The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Part 5

Whom envy dared not hate,

Bequeath'd the name of Was.h.i.+ngton.

The poem's reference to both Schoenberg's original home ("And she, proud Austria's mournful flower, / Thy still imperial bride; / How bears her breast the torturing hour?") and his adopted one completed the allegorical circle.92 But if the poetic content of Schoenberg's Ode was a rather obvious appropriation of Byron into the fight against perverted German nationalism, the musical content would make subtle but pointed use of another mascot: Beethoven.93 Schoenberg set Byron's poem not in melody but in Sprechstimme, a rhythmically specified and melodically contoured declamation, somewhere between singing and oratory. The speaker was accompanied by string quartet and piano. Schoenberg thoroughly plotted the piece: he typed out the poem and then annotated it in extensive precompositional detail, mapping out motives, planning musical connections between distant stanzas.94 The music is dense, chromatic, mercurial.

But then, about a quarter of the way in, as the speaker ruefully recalls Napoleon's former martial glory-"The triumph, and the vanity, / The rapture of the strife- / The earthquake voice of Victory"-the violins and piano offer an eminent bit of commentary: the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth. The speaker echoes it: of Victo- ry Schoenberg makes the connection between the Napoleonic era and World War II in a single stroke.

Schoenberg attached great import to the quotation, which provocatively yoked so much history into one charged gesture. He showed Leonard Stein "with barely concealed pride and excitement" the "serendipitous discovery." "Now it was rather unusual for Schoenberg to show anybody his works in progress," Stein remembered, "so he must have been struck by the remarkable inspiration which produced in combination the 'Ma.r.s.eillaise' and the motive of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony."95 The revolutionary echoes could be remastered in service of another century's struggle. But Beethoven's appearance in Schoenberg's Ode is by no means a moment of unclouded triumph. The entire piece, in fact, is arguing with history, undermining the privileges of a civilization that, in Schoenberg's opinion, thought too slowly to be preserved. The friction can be heard in the way Schoenberg applies the technique he was most identified with: the twelve-tone method.

The twelve-tone method was originally conceived, in part, as a systematic way to remove any hint of nineteenth-century tonality from a work's musical vocabulary. By basing a piece around a row-the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, rearranged and permutated, but threaded through a piece consistently, such that no one pitch took precedence over the other eleven-a composer could escape the fetters of a tonal center, a tonal point of departure and return (C, for instance, in the case of Beethoven's Fifth). Triads-the familiar harmonies of tonal music-were to be avoided, lest they set up aural expectations of resolution and arrival. The idea was to make sounds, structures, and rhetoric more fluid, their expressivity more instantaneous and powerful.

The application of twelve-tone principles in the Ode, though, is unusually loose. The row is hardly consistent: Schoenberg part.i.tions the row into three-, four-, six-note sections, which he then freely reorders. Once Schoenberg preached avoiding octaves, on the ground that they would give too much weight to the pitches being doubled; but the Ode doubles pitches at the octave all over the place. And Schoenberg deliberately flies in the face of the music's nominal atonality by constantly engineering his row so it throws off old-fas.h.i.+oned triads. The Ode is a twelve-tone piece that is bending over backward to sound tonal. The piece ends on a grand, fat E-flat major chord.

But the Ode is not really tonal: rather, it is taking the vocabulary of tonality and turning it into disorienting, churning rhetoric; the music runs away from tonal grammar, s.h.i.+fting through harmonies too quickly to allow any sort of anchor. And that may be part of the work's satiric intent-the Ode does to familiar musical sounds what the n.a.z.is did to language.

Victor Klemperer was a professor and philologist in Dresden up until 1935, when he was dismissed on account of his Jewish heritage. Since his wife was not Jewish, Klemperer avoided the camps, but spent the rest of the war shuffled between factory jobs. All the while, he kept notes on the n.a.z.is' gradual appropriation of the German language; after the war, he compiled a book on what he called LTI-"Lingua Tertii Imperii," the language of the Third Reich. It was a language of distortion, not invention. "The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its language, perhaps-indeed probably-none at all," Klemperer wrote. "But it changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison."96 If Klemperer a.n.a.lyzed a twisted language, Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon critiques a twisted cultural heritage. Since coming to America, Schoenberg had written a handful of works in a traditionally tonal style (a neo-Baroque Suite in G for strings, a modernistic but tonally anch.o.r.ed "Kol Nidre" setting), and many of his dodecaphonic works of the 1930s and '40s hinted at tonal centers. But the Ode to Napoleon is different, a funhouse mirror of tonality, a familiar language after a breakdown. It is at the original peroration of Byron's poem, when Napoleon's once-proud image is rendered most brittle-when Byron most mercilessly dismantles "That spirit pour'd so widely forth- / So long obey'd-so little worth!"-that Schoenberg suddenly wrings a stream of triads from his row: G major, E-flat minor, C-sharp minor, F major, G-flat major, D minor, and so on, the sequence divesting the familiar chords of their familiar meaning. The great inheritance of musical tradition, bequeathed from the Fifth Symphony through the Romantics, through Wagner, through Schenker, had, in the end, done nothing to forestall the conflagration of war. When it came to improving human nature, the edicts of music, so long obeyed, showed, ultimately, little worth.

The allusions to Beethoven in the Ode are similarly double-edged. The opening of the Fifth is clearly echoing V-themed Allied propaganda-but the poetic "voice of Victory" it underlines is Napoleon's. The E-flat major ending makes reference to the Eroica Symphony, but the piece it completes is a thorough dismantling of a heroic image. After the war, a generation of European composers would take Schoenberg's twelve-tone method to extremes, eager to flush from their music any vestige of the nineteenth-century tradition that, in their estimation, had paved the way for war. A piece like the Ode to Napoleon would have been regarded as old-fas.h.i.+oned, but, in a way, the Ode was designed to engineer its own obsolescence. In the Ode, Schoenberg came not to praise the nineteenth century, but to bury it.97 WHEN SCHOENBERG died, in 1951, Pierre Boulez published a famous left-handed eulogy t.i.tled "Schoenberg est mort" ("Schoenberg Is Dead"). Boulez sought polemically to rescue Schoenberg's fundamental innovation-the twelve-tone method-from Schoenberg's late-Romantic habits and allusions. Schoenberg's American period, in Boulez's opinion, was marked by "utter disarray and the most wretched disorientation";98 the technique needed to be claimed by a superseding, progressive aesthetic (one, naturally, corresponding to Boulez's own). Schoenberg would have recognized the gambit; it's what he himself was trying to do to an earlier master in the Ode. From his expatriate vantage point, Schoenberg was proclaiming that Beethoven-or, at the very least, the truculent nationalism that deified him-was dead.

