 1920, Stefan Wolpe, then an eighteen-year-old student at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, organized a Dadaist provocation. He put eight phonographs on a stage, each bearing a recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He then played all eight, simultaneously, with each record turning at a different speed.

A socialist and a Jew, Wolpe would flee n.a.z.i Germany; he eventually ended up in America, cobbling together a career as an avant-garde composer and as a teacher whose importance and influence belied his lack of fame. (The jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, shortly before he died, approached Wolpe about lessons and a possible commissioned piece.)2 In a 1962 lecture, Wolpe recalled his Dada years, revisiting his Beethoven collage; in a bow to technological change, this performance used only two phonographs, set at the once-familiar 33 and 78 r.p.m. Wolpe then spoke of "one of the early Dada obsessions, or interests, namely, the concept of unforeseeability": That means that every moment events are so freshly invented, so newly born, that it has almost no history in the piece itself but its own actual presence.3.

IF TODAY we regard Le Sueur's frazzled confusion as quaint, it is at least in part because of the subsequent ubiquity of the Fifth Symphony. The music's immediacy has been forever dented by its celebrity. Wolpe's eightfold distortion can be heard as a particularly outrageous attempt to re-create Le Sueur's experience of the Fifth, to conjure up a time when the work's course was still unforeseeable. It is an uphill battle-in the two centuries since its 1808 premiere, Beethoven's Fifth has become so familiar that it is next to impossible to re-create the disorientation that it could cause when it was newly born.

The disorientation is built right into the symphony's opening. Or even, maybe, before the opening: the symphony begins, literally, with silence, an eighth rest slipped in before the first note. A rest on the downbeat, a bit of quiet, seems an inauspicious start. Of course, every symphony is surrounded by at least theoretical silence. Though, in reality, preconcert ambient noise, or at least its echoes-overlapping conversations, s.h.i.+fting bodies, rustling programs, air-conditioning, and so on-may in fact bleed into the music being performed, we nonetheless create a perceptive line between nonmusic and music, enter into a conspiracy between performers and listeners that the composer's statement is self-contained, that there is a sonic buffer zone between everyday life and music. (Like most conspiracies, it thrives on partial truths.) The obvious interpretation is that silence functions as a frame for the musical object.4 The less obvious (and groovier) interpretation is that the music we hear is but one facet of the silence it comes out of.5 This is almost certainly not what Beethoven was thinking about when he put a rest in the first measure of the Fifth Symphony. But, were Beethoven really trying to mess around with the boundary between his symphony and everything outside of it, he would have been antic.i.p.ating the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the guru of deconstruction, by nearly two hundred years. Derrida talks about frames in his book The Truth in Painting, noting that when we look at a painting, the frame seems part of the wall, but when we look at the wall, the frame seems part of the painting. Derrida terms this slipstream between the work and outside the work a parergon: "a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out, but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy."6 Our minds dissolve the frame as we cross the Rubicon into Art. But Beethoven drags the edge of the frame into the painting itself, stylizing it to the point that, for anyone reading the score, at least, this parergon refuses to go quietly, as it were. Beethoven waits until we're ready, then gruffly asks if we're ready yet.

We can see the silence on the page, in the form of the rest. But do we hear it in performance? The rest completes the meter of 2/4-two beats per measure, with the quarter note getting the beat-which, normally, would mean that the second of the three following eighth notes would get a little extra emphasis. But most readings give heavy emphasis to all three eighth notes, steamrolling the meter (which is really only one beat to a bar anyway-more on that in a minute). Paleobotanist, artist, and sometime composer Wesley Wehr recalled one consequence of such steamrolling: Student composer Hubbard Miller, as the story goes, had once been beachcombing at Agate Beach. He paused on the beach to trace some musical staves in the sand, and then added the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Hub had, however, made a slight mistake. Instead of using eighth notes for the famous "da, da, da, dum!," Hub had written a triplet. He had the right notes, but the wrong rhythm-an easy enough mistake for a young lad to make. Hub looked up to find an elderly man standing beside him, studying the musical misnotation. The mysterious man erased the mistake with one foot, bent down, and wrote the correct rhythmic notation in the sand. With that, he smiled at Hub and continued walking down the beach. Only later did Hub learn that he had just had a "music lesson" from Ernest Bloch.7 Knowledge of the rest is like a secret handshake, admission into the guild. (Bloch, best known for his 1916 cello-and-orchestra "Rhapsodie hebraique" Schelomo, was also a dedicated photographer who liked to name his images of trees after composers: "Bloch sees 'Beethoven' invariably as a single ma.s.sive tree appearing to twist and struggle out of the soil."8) Indeed, one practical reason for the rest is to rea.s.sure the performers of the composer's professionalism. Beethoven knew that any conductor would signal the downbeat anyway, so he put in the rest as a placeholder for the conductor's gesture. And it's liable to be a fairly dramatic gesture at that. The meter indicates two beats to the bar, but no conductor actually indicates both beats, as it would tend to bog down music that needs speed and forward momentum. Instead, the movement is conducted "in one," indicating only the downbeat of every bar.

So the conductor has one snap of the baton to get the orchestra up to full speed. And the longer the Fifth Symphony has retained its canonical status, the more that task has come to be seen as perilous. For the two leading preWorld War I pundits of conducting, Richard Wagner and Felix Weingartner, starting the Fifth was no big deal. Wagner takes ignition for granted, being far more concerned with the lengths of the subsequent holds,9 while Weingartner scoffs at his colleague Hans von Bulow's caution: "Bulow's practice of giving one or several bars beforehand is quite unnecessary."10 But jump ahead to the modern era, and one finds the British conductor Norman Del Mar warning of "would-be adopters of the baton" suffering "the humiliation of being unable to start the first movement at all."11 Gunther Schuller, American composer and conductor, is equally dire, calling the opening "one of the most feared conducting challenges in the entire cla.s.sical literature."12 Del Mar reaches this conclusion: "It is useless to try and formulate the way this is done in terms of conventional stick technique. It is direction by pure force of gesture and depends entirely on the will-power and total conviction of the conductor."13 It is only a coincidence that the eighth rest resembles the trigger of a starter's pistol: Beethoven was known for being moody and intolerant long before he began to lose his hearing. Apparently he was just as p.i.s.sed off by what he could hear as by what he could not.

