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

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:

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
Eroica
³
—
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 assigned
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 encompasses 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:

J
EAN
-F
RANÇOIS
L
E
S
UEUR
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 Napoléon, 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 für
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 Nazi 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”:

• • •

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,
shifting 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