Sometimes, when Germans had bristled at using the Italian term Eroica, the equivalent word, Heldenhafte, was instead applied to Beethoven's Third Symphony. In the 1880s, the composer and historian Wilhelm Langhans had used the term to rate the Fifth Symphony higher than the Third: the Fifth described "the heroic [heldenhafte] struggle of man with an overpowering destiny, and victory over it, in even more poignant way than the Eroica."99 Victor Klemperer later recorded the n.a.z.i destiny of heldenhaft: In December 1941 Paul K. returned from work one day beaming. En route he had read the military despatch. "They are having a terrible time in Africa," he said. I asked whether they were really admitting it-usually they only report victories. "They write: 'Our troops who are fighting heldenhaft.' Heldenhaft sounds like an obituary, you can be sure of that."

Subsequently heldenhaft sounded like an obituary in many, many more bulletins and was never misleading.100 The German army's defeat at Stalingrad, in February of 1943, was too great even to euphemize. German radio announced that "all theatres, cinemas, and variety halls in the Reich were to close for three days." The announcement was followed by a broadcast of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.101

7.

Samples

Schoolchildren sing the theme of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, the Allies used it in propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War, and it has been made into a best-selling pop record. But its familiarity cannot be expected to trouble the extraterrestrial listeners for whom the Voyager record was intended, and it doesn't much bother us here on Earth either.

-TIMOTHY FERRIS, "Voyager's Music" (1978) Because p.r.o.nouns involve repeating the first tone of a sequence thrice, Martians were greatly delighted by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for it seemed to them a toying talk in praise of the ego.

-W. P. LEHMANN,

"Decoding of the Martian Language" (1965)1

IT TOOK the Second World War to find a steady movie role for the Fifth Symphony. It had not been used very often, possibly being already too much of a cliche even for Hollywood. But the success of the "V-for-Victory" meme gave the Fifth its big break: war movies. The four-note motive, along with the Ma.r.s.eillaise and "Rule Britannia," became an essential tool for cinematic pro-Allied sentiment. (It even worked its way into the plot on occasion: in Universal's 1942 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, which brought the Victorian detective forward thirty years to battle the n.a.z.is, Holmes [Basil Rathbone] a.n.a.lyzes radio broadcasts of the Fifth with an oscilloscope in order to unmask a Lord Haw-Hawlike propagandist.)2 Animated cartoons, already a playground for free-floating semiotic bits of music, seized on the a.s.sociation. Fifth Column Mouse (1943) brings in the theme to punctuate the war effort success of a group of mice, shaving a Hitleresque cat's fur into a dot-dot-dot-dash pattern.3 In Sc.r.a.p Happy Daffy (1943), newspaper reports of Daffy Duck's Brobdingnagian pile of Allied-bound sc.r.a.p metal inspire a burst of the Fifth on the soundtrack, the combination driving a cartoon Hitler into an unintelligible fury.4 Carl Stalling, the longtime music director for the Warner Bros. animation department, had the particularly apt idea of matching the Fifth's incessant motivic rhythm to modern, mechanized war production; both 1942's Ding Dog Daddy (in which a none-too-bright dog falls for a bronze-sculpture counterpart, only to see her carted off in a sc.r.a.p drive) and 1943's The Home Front (one of a series of cartoons produced for the U.S. Army starring the irrepressibly irresponsible Private Snafu) featured factories that hummed to Beethoven's beat.5 Dramatic films about the war made during the war had a tendency to use the Fifth to send the audience out with a dose of Allied resolve-as in Jules Da.s.sin's 1942 Reunion in France, which ends with Michele de la Becque (Joan Crawford) and her double-agent fiance (Philip Dorn) gazing up as a defiant skywriter offers occupied France COURAGE, to the accompaniment of familiar, pealing Fate.6 Postwar, Beethoven could be drafted for more casual purposes: Max Steiner's score for William Wellman's 1958 Darby's Rangers reorchestrates the Fifth's theme for flutes and muted trumpets, a comic sting for an American lothario (Corey Allen) knocked out by a British soldier after trying to steal his girl.7 (Allen collapses under a poster reading "Be Kind to Our Allies.") Samuel Fuller's 1959 Verboten! uses the Fifth Symphony for dread rather than uplift, ominously setting the film's opening scene: a burned-out German town, an American platoon trying to flush out a n.a.z.i sniper.8 (The sequence of the first few minutes is positively surreal: the Fifth's opening bars over the RKO logo, a fade-in to gunfire, then Paul Anka's syrupy t.i.tle song, then back to the story and the Fifth.) Fuller builds the entire sequence around the symphony's first movement, and any intended sense of victory is undermined, as two American soldiers are killed and a third wounded before the threat-and the music-is over. (Fuller, a veteran of the U.S. Army, 16th Infantry, once told of billeting on the floor of Beethoven's house in Bonn; to Fuller, who idolized the composer, it was like "finding an oasis in the desert."9) Producer Darryl F. Zanuck's 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day managed to be sparing yet unsubtle in its use of the Fifth, opening with a stark, BBC-style drumbeat of the motive over a close-up shot of an army helmet upturned on a Normandy beach.10 Like one of the film's roll call of big stars in small roles, Beethoven's Fifth appears fleetingly, and reduced to its most familiar essence, never getting any further than the first eight notes.

And, like Verboten!, The Longest Day almost seems to give Beethoven's Fifth back to the Germans, a.s.sociating it more with n.a.z.i foreboding than Allied triumph. The motive only appears in full orchestral guise twice: near the beginning, just after Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel (played by Werner Hinz) promises the Allies, should they invade, the t.i.tular ordeal; and then just before the German Major Werner Pluskat (Hans Christian Blech) memorably spots the invading force itself ("Auf mich zu direkt!").

Alan Sillitoe's 1960 novel The General, about a traveling orchestra captured by an enemy during war, specified neither the war nor the orchestra's repertoire; but, as the enemy general, "dwelling on one of the ma.s.s surprise attacks for which he had become famous," listens to the concert he forces the orchestra to play, the images are familiar: "The music illuminated his vision, and its final symphonic beats synchronized his resignation to the slow steps of advancing fate."11 When The General was made into a movie, it became very specific indeed: Counterpoint (1967, directed by Ralph Nelson) takes place during World War II; the orchestra is an American group on a USO tour; their captor is the German General Schiller (played by Maximilian Sch.e.l.l), who engages in a battle of wills with his egotistical equal, conductor Lionel Evans (Charlton Heston).12 Evans's conducting bona fides are established at the outset with a performance of the Fifth; at movie's end, with Evans left behind at the now-abandoned German headquarters, Allied artillery coming ever closer, the four-note motive again emerges from Bronislau Kaper's score, eventually swelling into full, grim Beethovenian force.