-PAULA POUNDSTONE.

There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say.

IF ONLY for the blink of an eye, the eighth rest leaves the symphony hanging in fraught silence, a condition that, even at the time of the Fifth's premiere, was already becoming attached to the Beethoven mythos. The fame of the Fifth Symphony has its biographical match in Beethoven's deafness.

Beethoven first noticed a deterioration in his hearing sometime in his twenties; when, in 1801, he first broached the subject in letters to close friends ("I beg you to treat what I have told you about my hearing as a great secret," he wrote to the violinist Karl Amenda, underlining the request for emphasis14), he had already been seeing physicians about it for at least a year. The initial symptoms were those of tinnitus-buzzing and ringing in the ears, a sensitivity to loud noises. ("[I]f anybody shouts, I can't bear it," he complained.15) It would be difficult to overestimate how disconcerting the onset of such a condition must have been to the young Beethoven, especially at that point in his career, having moved to the cultural metropolis of Vienna, on the precarious cusp between notoriety and lasting success. But it is also important to note that-contrary to much popular opinion-even at the time he was composing the Fifth Symphony (1804 to 1808, on and off), Beethoven could still hear fairly well, at least well enough to conduct the 1808 premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and then write his publisher about correcting the score: "When I gave these works to you, I had not yet heard either of them performed-and one should not be so like a G.o.d as not to have to correct something here and there in one's created works."16 His fellow composer-pianist Carl Czerny reported that Beethoven "still heard speech and music perfectly well until at least 1812."17 While that optimistic characterization is more likely a testament to Beethoven's adjustment to his infirmity, it's clear that the Fifth Symphony was not born out of an absolute pathological silence.

Tracing the progression of Beethoven's deafness is difficult not just because of Beethoven's own tendency to overdramatize his affliction, but also because of the tendency of his friends and acquaintances to attribute to deafness symptoms that might just as easily be traced to another underlying condition: that of, well, being Beethoven. In 1804, Stephan von Breuning writes to a mutual friend that as a result of Beethoven's "waning of hearing ... [h]e has become very withdrawn and often mistrustful of his best friends, and irresolute in many things!"18 But, as biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us, the withdrawal, mistrust, and retreat from everyday concerns were there all along: "During his childhood, Beethoven often wrapped himself in a cloak of silence as a s.h.i.+eld against both the vicissitudes of external reality and the traumatic events within his family constellation."19 Pushed forward as a Mozart-like prodigy by his alcoholic, dissolute, abusive father, Beethoven retreated into solitude and daydreaming, the defense of a figurative deafness, well before any literal manifestation.

If the onset of hearing loss fed into Beethoven's penchant for isolation, his penchant for isolation may have, in turn, fed an exaggerated sense of the extent of his deafness. Recent proposed guidelines for tinnitus diagnosis include the reminder that "it has become clear in recent years that the 'problem' of tinnitus relates far more to the individual's psychological response to the abnormal tinnitus signal than to the signal itself.... [I]n some cases the altered mood state predates tinnitus onset ... making it difficult to know whether tinnitus causes psychological disturbance, or whether psychological disturbance facilitates the emergence of tinnitus."20 Nevertheless, the adaptability of so much of Beethoven's middle-period "heroic" output to narratives of crisis and triumph has contributed to a popular sense that his deafness was sudden and total, rather than gradual. One finds it in an entry from an American music-lover's diary, published in Dwight's Journal of Music in 1853: "[Beethoven] was deaf, poor man, when he wrote the 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Symphonies. Deaf when he composed 'Fidelio,' 'The Ruins of Athens,' the two Ma.s.ses, &c."21 The unidentified diarist was actually Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who would later undertake extensive research in Germany and Austria and produce a pioneering Beethoven biography, the first volume of which appeared in 1866; based on Thayer's findings, most critics and scholars would adopt a more nuanced view of Beethoven's deafness. But the story of a stone-deaf Beethoven and his dauntless musical response was too good, too inspirational, not to survive. The American composer Frances McCollin, for example, blind from the age of five, took powerful inspiration from the story, starting when she attended a dress rehearsal for the Philadelphia Orchestra's inaugural concert in 1900: "[S]he heard the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which made her think of the deaf Beethoven and she burst into tears."22 McCollin's story echoes one from the six-year-old Clara Schumann-who, for reasons similar to Beethoven's, was so withdrawn as a child that her parents thought she, too, might be deaf-noting in her diary, "I heard a grand symphony by Beethoven which excited me greatly."23 The image of a young, completely deaf Beethoven gained a foothold in children's literature, offering an educational example of human perseverance (and, maybe, playing on a child's delight in paradox: a composer who can't hear). McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader included an excerpt from Harriet Martineau's The Crofton Boys, in which young Hugh Proctor's mother tries to console him after he has had his foot amputated: "Did you ever hear of Beethoven? He was one of the greatest musical composers that ever lived. His great, his sole delight was in music. It was the pa.s.sion of his life. When all his time and all his mind were given to music, he suddenly became deaf, perfectly deaf; so that he never more heard one single note from the loudest orchestra. While crowds were moved and delighted with his compositions, it was all silence to him." Hugh said nothing.24 Even today, one can still find the myth perpetuated here and there.25 As an up-and-coming composer and performer, Beethoven probably feared that common knowledge of his encroaching deafness would have hindered his career prospects. The opposite occurred, as it turned out: within his own lifetime, Beethoven's deafness became a celebrated element in the reputations of both the composer and his music. A snippet of that celebrity is preserved in the conversation books, the trove of one-sided table talk from Beethoven's later years, when guests would jot down their share of the discussion on paper. During one chat, Beethoven's nephew Karl informs his uncle of popular perception: "Precisely because of [your deafness] you are famous. Everyone is astonished, not just that you can compose so well, but particularly that you can do it in spite of this affliction. If you ask me, I believe that it even contributes to the originality of your compositions."26 On this occasion, Beethoven seems to have taken his nephew slightly to task for overdetermining the nature of his genius, but there is some evidence that it was Beethoven himself who planted the seed of that astonishment and fame. By the time of the Fifth's premiere, Beethoven had come to terms with his deafness enough to stop concealing it and to start even subtly advertising it, writing a note to himself in one of his sketchbooks to "let your deafness no longer be a secret-even in art." The musicologist Owen Jander went so far as to reinterpret the Fifth Symphony in light of this self-admonition, making it not just a metaphorical struggle with infirmity, but, at least in the slow march that permeates the third and part of the fourth movements-a march built out of the symphony's opening motive-a musical re-creation of the experience of deafness. The third movement's translation of its theme into a desaturated skeleton of pizzicato strings, Jander suggested, was meant to simulate the composer's increasingly hazy sense of hearing.27 If the Fifth Symphony is about Beethoven's deafness, then what could we read into its opening rest? A brief jolt of the experience of deafness, perhaps-a deployment of great energy that remains bereft of sound. Or maybe a remembrance and a reminder: a moment of silence for Beethoven's hearing.