Inevitably, though, memories of the war faded, and the Fifth would accompany situations that could simultaneously utilize and satirize its distracting familiarity. Woody Allen's 1998 Celebrity opened with a funhouse version of Reunion in France: the Fifth comes cras.h.i.+ng in as a skywriter over New York spells out HELP.13 (It turns out to be part of a movie shoot.) Playing a neurotic Californian in 1991's L.A. Story, Steve Martin, showing an English journalist played by Victoria Tennant around the city, takes her to the "Museum of Musicology," which proudly displays Verdi's baton, Mozart's quill, and (da-da-da-dum) "Beethoven's b.a.l.l.s," a donation from "The Austrian School of Castration"-a common allegorical Hollywood fate, one surmises.14 The other place the Fifth Symphony turned up in movies was, of course, in movies about Beethoven himself. Abel Gance's Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) plays it over the opening credits, almost as if to get it out of the way.15 The 1994 biopic Immortal Beloved, directed by Bernard Rose, also opens with it, but under much more appropriately fateful circ.u.mstances: Beethoven (Gary Oldman), on his deathbed, expiring to an impeccably timed clap of thunder-and the first five bars of the Fifth Symphony.16 Immortal Beloved's MORTAL BEGINNING echoes a variant of Schindler's story of Fate knocking at the door, one that replaces Fate with Death. The Musical Times used it in 1911, for instance, mocking the new fad of adapting cla.s.sical themes into popular songs with a most inappropriate hypothetical: "We would not, for instance, like to hear the low comedian chanting his quips, say, to the 'death-knocking-at-the-door' theme in Beethoven's C minor."17 It's possible the knock of Death was appropriated from a work that Romantic opinion often heard as a direct precursor to Beethoven: Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which death (in the form of the Commendatore's statue) really does knock at the door. But the notion is an old one, going back to the Roman poet Horace: Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turris (Odes 1.4) As translated by Christopher Smart in 1767: Pale death alike knocks at the poor man's door ... and the royal dome.18 The image made its way into the repertoire of English allusion, and thereafter nudged its way into the lore surrounding the Fifth Symphony. There are even translations that hint at the crossover, such as that by Philip Francis, first published in 1742: "With equal pace, impartial Fate / Knocks at the palace as the cottage gate."19 With the Fate/gate rhyme foreshadowing Schindler and/or Beethoven's Schicksal and Pforte, one can almost imagine some product of an English education, somewhere along the line, making the unconscious transfer from Horace to the Fifth. (It's tempting to make the connection between Horace and Beethoven himself-the poet was one of Beethoven's favorites from among antiquity-but the German translations Beethoven would have read are nowhere near as close to the Schindler/Beethoven formulation.20) The Death-at-the-door interpretation gained traction around the turn of the twentieth century, a reflection of the heightened emotional stakes of art and music in the wake of the Romantic era. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen salted his Sixth Symphony, premiered in 1925, with versions of Beethoven's motive; in the final movement, a theme-and-variations, a near-quotation is thwacked out by a large drum. Nielsen told a friend that this particular variation was, indeed, meant to symbolize "Death knocking at the gate."21 (Nielsen had suffered a series of heart attacks after completing his own Fifth Symphony; the Sixth would be his last. In a bit of defiance, Nielsen followed his Death-knocking Variation IX with a brash, concluding Fanfare.) Replacing Fate with Death also brought Beethoven's Fifth into the fold of old-time, fire-and-brimstone religion. The image had long been a favorite of preachers (such as seventeenth-century Presbyterian William Jenkyn: "Death may knock next and remember he will easily break into thy body, though thy Minister could not get into thy soul"22); as Schindler's tale became commonly known, enterprising proselytizers seized on the resemblance. Edmund S. Lorenz, composer of such favorite revivalist hymns as "There's Power in Jesus' Blood" and "Tell It to Jesus," provided this exhortation in 1909, ill.u.s.trating "Why a Minister Should Study Music": Who can hear the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven with its motif of Death knocking at the door without being deeply impressed, and stimulated to an intense degree? Now with one instrument, now with another, the hand of Death is heard knocking, knocking, persistently knocking. The phrase is mysterious, haunting, ever recurring, sometimes sweet and plaintive, sometimes with the roar of the ocean sounding through its measures, sometimes cras.h.i.+ng and pounding with bra.s.s and cymbal as though siege guns were being trained upon the heart.23 A good example of the Death-at-the-door variant is found in Pat Conroy's The Water Is Wide, his memoir of a year spent teaching on an isolated island off the coast of South Carolina. One day, Conroy decides to play for his poor, undereducated Gullah students-descendants of freed slaves-a record of Beethoven, whom the students promptly dub "Bay-Cloven."

"Now one of Beethoven's most famous songs was written about death. Death knocking at the door. Death, that grim, grim reaper coming to the house and rapping at the door. Does death come to everybody's door sometime?"

"Yeah, death come knocking at Dooney's door last year," Big C said.

"Well, Beethoven thought a little bit about death, then decided that if death were really knocking at the door, he would sound something like this: da-da-da-da. Now I am going to place this little needle on this valuable record and we are going to hear death knocking at Bay Cloven's door."

The first notes ripped out. Ol' death, that son of a b.i.t.c.h.

"Do you hear that rotten death?" I yelled.

"Don't hear nuttin'," said Prophet.

"Sound like music," said Lincoln.

"Shut up and listen for that bloodsucker death," I yelled again.

"Yeah, I hear 'im," Mary said.

"Me, too," a couple of the others agreed.

Finally, everyone was hearing old death rapping at the door. Once we labeled death and identified him for all time, I switched to the Triumphal March from Aida.24 The scene touches on every aspect of the Death story that made it particularly resonant in America. There are the religious overtones, the revivalist style that Lorenz promoted, and also the call-and-response traditions of the African-American church. The repertoire of Negro spirituals often opts for similar imagery; Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a cousin of the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) recorded one such spiritual during his Civil War days as the colonel of a black regiment: For Death is a simple ting, And he go from door to door, And he knock down some, and he cripple up some, And he leave some here to pray.25 There's also the point that Horace was trying to make: death's universality. That, too, would have taken on special meaning in the United States, a country where the ideal of democracy was perpetually celebrated, if only intermittently realized. If the fate knocking at the door was to be specified, Americans might well imagine it as death, the most democratic fate of all.