THE PITCHES of the opening phrase produce their own ambiguity, albeit one that, given the symphony's familiarity, is, again, well-nigh impossible to recapture. The Fifth is in C minor, a key forever a.s.sociated with Beethoven in his most heaven-storming moods. But, strictly speaking, C minor is not actually established until the seventh measure of the first movement. Beethoven exploits a quirk of music theory concerning the triad, one of the basic building blocks of Western music: a stack of three notes, the first, third, and fifth notes of the major or minor scale. If you take away one of the notes of a triad, it starts to, in effect, gesture in two directions at once. So the first two pitches of the Fifth Symphony, G and E-flat, might be two-thirds of a C-minor triad, or they might be two-thirds of an E-flat major triad. The second pair of pitches, F and D, could be part of a dominant-seventh chord built on G (the most basic harmonic antecedent of C minor), or part of one built on B-flat (the most basic harmonic antecedent of E-flat major). From a music theory standpoint, the opening pa.s.sage is playing fast and loose with the symphony's key: until the cellos and ba.s.soons anchor the motive with a sustained middle C in the seventh bar, there's no way to tell whether the piece is in a major or minor key.

Modern ears might reflexively a.s.sign more dramatic weight to minor keys than to major, but that wasn't necessarily the case in Beethoven's time. Italian theorist Francesco Galeazzi, writing in 1796, called E-flat major "a heroic key, extremely majestic, grave and serious."28 Not so for C minor. In 1713, German composer and theorist Johann Mattheson wrote, "An extremely lovely, but also sad key. Because the first quality is too prevalent and one can easily get tired of too much sweetness, no harm is done when the attempt is made to enliven the key a little by a somewhat cheerful or regular tempo."29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1749 Encyclopedie opined that C minor "brings tenderness into the soul." Writing in 1783, Johann J. H. Ribock, an accomplished amateur flutist, compared the key "to the colour of a pale rose and also to the aroma of the same."30 Late-eighteenth-century composers created a somewhat more Gothic atmosphere with C minor-as in Mozart's K. 491 Piano Concerto, a brooding piece that Beethoven particularly admired. ("We shall never be able to do anything like that!" he once told a friend.31) But for heroism, Mozart opted for E-flat major-in the opening scene of Die Zauberflote, Prince Tamino finds himself set upon by a slithery C-minor monster that the Three Ladies vanquish with a timely modulation to E-flat: "Triumph!"

In the concert hall, though, the sheer gravity of the Fifth's opening makes the vague tonality moot. The major-minor uncertainty in the opening of the Fifth Symphony engendered next to no contemporary comment-only E. T. A. Hoffmann mentioned it, in his seminal 1810 review of the symphony ("the listener surmises E-flat major," he surmised32), and he was working from the score, not from a performance. And, harmonically rooted or not, the sound of the Fifth's opening was actually somewhat traditional for C minor: many C-minor works of Haydn and Mozart (K. 491 included) also start out with pa.s.sages in bare unisons or octaves.33 Beethoven adopted that stylistic tic; his largest C-minor essay prior to the Fifth, the Third Piano Concerto, opens in ominous octaves (and with a theme strongly foreshadowing the Fifth Symphony's Finale), as does his Violin Sonata op. 30, no. 2.

But those openings were all quiet in their foreboding. The Fifth imbues the C-minor dialect with rhetorical force. Beethoven's orchestration of the opening is optimized toward weight: all the strings, in their lowest, heaviest registers, plus clarinets, which round and burnish the strings' tone. In the original ma.n.u.script, Beethoven initially had the flutes doubling the opening line an octave higher, then thought better of it and scratched those notes out. No double reeds-oboes, ba.s.soons-and no bra.s.s: any hint of instrumental brightness has been banished. In place of an all-for-one tutti opening, Beethoven opts for only those instruments that can combine power with overcast gloom. The feminine overtones of contemporary C-minor impressions are absent-Leonard Bernstein heard the orchestration as gender-specific: "Beethoven clearly wanted these notes to be a strong, masculine utterance, and he therefore orchestrated entirely with instruments that play normally in the register of the male singing voice."34 At the very least, Beethoven deliberately avoided Mattheson's advice to leaven C minor with a bit of cheer.

Beethoven's appropriation of E-flat major's dark majesty for his favored C minor was a success, to judge by a subsequent spate of revised key impressions. While some writings, still reliant on older traditions, continued the theme of gentle lament, an 1827 musical dictionary by J. A. Schrader a.s.signed to C minor "rigid, numb grief," "fear and horror," "bitter lamenting," and "despair." In 1830, the German organist G. F. Ebhardt heard in C minor "extreme misery, sometimes raving nonsense."35 Part of the s.h.i.+ft no doubt came from the Romantic era's louder dramatic volume; descriptions of other keys also move toward more emotional extremes. But Beethoven's own stormy reputation drove much of that Romantic amplification-and his stormiest key was C minor. The Fifth Symphony endured as a ready-made example of the new a.s.sociation.

NO OTHER COMPOSER'S working habits have been a.n.a.lyzed as closely as Beethoven's. It helped that Beethoven's sketches survived to be a.n.a.lyzed. Most of Mozart's sketches, by comparison, were destroyed after he died, which contributed to the popular impression that he worked out everything in his head before putting pen to paper.36 Whereas Beethoven's sketchbooks, in all their messy, indecipherable glory, seemed tailor-made for his Romantic admirers, a chance to witness the familiar themes twist and struggle their way to the surface like Bloch's Beethovenian trees. Unlike many of Beethoven's themes, however, the opening of the Fifth seems to have sprung nearly fully grown from his head.

The earliest sketches for the Fifth are found in a ma.n.u.script referred to as Landsberg 6, or, sometimes, the Eroica sketchbook-the bulk of the leaves are filled with workings-out of Beethoven's Third Symphony. Much of the rest is taken up with early work on Beethoven's only completed opera, Leonore (later ret.i.tled Fidelio).37 Located at the creative locus of three of Beethoven's most celebrated works-the Third and Fifth Symphonies and Fidelio-Landsberg 6 might be the most famous of Beethoven's sketchbooks.

Amazingly, it was lost for much of the twentieth century, having vanished from the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin at the end of World War II. The library had acquired it in 1861 from the estate of Ludwig Landsberg, a Prussian-born violinist and singer who ended up living in Rome. Landsberg ama.s.sed ma.n.u.scripts and early editions of Renaissance and Baroque music during his more than twenty years in Italy; on trips between Rome and his native Breslau, he was apparently in the habit of stopping to buy ma.n.u.scripts from Viennese dealers as well. When a catalog of his collection was published after his death (in preparation for its sale), Landsberg's Beethoven trove-including eight of the sketchbooks-was listed first, the most obvious treasures.38 Breslau, now Wroclaw, became part of Poland after World War II. Landsberg, who died and was buried in Rome, didn't make it back home, but the highlight of his collection did: after disappearing from Berlin, Landsberg 6 eventually turned up in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Krakow-a souvenir of Beethoven's heroic period appropriately transformed into a trophy of war.

Sometime in early 1804, at the bottom of page 157, tucked into three extra staves under some scribbled ideas for Fidelio, Beethoven sketched out the opening section of the Fifth, in unusually well-developed embryo: The transcription-a bit of heroism in itself, given the illegibility of Beethoven's handwriting-is by Gustav Nottebohm, a German academic who did the first serious work on Beethoven's sketchbooks.39 (Johannes Brahms, a longtime friend, once pranked Nottebohm by fas.h.i.+oning a fake Beethoven sketch and then bribing Nottebohm's favorite grocer to wrap up the scholar's cheese and sausage in it.40) The structure and contour of the opening sentences are already there; the only difference is in those places where Beethoven softens the three-note repet.i.tion of the opening motive by walking the melody down the scale. Beethoven, perhaps, was already considering how the motive would make connections between the symphony's movements; on pages just prior to this, he was jotting down ideas for the Fifth's third movement, in which the motive returns in march form, and the three-note figure does break into a step-by-step melodic descent. In the context of the opening, though, such filling-in was far too fussy, the musical equivalent of making a bold claim and then immediately qualifying it with a lot of hemming and hawing. By the time the Fifth was completed, Beethoven had decided that the repeated notes made a better effect, that the motive's rhythmic profile alone would be strong enough to tie the various movements together.

The rhythmic foot the Fifth lays out-short-short-short-long-was known in Cla.s.sical antiquity as a quartus paeon. (Any combination of one long syllable with three short ones is a paeon; putting the long syllable at the end makes it the fourth, or quartus, paeon.) Beethoven, who revered the Greek poet Homer, would have read of the paeon's namesake, the Olympian physician, in Book V of the Iliad: "Thereon Hades went to the house of Jove on great Olympus, angry and full of pain; and the arrow in his brawny shoulder caused him great anguish till Paeeon healed him by spreading soothing herbs on the wound, for Hades was not of mortal mould."41 As the divine power of healing gravitated to Apollo, so did the name, and paeans became hymns to Apollo. Later, the paean also acquired a martial connotation, a name applied to songs sung by armies heading into battle or, afterward, giving thanks for victory. (Conveniently, paeans often used the paeon for a metrical basis.) Beethoven read Homer only in translation, and any connection he might have made between the Homeric healer and the rhythmic pattern he liberally applied to his most famous symphony is pure conjecture. But if the quartus paeon was a conscious choice on Beethoven's part, he couldn't have picked a more appropriate confirmation of the symphony's popular perception: a battle cry and a plea for healing, all wrapped up in a concise motive.

The ancient Greeks would have appreciated the quartus paeon as a source of the Fifth Symphony's oft-cited rhetorical power. Aristotle didn't discuss the paeon in his Poetics, but included it in the toolbox of his Rhetoric. After dismissing a host of poetic feet as unsuitable to oratory ("prose must be rhythmical, but not metrical, otherwise it will be a poem"), Aristotle allows for an exception: There remains the paeon, used by rhetoricians from the time of Thrasymachus, although they could not define it.

The paeon is a third kind of rhythm closely related to those already mentioned; for its proportion is 3 to 2, that of the others 1 to 1 and 2 to 1, with both of which the paeon, whose proportion is 1 to 1, is connected.

In other words, the slightly off-balance three-versus-two of the paeon (three short syllables plus a double-length long syllable) relieves the singsong nature of other poetic rhythms. Thus "the paeon should be retained, because it is the only one of the rhythms mentioned which is not adapted to a metrical system, so that it is most likely to be undetected."42 The paeon gives prose the dramatic force of epic poetry without its sounding like poetry. The vague sense of rhetorical meaning that contemporary listeners found so novel about the Fifth may have been the by-product of an ancient Greek toastmasters' trick. (The Roman rhetorician Quintilian was, in fact, downright sn.o.bbish about the paeon: "Why it pleased [other] writers so much I do not understand; but possibly most of those who liked it were men that fixed their attention rather on the language of common life than on that of oratory."43) The trick still works. In the 1970s, the music education researcher Edwin Gordon was trying to sort basic building blocks of music by how easy or hard they were for students to learn. For one study, Gordon developed a taxonomy of 533 different rhythmic cells, then had more than four thousand fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders listen to tapes of the cells.44 Each cell was played, then repeated, and the students were tested as to whether or not they perceived the repet.i.tion as identical with the original. Gordon then sorted the cells by both difficulty (the more the students identified the repet.i.tion of a cell, the "easier" that cell was considered to be) and progression-whether a given cell was "easier" for older students.