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1863, a jubilant crowd of Boston abolitionists celebrated the arrival of Lincoln's Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation with a concert featuring Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.26 Ralph Waldo Emerson read a new poem, called "Boston Hymn": To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!27 The novelist Ralph Ellison was named for Emerson. In a 1955 article for High Fidelity magazine, Ellison recalled his days as an aspiring writer living in a noisy apartment. The Basie fan next door and the singing barflies who would stumble into the backyard court were profound annoyances, but there was another musical intrusion that provoked "feelings of guilt and responsibility": an opera singer, practicing hour after hour. This "more intimate source of noise ... got beneath the skin and worked into the very structure of one's consciousness-like the 'fate' motif in Beethoven's Fifth or the knocking-at-the-gates scene in Macbeth."28 The feelings were rooted in the past. Before turning to writing, Ellison had aspired to music. A budding trumpeter, he hung around Oklahoma City's vital jazz scene, yearning for entry. At the same time, he nurtured a desire to be a great Negro composer, bringing black American vernacular sounds into the temples of European high art. "[H]ere I was with a dream of myself writing the symphony at twenty-six which would equal anything Wagner had done at twenty-six," he recalled. "This is where my ambitions were."29 Ellison took lessons in trumpet, a.n.a.lysis, and composition from Ludwig Hebestreit, a German immigrant, music educator, and conductor, who founded the Oklahoma City Junior Symphony Orchestra. (Since Hebestreit taught at a segregated high school, Ellison's lessons were, by necessity, private; he got a break on the fees by mowing Hebestreit's lawn.)30 He enrolled at the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute as a music major, to study with the conductor and composer William L. Dawson, whom Ellison ranked as "the greatest cla.s.sical musician in that part of the country."31 Ellison may have imagined that he would satisfy mind and soul by pursuing both jazz and cla.s.sical music; instead, all he felt was tension. Hence the unease that his opera-singer neighbor brought flooding back, along with Ellison's recollection of his own obsessive practicing (and of the discomfort it caused his own neighbors) in pursuit of a troublesome goal: "For while our singer was concerned basically with a single tradition and style, I had been caught actively between two: that of Negro folk music, both sacred and profane, slave song and jazz, and that of Western cla.s.sical music. It was most confusing."32 It is at a point of acute confusion that Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony enter Ellison's most famous piece of writing, his 1954 novel Invisible Man. The protagonist, once a favored standout at a black college, is working at a paint factory after a series of disillusioning setbacks; after causing a boiler explosion, he wakes up in a hospital, in the middle of shock treatment.

Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and woman above me.

They were holding me firm and it was fiery and above it all I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth-three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in varying volume, and I was struggling and breaking through, rising up, to find myself lying on my back with two pink-faced men laughing down.

"Be quiet now," one of them said firmly. "You'll be all right." I raised my eyes, seeing two indefinite young women in white, looking down at me. A third, a desert of heat waves away, sat at a panel arrayed with coils and dials. Where was I? From far below me a barber-chair thumping began and I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound from the floor. A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning. A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling. Two forces tore savagely at my stomach and back. A flash of cold-edged heat enclosed me. I was pounded between crus.h.i.+ng electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player's hands. My lungs were compressed like a bellows and each time my breath returned I yelled, punctuating the rhythmical action of the nodes.

"Hush, G.o.ddamit," one of the faces ordered. "We're trying to get you started again. Now shut up!"33 The Beethoven reference is not just a throwaway; as in the symphony, Ellison builds his gambit into a whole movement, the entire experience itself echoing the opening of the Fifth. The opening rest ("Be quiet now," one of them said firmly); the initial attack (I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound); the repet.i.tive anacrusis (A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning); and then the held note, the fermata, delivered with the drawn-out excess recommended by Wagner: I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling.... My lungs were compressed like a bellows (Wagner: "Then shall life be drained to the last blood-drop"). Eventually, though, the fermata yields (We're trying to get you started again).

The symbolism, too, becomes more nuanced on closer inspection. At first, it seems a wedge, a bit of white, European culture meant to torture a black man into docility, for his own good. But in bringing in the Fifth, Ellison also brings in all of the symphony's encrusted narratives: fate, struggle, defiance.

Ellison's idea of art was decidedly Beethovenian. In one famous description of another musical touchstone, the blues, Ellison's language might have come directly from a description of the Fifth Symphony: "Their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit."34 As the civil rights movement picked up steam, Ellison stood outside it, defending his Beethoven-like retreat into his art; the social impact of Invisible Man was "the result of hard work undertaken in the belief that the work of art is important in itself, that it is a social action in itself."35 Critic Jerry Gafio Watts writes of Ellison in a way that recalls Beethoven's complicated pas de deux with Napoleon: "Heroic individualists, like most ambitious fine artists, are not fundamentally democratically minded. They may espouse democratic ideology, but they tend to view themselves as a select group, select by virtue of talent but more importantly by virtue of their sheer artistic willpower and bravery."36 Ellison once wrote that "being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures."37 (Muss es sein? Es muss sein!) In that sense, Beethoven's cameo in Invisible Man echoes Ellison's individualism, echoes his protagonist's need to find an ident.i.ty that transcends the preexisting roles in which both blacks and whites would cast him.

Nevertheless, Ellison is also picking a fight with Beethoven, and Ellison's Sunday punch is the way he rewrites the recognized instance of the Fifth Symphony's opening as an expansive, intricate description, neutralizing the music's temporality by lingering over each moment. Early in the book, the protagonist muses on what he's learned from listening to Louis Armstrong, likening it to a boxing match between a skilled pro and an amateur. Like the first movement of the Fifth, the prizefighter's body "was one violent flow of rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise." But the yokel, coming from outside the world of tradition and conventional tactics, lands his blow. "The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time."38 Retelling his protagonist's experience as a stretched-out version of the Fifth's opening, Ellison could get inside Beethoven's sense of time.

The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognises it.

-NADINE GORDIMER,

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories

IN THE STORY "Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black," by South African writer Nadine Gordimer, that particular a.s.sertion of Beethoven's heritage, heard by a white former antiapartheid activist and slightly alienated academic, prompts a reflection on the unknowable distance between him and his own ancestors, and how the needs of the present shape the perception of the past. "Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white," he notes. "Now there's a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It's the same secret."39 The idea of Beethoven having African ancestry inched into the mainstream along with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Malcolm X often claimed that Beethoven was black, as in a 1963 Playboy interview: "Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven's father was one of the blackamoors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven's teacher, was of African descent."40 Haydn's alleged blackness didn't make much of a ripple, but Beethoven's did, even reaching the ears of Schroeder, the Beethoven-idolizing pianist of Charles Schulz's comic Peanuts: "Do you mean to tell me," he asked, "that all these years I've been playing 'soul' music?"41 The cla.s.sification of Beethoven as some fraction black-one-sixteenth, or one-sixty-fourth, or even one-fourth, depending on where one reads-is often traced back to J. A. Rogers. A journalist, historian, and quintessential "race man" of the first half of the twentieth century, Rogers made the a.s.sertion that Beethoven was of African ancestry in the 1940s, in a three-volume study t.i.tled s.e.x and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands, citing numerous descriptions of Beethoven's swarthy complexion and curly hair, hinting at Moorish ancestors, going so far as to a.s.sert that "there is not a single shred of evidence to support the belief that he was a white man."42 That sort of burden-of-proof fallacy might give rational pause, though perhaps it helped make Rogers the go-to source on Beethoven's blackness: for those inclined to believe, a published reference; for those inclined to doubt, an argument that never ventured beyond the circ.u.mstantial. And Rogers's contention was not new. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had a.s.serted a black Beethoven, sardonically noting that "if the greatest of all musicians were alive today, he would find it somewhat difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities."43 There is no positive evidence to support African ancestry for Beethoven. There is always the possibility that Beethoven's Flemish ancestors deliberately obscured the doc.u.mentation; perhaps the Eighty Years' War, which dominated the Dutch Renaissance, occasioned a dalliance between one of Beethoven's forebears and an occupying Spanish sailor, one with Moorish or African blood, a connection whitewashed for the sake of propriety. But, given its fundamental reliance on speculation, the idea of a black Beethoven ends up as something like the Fifth Symphony: a convenient screen onto which anyone can project their own concerns.