The perception of the 2/4, three-eighth-note pickup of the Fifth Symphony's opening was cla.s.sified as both "Difficult" (fewer than half the listeners heard the motive's repet.i.tion as a repet.i.tion) and "Static-Regressive" (the age of the student made no difference in their perception).45 It was, in fact, the only rhythmic cell in Gordon's "Usual Duple" category-symmetrical divisions of individual beats and measures-to rank as both difficult to perceive and age-neutral. By design or by accident, Beethoven made an ideal choice for an all-pervasive motive, one whose obsessive repet.i.tion doesn't come across as repet.i.tion-the exact intended effect of the paeon.

THE SIMILARITY of the Fifth's earliest sketches to its final iteration-one of the few instances in the sketchbooks where a bolt-of-inspiration interpretation could apply-lends at least pa.s.sing credence to the earliest musical creation story of Beethoven and his four notes: a little bird told him.

The most-cited source for this story is Beethoven's student, the pianist and composer Carl Czerny. Beethoven heard the ten-year-old Czerny play in 1801 and was impressed enough to give the child lessons. Czerny in turn would become perhaps the nineteenth century's greatest piano teacher, training a host of performers and pedagogues more important than famous-Sigismond Thalberg, Stephen h.e.l.ler, Theodor Leschetizky-as well as one whose importance and fame seemingly knew no bounds: Franz Liszt. Unlike almost everyone else who ever knew the composer, the sober and industrious Czerny never sought to cash in on his relations.h.i.+p with Beethoven; in turn, Beethoven stayed friends with Czerny, trusting him to edit proofs of his works for publication, recruiting him to give lessons to his nephew Karl.

"Many of Beethoven's motives resulted from pa.s.sing outside impressions and events," Czerny recalled. "The song of a forest-bird (the yellowhammer) gave him the theme of the C-minor symphony, and those who heard him fantasize on it know what he was able to develop from the most insignificant few tones."46 (Czerny reported that the theme of the Scherzo from the Ninth Symphony was also inspired by a bird.) Beethoven, a lover of nature, probably would not have considered such a source trivial. It might have carried an echo of Naturphilosophie, a then-popular concept that the natural world was the manifestation of a single, ideal, dynamic process, an order that would be revealed once all of creation was arranged in a sufficiently intricate hierarchy. A foreshadowing of Naturphilosophie can be found in a book Beethoven particularly enjoyed, Christoph Christian Sturm's 1784 Betrachtungen uber die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur (Reflections on the Works of G.o.d in the Realm of Nature): How bountifully has G.o.d provided for the gratification of our senses! For instance, he has chosen the softest and most proper colours to please and refresh the sight. Experience proves that blue and green surfaces reflect those rays only which are least injurious to the eyes, and which they can contemplate the longest without being fatigued. Hence it is the Divine goodness has clothed the heavens with blue, and the earth with green.... The ear also is not unemployed: it is delighted with the songs of birds, which fill the air with their melodious concerts.47 Naturphilosophie would become more sophisticated after it was taken up by one of the era's leading philosophical celebrities, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch.e.l.ling. A later exponent of the style, Lorenz Oken (whose work Beethoven had at least a pa.s.sing familiarity with48), would place the senses at the center of his conception, a fanciful taxonomy of nested five-part divisions; at its highest level, birds, representing hearing, ranked just behind mammals, representing sight.49 The tale of the yellowhammer and the Fifth seems to have been current during Beethoven's lifetime; Wilhelm Christian Muller, a music teacher and acquaintance of Beethoven, mentioned it in a remembrance he wrote shortly after Beethoven's death: "During [Beethoven's] walks he composed and often took his themes from birds, for example, the G-G-G-E-flat, F-F-F-D in the Fifth Symphony."50 And the yellowhammer's song does bear at least some resemblance to the motive, a rapid-fire repet.i.tion of short notes followed by one or two longer tones.51 In other words, this is an unusually well-sourced and plausible Beethoven myth, and yet, its provenance notwithstanding, the yellowhammer's authors.h.i.+p gradually became a footnote, usually mentioned only in pa.s.sing alongside more-well-known stories-including one that will occupy the entire next chapter of this book, the characterization of the Fifth's opening as "fate knocking at the door." In English-speaking countries, the bird story suffered a bit of guilt by a.s.sociation after Anton Schindler, Beethoven's onetime secretary and, later, his notoriously inaccurate biographer, related that Beethoven had told him that a completely different figure in the Sixth Symphony, a quick upward arpeggio, was also inspired by a yellowhammer. The discrepancy cast doubt on all Beethovenian birdcalls; most thought that the composer was merely pulling Schindler's leg. (Schindler may actually have been right for once, the victim of German-English dictionaries that translated his Goldammer and Czerny's Ammerling as the same bird, but Schindler was referring to a goldfinch, not a yellowhammer.)52 Mostly, Czerny's story faded to footnote status because the symphony's acc.u.mulating philosophical baggage crowded it out-a chance avian dictation of the famous theme came to be considered too insignificant a source for the Fifth's increasingly portentous reputation. Harvey Grace, an English organist and writer, put it thus in 1920: But how many hearers think of the yellow-hammer? They are all Werthers for a brief spell, and invest the music with a significance far more profound than the composer ever gave it. What verbal commonplace can ever come to mean so much as this trivial birdcall? It is as if such an expression as "I'll trouble you for the salt" suddenly became so charged with tremendous and shattering import that on hearing it people would fall into an agony of remorse.53 THE OPENING EIGHTH-REST IS BEETHOVEN'S first bit of misdirection-combined with the quick, in-one 2/4 meter, it produces the triplet-or-straight-eighth rhythmic uncertainty of the first three notes. The C-minor/E-flat major ambiguity is Beethoven's second bit of misdirection. Either uncertainty would be so brief as to be unworthy of mention, except that they're compounded by Beethoven's third bit of misdirection: fermatas over the fourth and eighth notes of the symphony, dramatic pauses punctuating the two statements of the four-note motive.