Those concerns came into conflict in 1988, at Stanford University. During a freshman orientation at Ujamaa House, an African and African-American-focused dormitory, two white students got into an argument with a black student over Beethoven's alleged blackness; later, the white students drunkenly defaced a Stanford Symphony poster featuring a picture of Beethoven, coloring it brown, giving it frizzy hair, big lips, red eyes-Beethoven in blackface-and then hung it up outside the black student's room. Tensions rose and feelings frayed amid charges of overt and covert racism.

The Ujamaa Incident, as it came to be known, engendered pa.s.sionate if somewhat predictable reaction from all shades of the political spectrum-from grim denunciations of political correctness run amok to reinterpretations of legal case theory that attempted to square regulation of hate speech with the First Amendment. n.o.body, though, mentioned the curiosity of finding Beethoven, a long-dead product of long-dead German city-states, at the center of a late twentieth-century American clash over race and prejudice.44 On the one hand, the incident was a warped tribute to Beethoven's iconic status; how many other figures would inspire such a heated reaction? (One commentator asked if the reaction would have been the same if one insisted that Beethoven was Danish; the better comparison would be a claim of blackness for someone as obscure as, say, Jean-Francois Le Sueur.)45 But the incident also hinted at how the direction of Beethoven's fame had s.h.i.+fted from the music to the man. It was the figure of Beethoven, not the music, that was still potent enough to occasion both the black student's debate trump card and the white students' ill-considered response.

Critics of the hand-wringing the incident produced suggested that black students overreacted; but one might also wonder what it was about the possibility of Beethoven being black that so unnerved the white students. How much difference would an African ancestor make in the way we hear the Fifth Symphony? The notes would still be the same. Schroeder wondered if he had been playing soul music; but the whole idea that music has soul only gained traction with Beethoven in the first place. (Hoffmann, writing of the Fifth's innovatory nature: "Beethoven bears musical romanticism deep within his soul and expresses it in his works with great genius and presence of mind."46) Ralph Ellison once cautioned blacks that they didn't have a monopoly on soul: "Anyone who listens to a Beethoven quartet or symphony and can't hear soul is in trouble."47 In light of the Ujamaa Incident, Ellison's warning might be extended to all races.

The Stanford Symphony poster the students defaced was, in fact, a recruitment poster-an ironic footnote to the whole saga of Beethoven's blackness, since at the heart of the matter was the question of who got to claim Beethoven. Even as Malcolm X extolled Beethoven's blackness, other radical black activists saw Beethoven as recruiting for the other side, seeing the music-appreciation idolization of Beethoven as a kind of propaganda designed to a.s.similate blacks into white modes of living. The Howard University sociologist Nathan Hare regarded Beethoven as an affectation of "black Anglo-Saxons," as he put it; Hare told of a party where "the guests sighed with boredom amid strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," until Hare surrept.i.tiously put on a record by Little Richard.48 The poet and playwright LeRoi Jones was, not surprisingly, even more harsh; in his 1966 black-power "Morality Play" Madheart, an archetypically posited Black Man speaks of "the nightmare in all of our hearts. Our mothers and sisters groveling to white women, wanting to be white women." Later, one of those mothers prays to the idols of the (white-controlled) media: "Tony Bennett, help us please. Beethoven, Peter Gunn ... deliver us in our sterling silver headdress ... oh please deliver us."

"This is enough of this stuff," the Black Man scolds.49 Dominique-Rene de Lerma, one of the great scholars of black music, was scholastically compelled to dismantle the Beethoven-is-black theory as unsupported conjecture, but found one equally compelling benefit in engaging with Rogers and the idea of Beethoven's African-tinged features. "No matter how circ.u.mstantial or speculative Rogers's arguments might be," he wrote, they "are most provocative for those who still think of a black/white dichotomy."50 (Go back far enough, and we are all African.) The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had a musical taste that ran more to opera, and was more likely to cite spirituals than symphonic composers, though King would occasionally mention Beethoven as part of a sequence directed at seemingly more humble toilers: "If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures; sweep streets like Michelangelo carved marble; sweep streets like Beethoven composed music."51 But Beethoven made it into King's movement, wittingly or not; it was at the 1963 March on Was.h.i.+ngton-a century after the Boston abolitionists had celebrated Emanc.i.p.ation with the Fifth-that King honed to perfection a piece of rhetoric he had been trying out for some weeks, a peroration built on the power of a short, repeated theme, perhaps the most famous quartus paeon in oratorical history: I have a dream As Ellison said, the motive does get beneath the skin.

A 1987 PROMOTIONAL AD for ABC network programming found Beethoven hammering out the Fifth at a piano: "If Beethoven were alive today, could he make it in the music business?" Beethoven dons sungla.s.ses, electric guitars wail. "Find out what it takes ... this week on Good Morning America!"

The first attempt at cross-fertilizing Beethoven's Fifth and rock-and-roll didn't make that much of a splash. "Rock and Roll Symphony," in two movements (the A and B sides of a 45), was released in 1961, credited to "The Back Beat Philharmonic." The Fifth's opening is duly invoked before the piece slides into a string-laden, light-rock instrumental-only to come back around to quote a version of the Fifth's ending. The Philharmonic was a one-off, the product of accordionist Frank Metis and guitarist Randy Starr (the pseudonym of a Manhattan dentist, Dr. Warren Nadel). As The Islanders, Metis and Starr had previously scored a hit with their instrumental "The Enchanted Sea." Billboard highlighted the record as one of its "Spotlight Winners of the Week"-"Both sides come across well and should make strong instrumentals"-but "Rock and Roll Symphony" failed to chart.52 In j.a.pan, the Fifth Symphony's pop infiltration received an a.s.sist from California surf culture, namely, the instrumental rock group The Ventures, whose wildly successful 1965 j.a.panese tour inspired the genre known as eleki (after the electric guitars that defined the sound). One of the leading eleki artists, guitarist Takes.h.i.+ Terauchi, filled his tenth LP, Let's Go Cla.s.sics, with surf-guitar versions of cla.s.sical themes. The opening track reworked the opening of Beethoven's Fifth; "Let's Go Unmei" ("Let's Go Fate") won the 1967 j.a.pan Record Prize for Best Arrangement.