Throwing up such rhythmic roadblocks, holding the notes out for as long as the conductor sees fit, might seem like an avant-garde touch-a Beckettesque frustration, stopping the clock just as it's getting started. But beginning a piece with dramatic pauses had become something of a commonplace toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mozart's Die Zauberflote, a piece Beethoven especially admired, opens with three grand chords interspersed with temporally generous s.p.a.ce, fermatas over the intervening rests. And Beethoven's onetime teacher Haydn, as his career went on, was more and more likely to start his symphonies with similarly grand fermatas.54 The Cla.s.sical-era music theorist Heinrich Koch had equated the fermata with an "expression of surprise or astonishment, a feeling whereby the movements of the spirit itself appear to come to a brief standstill."55 Fermatas right at the start were an attempt to create that surprise and astonishment immediately, a proto-Romantic goal of jolting the audience into a heightened emotional state.

Mozart and Haydn, though, placed their fermatas in slow introductions (Adagio markings in both cases), set off from the thematic argument of the piece. Beethoven pushes the envelope by starting off at the movement's main, fast pace, then dropping his fermatas, in quick succession, into his main theme. (After the premiere, Beethoven added an extra bar before the second fermata, making it slightly longer than the first, and the whole opening that much more off-balance and edgy.) In performance, the fermatas rather quickly became repositories of applied importance, with conductors stretching the emphases into extravagant flourishes. The most immoderate of such conductors was Richard Wagner, who, in a famous pa.s.sage, prescribed overwrought fermatas, in prose to match: Now let us suppose the voice of Beethoven to have cried from the grave to a conductor: "Hold thou my fermata long and terribly! I wrote no fermata for jest or from bepuzzlement, haply to think out my further move; but the same full tone I mean to be squeezed dry in my Adagio for utterance of sweltering emotion, I cast among the rus.h.i.+ng figures of my pa.s.sionate Allegro, if need be, a paroxysm of joy or horror. Then shall its life be drained to the last blood-drop; then do I part the waters of my ocean, and bare the depths of its abyss...."56 That image of conductors casting down the fermatas like Charlton Heston as Moses contributed to an increasingly DeMille-like aura around the Fifth as the Romantic era hit its stride, the sort of reputation that marginalized Czerny's yellow-hammer source as simply too trifling.

But Beethoven might have intended the fermatas to exaggerate a feeling of forward motion. The symphony shows off its power by only hinting at its speed-a couple of fearsome revs of the engine before Beethoven finally lets out the clutch-but the trip is already under way, leaving the listener scrambling to catch up. And almost from the beginning, Beethoven's combination of rebellion and haste rather fittingly engendered the question of whether it was too fast.

Nearly a decade after the Fifth's premiere, Beethoven augmented the first movement's Allegro con brio tempo with a metronome marking: 108 half notes per minute. Beethoven hadn't initially indicated a metronome marking for the Fifth for the simple reason that, in 1808, the metronome didn't exist yet. It was only in 1812 that Dietrich Winkel invented the device; not until 1816 that Johann Malzel, having stolen Winkel's invention, began to manufacture it.

Malzel and Beethoven were friends-Malzel provided the composer with custom ear trumpets57 and, having built a ma.s.sive mechanical organ called a panharmonicon, commissioned for it Beethoven's op. 91 novelty Wellington's Victory (a commission that led to a characteristically Beethovenian falling-out over money). Beethoven became the metronome's most famous early adopter. With his nephew Karl, Beethoven went back over his catalog, retroactively quantifying his tempo markings with the new gadget, then published a table of such markings, covering the first eight symphonies, in a leading German music magazine, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in December 1817.