The trend reached Europe the following year. In 1968, the Dutch jazz-rock group Ekseption won an award at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival, the prize being a record contract with the conglomerate Philips; Ekseption recorded two songs by the early jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, which the record company p.r.o.nounced too old-fas.h.i.+oned and refused to release. Having been impressed by an English group, The Nice, whose organ player, Keith Emerson, liked to combine cla.s.sical and rock (a combination he would epitomize with his next group, Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Ekseption's keyboard player, Rick van der Linden, was inspired to work up his own rock-flavored, organ-and-ba.s.s-heavy arrangement of the opening movement of Beethoven's Fifth. For fun, he also worked in the theme from the Moonlight Sonata, as well as a 5/4 version of the opening of Beethoven's op. 2, no. 1 Piano Sonata. The band regarded the arrangement as little more than a novelty, but went along and recorded it.53 "The Fifth"-backed by an arrangement of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance-spent seven weeks in the top ten in Holland, and was a hit throughout Europe.

The British group Electric Light Orchestra, another rock outfit that flaunted cla.s.sical overtones, redeemed an obvious joke by the skill with which they worked the Fifth into their 1973 cover of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," using the entire opening paragraph as a lead-in, and then contrapuntally threading the four-note motive throughout the arrangement. Yngwie Malmsteen, the Swedish heavy metal guitar hero, signaled the ambition behind his neocla.s.sical style by playing a highly electrified solo arrangement of the Fifth on his 1980s concert tours.

It was, however, the advent of disco that would allow Beethoven to leave his most indelible mark on the pop music landscape. Disco started off as danceable defiance for a confluence of demographics-black, Latino, gay-shut out from the overwhelmingly white-straight-male world of mainstream rock. Originally limited to underground parties and clubs, dis...o...b..gan to enter the mainstream (and the mainstream pop charts) around 1973. In retrospect, it seems amazing that it took even as long as it did for the disco style-lush, string-laden, with a basic, readily adaptable four-on-the-floor beat-to be applied to the cla.s.sical repertoire. But it was only in 1976 that a matchmaker emerged in jingle writer and former Tonight Show arranger Walter Murphy.

Accidentally recapitulating a Hegelian model of progressive German music history, Murphy was inspired to arrange Beethoven by an arrangement of J. S. Bach. In 1972, a fleeting British studio group called Apollo 100 had scored an American hit with a pop-flavored version of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."54 Murphy worked up a demo of a dis...o...b..ethoven's Fifth that convinced a short-lived label called Private Stock Records to sign on to the project. (Private Stock's biggest successes had been Frankie Valli solo alb.u.ms, but the label also cornered the market on unlikely dance records: another 1976 release was Bicentennial Gold, an alb.u.m of disco versions of American patriotic songs like "The Marines' Hymn" and "You're a Grand Old Flag.")55 "A Fifth of Beethoven," credited to "Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band," reached the top of the Billboard singles chart in October 1976.56 (The "Band" was a label-imposed fiction that irked Murphy, who noted, "I wrote the song, arranged it, played most of the parts; it was basically my own doing"57-apparently taking the Fifth's motive as, essentially, common property.) The acerbic rock critic Robert Christgau admitted that the track was "great schlock, transcendent schlock even,"58 but none of Murphy's subsequent cla.s.sical-disco experiments ever approached its success. (As if to amplify its novelty aspects, it was knocked out of the number one spot by radio DJ Rick Dees's "Disco Duck.") That didn't stop producer Robert Stigwood from licensing the track for the soundtrack to his movie project, Sat.u.r.day Night Fever. "A Fifth of Beethoven" was accorded prime placement in the film, accompanying Tony Manero (John Travolta) and his coterie as we see them enter the 2001 Odyssey club like a prince and his retinue. Again, the song functions as an entree into the world of dis...o...b.. way of the most common entree into cla.s.sical music. For all its opportunistic sheen, "A Fifth of Beethoven" transcended mere novelty by deftly averaging a host of cultural vectors: inside and outside, black and white, gay and straight, art and commerce, eternal and ephemeral.59 Musically, "A Fifth of Beethoven" domesticates the Fifth Symphony while subverting its acc.u.mulated history. Murphy changes the meter from 2/4 to 4/4; the three eighth notes become three sixteenth notes, the entire anacrusis falling within a single beat, rather than across the center of the original's ambiguously fast two-beat bar. This makes the fourth note of the motive proportionally longer, almost like a fermata every time, but the continuing steady changes of harmony leave no doubt as to the underlying grid of time. After a somewhat faithful rendition of the original's first paragraph, Beethoven's contribution is boiled down to merely the four-note riff, punctuating sections that venture ever further from the symphony's material.

The only real vestige of Beethoven's ambiguity is in the opening, a fairly literal quote of the first five bars, but the context mitigates that original disorientation; "A Fifth of Beethoven" both plays upon and depends on the Fifth Symphony's celebrity. With the same pa.s.sage with which Beethoven sought to jolt and confuse listeners, Murphy draws them into comfortable familiarity. Those inclined to dance will wait through the opening because it's Beethoven; those inclined toward Beethoven will, maybe, stay through the dance because it's Beethoven.

Much of the effectiveness of "A Fifth of Beethoven" vis-a-vis Beethoven's original derives from how much the disco sound, with its swooping strings and hypnotically incessant beat, already matches the Romantic descriptions of the Fifth Symphony that would become music-appreciation boilerplate: transcendence, otherworldliness. (English critic Richard Dyer once wrote of how disco creates a Hoffmann-like " 'escape' from the confines of popular song into ecstasy."60) The seeming juxtaposition of high and low is an illusion, even a ruse; disco and Beethoven are revealed as long-lost cousins. One of the cousins just happens to be gay.

In much the same vein as avowals of an African ancestor for Beethoven, there have been periodic speculations that Beethoven was a deeply closeted h.o.m.os.e.xual. The most famous claim was made by psychoa.n.a.lysts Editha and Richard Sterba in their 1954 a.n.a.lysis Beethoven and His Nephew, citing Beethoven's repeated self-sabotage of his relations.h.i.+ps with women, his unhealthily intense obsession with his nephew, even the cross-dressing at the center of the plot of Fidelio.61 The claim is most a.s.suredly questionable. "A Fifth of Beethoven" is much more shrewd in its appropriation: rather than Beethoven himself, it is Beethoven's music that is conscripted into gay culture, polis.h.i.+ng another facet of the Fifth's universality. In the words of Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, it was in "A Fifth of Beethoven" that "the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic masculinity, met its gay destiny."62 The Fifth also fulfilled its black destiny by gaining a place, via "A Fifth of Beethoven," in hip-hop and R&B. The VHB-the Vintertainment House Band, the production team for Vincent Davis's Brooklyn-based Vintertainment Records, which featured the influential DJ Chuck Chillout-produced a 1984 hip-hop adaptation, "Beethoven's Fifth (Street) Symphony," that relied heavily on Murphy's framework. (And if "A Fifth of Beethoven" counted on the listener to remember the actual Fifth, "Beethoven's Fifth (Street) Symphony" alters the source material in a way that sounds like the musicians themselves were trying to remember how the piece goes.) The Fifth has been sampled, looped, and layered into other songs' backing tracks. The music could lend weight, either ironic (the British rap group Gunshot used the opening to kick off their debut single, "Battle Creek Brawl," in suitably imposing style) or earnest (producer Antoine Clamaran, under the name Omega, had a French club hit with "Dreaming of a Better World," making a transition in the middle of the song with a swath of the Fifth, much as another DJ might use a sampled drum break). "A Fifth of Beethoven" specifically could signify both sophistication and retro connoisseurs.h.i.+p, as when the rapper A+ (Andre Levins) used Murphy's version as the foundation of his 1999 single "Enjoy Yourself," a night-out boast that updates Tony Manero's entrance into the 2001 Odyssey for a hip-hop generation.

But as remixed culture evolved into something more fluid, the disco Fifth found a niche in which the symphony's more deep-rooted celebrity could also be acknowledged: an ironic counterpoint of history and parallel musical tradition. A pair of related dance tracks from the vibrant mash-up community that sprung up in San Francisco in the 2000s made especially trenchant commentary: first the DJs Adrian & Mysterious D mixed the Fifth and Kanye West's 2005 single "Gold Digger"; in tribute to that track's popularity, fellow DJ Party Ben worked the Fifth into a more elaborate collage built around Kanye's "Love Lock-down." Beethoven's monumentality made fluent combination with Kanye, a rapper and producer whose musical ambition and self-regard (he once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus in a crown of thorns)63 might well be called Beethovenian. The grandeur suits him.

Hip-hop artist Bonita "D'Mite" Armah used the Fifth's theme as a backing for his 2007 single "Read a Book," which recast basic self-improvement advice-brush your teeth, take care of your kids, invest in real estate-as a full-on, thumping crunk anthem, redolent with profanity ("read a muh'f.u.c.kin' book"). Satire with an edge that fine was bound to offend, especially after Black Entertainment Television turned the song into an animated short that showcased seemingly every negative hip-hop stereotype extant; a crowd five hundred strong protested outside the home of BET's chairperson.64 But Beethoven's presence was one key to Armah's intent, to parody a style that had grown so focused on style that any content would fit. "People tell me all the time, 'You know, I'm thrown off by how ridiculous the song is,' "Armah said. "I was like, yes, it's ridiculous, isn't it? It shows kind of where we've gone as a culture, and as an art."65 It was the brilliantly edgy Irish band A House that had, perhaps, the best take on pop Beethoven, with their 1992 single "Endless Art." The verses-lists of deceased artists, writers, and musicians, often cited with their birth and death dates-lead into the chorus, built on a sample of the first movement of the Fifth: "All dead, yet still alive."66 "HOW DIFFERENT life must have been before the tape-recorder. Fine things evaporated like rain drops. Nowadays, even rubbish has a chance of immortality. That is progress indeed."

The words of Stephen, a music critic, "dictating into the latest j.a.panese device" in Peter Ustinov's play Beethoven's Tenth. Later, Beethoven himself shows up at Stephen's house (knocking on the door in predictable rhythm) and, after being outfitted with a hearing aid, spends three days listening to his own works-many for the first time-via Stephen's record collection. Beethoven notes the productive virtue of his shelved expanse of vinyl: "From there to there," he boasts.67 Beethoven's Fifth had been a soundtrack for the recording industry's technological milestones-the 1910 Fifth by Friedrich Kark and the Odeon-Orchester had been the first complete symphony put on record, while RCA Victor had introduced the long-playing record with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the Fifth, conducted by Leopold Stokowski-but, with the advent of the LP era, Beethoven's Fifth itself could make the pitch, and cheaply. In 1940, for example, the Southern California Gas Company began sponsoring nightly programs of cla.s.sical music on radio station KFAC; a report in Public Utilities Fortnightly explained the rationale: "The theory: That people who like cla.s.sical music are mostly nice people, who like nice things, have nice homes, const.i.tute a sort of upper crust to the community pie-and therefore should be the folks to talk about the latest appliances."68 The programs actually exceeded that demographic, drawing a cross-section that would be any marketer's dream. "The listening audience is large, includes all population and economic groups, commands attention longer than any other form of advertising, and gets close to its audience, as a very personal thing," the report noted. "As a friend-maker, it is in its own cla.s.s."69 But, with the advent of rock-and-roll, Beethoven-as-pitchman could go back to courting that theoretical, upper-crust (or upper-crust-aspiring) audience. Thus, for instance, Orson Welles-from 1978 until 1981, the television spokesperson for the California winemaker Paul Ma.s.son-was, in one ad, discovered by the camera listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the stereo: It took Beethoven four years to write that symphony. Some things can't be rushed. Good music ... and good wine: Paul Ma.s.son's Emerald Dry-a delicious white wine. Paul Ma.s.son's wines taste so good because they're made with such care. What Paul Ma.s.son himself said nearly a century ago is still true today: We will sell no wine before its time.70 In theory, that was the place of Beethoven's Fifth in advertising-as a kind of underhanded appeal to sn.o.bbery, a shorthand for good taste. In practice, though, it was the Fifth's sheer recognizability that won out.

The strength of wartime V-for-Victory a.s.sociations initially put a damper on the Fifth's ma.s.s-media advertising presence. In the early 1950s, the fledgling jingle-writing team of Bobby Ca.s.sotto (who would later adopt the stage name Bobby Darin) and Don Kirshner (who would later produce the Monkees) had used the opening of the Fifth Symphony as the basis of a radio ad for a German airline; not surprisingly, the pitch was rejected.71 By the 1970s, though, an ad for the pain reliever Vanquish could successfully commercialize the war, with the Fifth ringing out as a construction worker flashed the V sign to indicate the defeat of his headache. (Churchill might have demurred, but Sir Thomas Beecham would have been proud.) A 1990 television spot for Nike shoes, starring NBA center David Robinson, used a nifty remix of the Fifth to set up Robinson's dig at fellow Nike spokesman Bo Jackson: "Bo may know Diddley, but Mr. Robinson knows Beethoven." It was a widespread intelligence, and one that became the Fifth's main selling point-what better way to drill a name or a product or a slogan into the customer's head than to leash it to a tune that seemingly everybody already knew?

The a.s.sociation could be positive-as in an Italian television commercial for the cleaner Vim ("vi-vi-vi-Vim")-or negative, as in a Swedish radio commercial for Nicorette gum, starring a choir coughing out the Fifth. Then there was Hyundai's 2007 "Big Duh" campaign, in which the glossy poetry-in-motion images of automobiles standard to such commercials were backed by famous songs, "remixed" into a cappella renditions consisting solely of the word "duh"-"based on the idea that it's a no-brainer to pick a Hyundai," according to Jeff Goodby, chairman and chief creative officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who came up with the ads. Among the songs was, perhaps inevitably, the Fifth Symphony. "Beethoven would be rolling over in his grave," reported Advertising Age magazine.72 Nevertheless, the campaign "earned the highest ranking for consumer recall," according to the advertising a.n.a.lysts IAG Research.73 The quartus paeon still works.