And, since December 1817, conductors and performers have been ignoring those markings. Anecdotal evidence hints that nineteenth-century performances customarily eased Beethoven's 108 marking to something a bit more manageable. The ever-unreliable Anton Schindler even insisted that Beethoven took the opening five bars (up until the second fermata) at a tempo of quarter-note-equals-126, or half-note-equals-63-almost twice as slow as indicated.58 That was too much liberty for at least one famous colleague; Felix Weingartner tells the story: "Liszt told me that the 'ignorant' and furthermore 'mischievous fellow' Schindler turned up one fine day at Mendelssohn's and tried to stuff him that Beethoven wished the opening to be andante-pom, pom, pom, pom. 'Mendelssohn, who was usually so amiable,' said Liszt laughingly, 'got so enraged that he threw Schindler out-pom, pom, pom, pom!' "59 (But even Weingartner, an early stickler for textual fidelity, advised dialing back the first movement to 100 beats per minute.60) With the advent of the gramophone, parameters of performance practice-at least those inherited from late Romanticism-could be pinned down exactly. Conductor Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic made a complete recording of the Fifth in 1913; Nikisch's reading of the first movement coalesces around 88, albeit through a heightened haze of flexible speed. Weingartner lived long enough to record the Fifth four times in the 1920s and '30s, by which time his tempo had slowed from his earlier recommendation (his 1933 recording with the London Philharmonic settles in at around 92, for instance). In 1998, Gunther Schuller tabulated tempi for sixty-six different recordings of the Fifth; the average speed was just under 92 bpm.61 Nikisch's is sometimes cited as the first complete Fifth on record, but Friedrich Kark, a German conductor whose range extended from opera to popular dance music, had already led a cheerfully rough-and-ready recording with the Odeon-Orchester, a studio group, in 1910-with a first movement that does, indeed, reach the 108 mark here and there, albeit in somewhat runaway fas.h.i.+on. Kark aside, for many years, the only conductor to match Beethoven's markings (and not always) was the fiery taskmaster Arturo Toscanini. But Toscanini's fleetness was at least as much a sign of its own time as an effort to re-create the sound of Beethoven's era. Composer Lazare Saminsky called Toscanini "entirely a musician of our day.... His very aversion to adorning music, for inflating it with meaning, with extra-musical content, emotionalizing what is but pure line and form, is the aversion of today's musician."62 Even this approach was subject to its own modernist reaction, as when the quintessential avant-gardist, Pierre Boulez, conducted a recording of the Fifth in which the first movement clocked in at an astonis.h.i.+ngly deliberate 74 beats per minute. "At the time it seemed to me people generally took off like bats out of h.e.l.l in the first movement," he later explained. "I probably overcompensated. Certain things set one off."63 (Another provocateur, Leopold Stokowski, even managed to out-Schindler Schindler in one recording, taking the opening at a geologic 40 beats per minute.) Alternately obeying and ignoring Beethoven's tempi has created its own historical rhythm, the present's undulating dance with the past. (The controversy has even crossed over into other planes of existence. Attending a table-rapping seance, Robert Schumann asked the spirit to knock the first two bars of the Fifth. After a pause, the familiar rhythm commenced-"only slightly too slow," as Schumann told it. "The tempo is faster, dear table," Schumann chided; the table duly sped up.64) Those rare performances that adopt Beethoven's metronome marking can still sound almost cartoonishly fast. Such a reaction demonstrates either a) the extent to which two centuries of overdoses of injected Romantic gravitas have distorted Beethoven's original conception, or, b) that somehow or other Beethoven got his own tempo wrong. But the seemingly simple task of confirming Beethoven's metronome markings can quickly turn into a game of point/counterpoint. The Vienna of Beethoven's time apparently favored faster tempi-Carl Czerny, for instance, published tables of metronome markings for works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven indicating such.65 On the other hand, both Czerny and Beethoven were setting tempi at the piano, not in rehearsal with a full orchestra, and the sharper attack and quicker decay of the piano might have encouraged faster tempi.66 And then, there is the tricky business of Beethoven's advancing deafness. A Beethoven relying more on the sight of the metronome's swinging pendulum than its sound might have experienced a psychological phenomenon called saccadic chronostasis: watching a clock tick can produce the illusion that it's ticking ever so slightly slower than it actually is.67 Another toss-up: musical training improves accurate tempo perception, but deafness inhibits it.68 Possibly the first person to notice that the ears were better than the eyes at judging intervals of time was a German physician named Karl von Vierordt, whose main claim to fame was figuring out how to measure blood pressure; he invented the forerunner of the modern sphygmomanometer. He was also curious about how the brain makes sense of time, publis.h.i.+ng a book about it in 1868. Out of his experiments (performed mainly on himself), he formulated Vierordt's Law, a fairly robust rule of thumb that says that humans almost universally underestimate long periods of time, while overestimating short ones. This logically implied the existence of an "indifference point," where our perception crosses the line between under- and overestimation: one spot on the continuum where our perception of an interval of time is exact.69 The indifference point is not an uncontroversial subject (experimental parameters seem to affect it to a somewhat unruly degree, scientifically speaking), but-and here's where it gets interesting vis-a-vis Beethoven-the most commonly cited figures for the indifference point are between 625 and 700 milliseconds.70 On a metronome, that would correspond to between 86 and 96 beats per minute-almost exactly the range of Romantic and post-Romantic performances of the first movement of the Fifth. Also, the 550-millisecond beat that Beethoven's 108-bpm marking prescribes is right in the middle of the range in which people are most sensitive to tempo discrimination.71 In other words, in psychological terms, Beethoven's marking for the Fifth is too fast-perhaps deliberately too fast. Based on Vierordt's Law, 108 bpm will always feel like it's running away from us, the next beat always falling just before our overestimation wants to place it; and, what's more, 108 is right where that's liable to dis...o...b..bulate us the most. All those plodding conductors might have been in search of rhetorical importance-or they might merely have been instinctively nudging the Fifth's tempo back toward the indifference point, each successive downbeat coming where they expect. Consciously or not, Beethoven gave the Fifth a tempo marking that exacerbated the symphony's sense of disorientation; consciously or not, ever since they got their hands on it, conductors have been trying to ameliorate it.

The 108 threshold reentered the musical world with the early-music movement, once its pract.i.tioners gained the confidence to cla.s.sify Beethoven as a candidate for historically informed performance.72 The early-music philosophy, with its focus on period instruments, textual fidelity, and "letting the music speak for itself" (as one sometime skeptic put it),73 nonetheless, like Toscanini's machine-like clarity, reflected contemporary needs as much as Beethoven's; it was both a construct made possible by modern scholars.h.i.+p and an a.s.sertion of authenticity in an increasingly manufactured, consumerist culture.

The whole concept of "authenticity" fascinated the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, as a symptom of modernity and its discontent; Sartre wrote of "that deep desire, that fear and anguish at the heart of all authenticity-which are apprehensions before life.... This fear is due to the fact that the situations envisaged are on the horizon, out of reach[.]"74 One is almost tempted to plot the fluctuations in the speed of performances of the Fifth as a kind of index of alienation over time, with instances of Beethoven's perceptually out-of-reach 108 beats per minute indicating, paradoxically, the most insistent need for an authentic experience.

SARTRE ONCE LIKENED Beethoven's music to a historical moment of unusual possibility: Rhetorical, moving, sometimes verbose, the art of Beethoven gives us, with some delay, the musical image of the a.s.semblies of the French Revolution. It is Barnave, Mirabeau, sometimes, alas, Lally-Tollendal. And I am not thinking here of the meanings he himself occasionally liked to give his works, but of their meaning which ultimately expressed his way of hurling himself into a chaotic and eloquent world.75 For Sartre, Beethoven's exhortations were all too easily adaptable to revolution and reaction alike. (Hence the mention of Gerard de Lally-Tollendal, the Irish-born deputy to the Estates-General who defended Louis XVI and sought to preserve the ancien regime; whom the great French historian Jules Michelet described as "lachrymose Lally, who wrote only with tears, and lived with a handkerchief to his eyes."76) No stranger to the discord between the personal pursuit of intellectual freedom and the more restricted menu of political positions available in the public sphere, Sartre might have envied Beethoven's comparatively frictionless revolutionary reputation: energetically radical but politically elusive, embodying the pa.s.sions of revolution without ever firmly coming down on any one side.

The French Revolution ended up being the great politico-intellectual winnowing of the subsequent century, as the boundaries of the European political and philosophical landscape were reconfigured around the poles of support for the Revolution's rights-of-man intentions and horror at its reign-of-terror consequences. The young Beethoven's sympathies with the ideals of the Revolution were sincere, as far as they went ("Liberty and fraternity-but not equality" is how Maynard Solomon aptly sums it up,77 a formula that could be applied to the German Enlightenment as a whole), but his advertis.e.m.e.nt of them was selective.