The Fifth Symphony also became a calling card for the composer, especially in j.a.pan, where Beethoven himself (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) was often pressed into advertising service. In a 2006 commercial for Tokyo Gas, a j.a.panese Beethoven bursts out of an armoire, announcing himself by singing the first four notes of the Fifth. (After cajoling the armoire's owner into letting him use the shower, and learning he can simultaneously wash his clothes without losing hot water-thanks to Tokyo Gas and its new "Eco-Jozu" water heater-Beethoven runs to the piano, clad in a towel, shampoo in his hair, and pounds out the motive in triumph.) A commercial for NewTouch Sugomen, a line of frozen noodle bowls manufactured by the Yamadai corporation, showed Beethoven enjoying the product in question in rhythm-slurp, slurp, slurp, sluuurrrrp. Beethoven expressing his satisfaction by shouting "Unmei" (Fate), the popular j.a.panese name for the Fifth, but also aurally close to "umai"-"excellent."74 In South America, the advertising agency W/Brasil ingeniously used the motive to hint at Beethoven's presence as part of a television commercial for the French-based media/electronics retailer Fnac: an overhead shot showed a customer flipping through a rack of compact discs, the plastic cases clacking in the Fifth's opening rhythm, until the desired Beethoven alb.u.m is located and retrieved. (The campaign won a 2003 Gold CLIO award.) The Fifth could even stand in for the customer rather than Beethoven, at least over the phone. In 1986, composers and recording engineers Mitch and Ira Yuspeh produced and marketed "Crazy Calls," songs in various styles with lyrics designed to work as outgoing messages on tape-based telephone answering machines. Promoting the collection through television commercials, the brothers sold over a million ca.s.settes. The message utilizing the Fifth Symphony's opening theme was probably the best-known of the set. "n.o.body home," it sang, "n.o.body home."

IN THE EARLY 1980s, chipmaker General Instrument released the AY-31350, an integrated circuit capable of providing synthesized tunes for "toys, musical boxes, and doorchimes" (the latter especially)-among the twenty-five preprogrammed "popular and cla.s.sical tunes chosen for their international acceptance" were Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. (Also included were the Ma.r.s.eillaise, the "William Tell" Overture, and the theme from Star Wars.)75 Hobbyists soon figured out how to wire an AY-31350 to an existing phone, creating the first Beethoven's Fifth ringtone.76 Beginning in 1996, when the j.a.panese telecom company NTT DoCoMo released the Digital Mova N103 Hyper, the first cell phone preprogrammed with multiple melodic ringtones, the notion of a phone call announced by Beethoven's Fifth really began to seep into cultural consciousness. In reality, both "Fur Elise" and the "Ode to Joy" (the latter was programmed into phones supplied by the organizers of the 1998 Nagano Olympic games) seemed to be more common. But Beethoven's Fifth became a common reference for writing about the possibility of a cla.s.sical ringtone. (After all, the original already sounds like a ringtone.) As early as 2000, the prevalence of Beethoven's Fifth as a ringtone, or, more to the point, the prevalence of the idea of Beethoven's Fifth as a ringtone, was enough for InfoWorld editor-at-large Dan Briody to include it in the second of a list of ersatz-Mosaic cell-phone commandments. "Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings," he preached. "Or Beethoven's Fifth, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody."77 (Was it the mere translation into ringtone that made the melody annoying? Briody's placement corresponded to either the prohibition against wors.h.i.+pping graven images or the misuse of the Lord's name, depending on whether one adopts a Talmudic or Augustinian numeration.) But as the technology advanced to the point of sampled, not synthesized, ringtones, popular music began to dominate the market. Where Beethoven's Fifth did become enormously popular as a ringtone is in the universe of ma.s.s-market fiction. Instantly familiar and unsusceptible to cultural obsolescence, the Fifth fairly rings off the hook in such writing. Pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel at your local airport, and chances are, if a cell phone rings during the story, it will ring Beethoven's Fifth.

To trace the symbolism of these fictional ringtones is to revisit familiar contexts for Beethoven's Fifth, and Beethoven's reputation in general. Sometimes it hints at a more privileged path through life; in Christopher Reich's 2002 thriller The First Billion, Hans-Uli Brunner, the Swiss Minister of Justice, receives an untimely interruption on the links, the melodic content an indication of his cla.s.s: As he stroked the putter toward the ball, an ominous tune chimed from within his golf bag. The first bars of "Beethoven's Fifth." The blade met the ball askew and it sailed three feet past the cup.

"d.a.m.n it!"78 With the advent of technology that allows multiple ringtones, tailored to particular incoming callers, Schindler's fate-knocking-at-the-door story again surfaces. For example, disillusioned political wife Helene Zaharis in Beth Harbison's 2007 Shoe Addicts Anonymous programs political calls to ring "with the ominous opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony."79 Parents are often the symbolized authority, as in Caroline c.o.o.ney's. .h.i.t the Road, in which the sixteen-year-old Brit embarks on an illegal road trip: "For her mother's ring, Brit had chosen the Beethoven's Fifth theme, that ominous one: dum dum dum daaaaah."80 (In the 2007 Rear-Window-for-teens movie thriller Disturbia, the girl-next-door Ashley similarly has the Fifth to warn her of a maternal call.) One can even find the American death-knocking variant, as in E. R. Webb's Christian-inspirational serial-killer novel Gemini's Cross, as part of the usual cat-and-mouse game: Immediately a phone rang somewhere in the shop. The ring tone was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Da-da-da-dum. Death, knocking at the door. Da-da-da-dum. Following the sound, Baxter looked under the table. Nothing. He turned over the chairs, one by one....

There it was, a cell phone taped under the chair. He ripped it off and put it to his ear.

"Okay, Darrell. I'm here."

"Good. Remember what I said about law enforcement."

"I'm alone."81 Jonathan Kellerman, in his 2005 detective novel Rage, uses the Fifth to hint at a character's Beethovenian outsider gruffness: He downed two Bengal premiums, called for the check, and was slapping cash on the table when his cell chirped Beethoven's Fifth....

Rising to his feet, he motioned me toward the exit. Some of the twenty-somethings stopped laughing and looked at him as he loped out of the restaurant. Big, scary-looking man. All that merriment; he didn't fit in.82 Then there is the Fifth as an affectation to be mocked. In Linda Ladd's Die Smiling, detective Clare Morgan considers the Fifth to reflect poorly on her partner, Bud Davis ("he's pretentious sometimes that way").83 On the other hand, in Christine McGuire's serial-killer mystery Until Judgment Day, DA investigator Donna Escalante's ringtone impresses sheriff's chief of detectives James Miller, echoing the turn-of-the-century use o