The most famous of Beethoven's political statements would be his use of Friedrich von Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, premiered in 1824. But he was planning a setting as early as 1793.78 That would have been just about the radical-chic zenith for Schiller, who had been arrested by the Duke of Wurttemberg after the sensational 1781 premiere of his play Die Rauber, and whose tragedies of authoritarianism and snuffed-out flames of freedom were enough to warrant the author a grant of honorary French citizens.h.i.+p from the National a.s.sembly in 1792. But Schiller had already begun to sour on the French Revolution, its violence and chaos. In 1793, he would begin writing his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, in which he postulated art as a more reliable source of freedom: The dynamic State can merely make society possible, by letting one nature be curbed by another; the ethical State can merely make it (morally) necessary, by subjecting the individual will to the general; the aesthetic State alone can make it real, because it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual.79 "[I]t is the aesthetic mode of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom," Schiller concluded.80 By the time news of his French citizens.h.i.+p reached him, in 1798, Schiller considered the honor a postcard "from the empire of the dead,"81 as he told his now-friend, the conservative Goethe. In 1802, ten years after the a.s.sembly offered him symbolic fraternity, he accepted the n.o.biliary particle, becoming Friedrich von Schiller. (True, he accepted it from the comparatively liberal Charles Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, but still.) The young Beethoven was enough of a Schiller fan that he and his friends could trade quotes from Don Carlos in their autograph books. But soon after Beethoven's arrival in Vienna, Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris, Schiller's plays were banned by the Hapsburg monarchy, and Beethoven's revolutionary enthusiasms became more circ.u.mspect. He continued to work on a setting of "An die Freude"-perhaps even finis.h.i.+ng it-but ultimately decided to keep it under wraps.82 By the time Beethoven returned to the "Ode" in the Ninth Symphony, some three decades later, both the delay and Schiller's post-"Ode" moderation had somewhat dulled the connection with the Revolution.

Beethoven's politics are tricky to unravel, not just because of the novel political landscape he inhabited, but because his personal intersection with politics, fame, and necessary livelihood was largely unprecedented. One oft-repeated story of Beethoven and politics concerns the Third Symphony, the Eroica, which Beethoven originally planned to dedicate to-and name after-Napoleon. As Ferdinand Ries told it: I was the first to tell him the news that Bonaparte had declared himself Emperor, whereupon he flew into a rage and shouted: "So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man! mortal! Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!" Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the t.i.tle page at the top, ripped it all the way through, and flung it to the floor.83 Beethoven scratched Bonaparte's name off the t.i.tle page of the original ma.n.u.script with such vehemence that he wore a hole in the paper, and ensured his future reputation as a champion of individual freedom. Except that, as late as 1810, some six years later, Beethoven was considering dedicating another work to the former First Consul.84 Napoleon had abandoned democratic ideals, occupied Vienna-twice-and yet Beethoven kept circling back. While working on the Fifth, he received a job offer from Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon's youngest brother, recently made King of Westphalia, a Napoleonic attempt at German unification; only an intervention of Viennese patronage kept Beethoven from leaving. Several years later, in 1815, Beethoven entertained dignitaries gathered to dispose of the Napoleonic Era at the Congress of Vienna. In the wake of Waterloo, he must have felt as if his career had dodged a bullet-and yet, after Napoleon left the stage, Beethoven largely abandoned his heroic style, the style that had made him famous, the style of the Fifth.85 For all his paper-mutilating rage, Beethoven surely sensed that he and Napoleon were more alike than not: both coming up from modest backgrounds, both disdainful of the limitations of traditional cla.s.s structure and privilege while leveraging tradition to their own ends. Napoleon paved the way for Beethoven, setting a pattern of innovative fame-one based as much on a cultivated force of personality as on achievement-that Beethoven exploited to the hilt. Leo Braudy, preeminent critic of fame, described the Emperor in terms that could easily apply to Beethoven: "He was at once the man of destiny-melancholic, brooding, striving alone-and the man of cla.s.sic order, ensuring the survival of all those inst.i.tutions ... at whose center he stood."86 Every anecdote of Beethoven's disheveled dress, his oblivious demeanor, his contempt of social ceremony, his reverence for the cla.s.sics (literary and musical: toward the end of his life, Beethoven even bruited about the idea of an overture on the B-A-C-H theme), proved to be canny moves in a game Napoleon had pioneered.

It wasn't that the young and the restless hadn't pursued fame before, but that fame had been a means to a cushy end. As historian Henri Brunschwig put it, referring to young writers in late-eighteenth-century Prussia: "To become famous is a short cut to the heights of a career in politics or the civil service. It means gaining an emba.s.sy or a university chair without the heat of the fray; it means invitations from princes aspiring to be Maecenases."87 But as the repercussions of revolution dried up those channels, ambition became diffuse and unfocused. Napoleon offered a case study in a new career path, one in which fame became an end in itself.

In Beethoven's case, the fame of both the composer and his music reinforced each other. The Eroica story burnished Beethoven's antiauthoritarian credentials, which in turn encouraged democratically "spun" interpretations of the rest of his music, which in turn further solidified the composer's radical reputation, and so on. The Landsberg 6 triumvirate-Eroica, Fidelio, the Fifth-had the biographical effect of making tales of Beethoven more believable the more they seemed to reveal a sympathy with revolutionary ideals.

And in Beethoven's relations.h.i.+p with Bettina Brentano-and Bettina's subsequent reportage of that relations.h.i.+p-one can clearly see the image being built.

In her own life, Bettina Brentano-later Bettina von Arnim-showed how the new rules of fame could be leveraged for feminine empowerment. Beethoven fell into the circle of the Brentanos sometime after the family moved into the wonderfully cluttered Vienna house of Joseph Melchior von Birkenstock, Bettina's half brother Franz having married Birkenstock's daughter Antonie. The Brentano sisters-Sophie, one-eyed and doomed to an untimely death; Antonie, the link between old and new Viennese aristocracy; and Bettina, confident and self-a.s.sured-were everything that Beethoven found attractive: lovely, intelligent, talented, and, for all practical purposes, maritally unattainable. At one time or another Beethoven found himself pulled toward all three. (Antonie, her marriage notwithstanding, has been not implausibly suggested as the mysterious "Immortal Beloved" to whom Beethoven wrote a series of impa.s.sioned love letters.88) It was in May 1810 that Bettina stole up behind Beethoven at his pianoforte and put her hands on his shoulders; when the misanthropic composer realized it was a pretty girl, and a Brentano to boot, he softened and sang to her a newly written setting of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land?" That, at least, is how Bettina told the story-and Bettina was quite a storyteller. The young woman had already made the a