The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (14 page)

Kant ran out of road trying to critique aesthetics. His
Critique of Judgement
followed the more well-known
Critiques
of pure reason and practical reason (i.e., ethics). The half of the
Critique of Judgement
dealing with aesthetics is not exactly the watertight freighter you might expect
from the author of the
Critique of Pure Reason
. Kant expends a lot of effort distinguishing between “free beauty,” that is, beauty
that is perceived without any intermediary concepts, and “dependent beauty,” beauty
based on comparison with some preexisting concept in the subject’s mind. Only a perception
of free beauty qualifies as a true aesthetic judgment; if there’s an intervening concept,
then the subject is merely judging what is agreeable or functionally good. In Kant’s
definition: “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally.”
³

But, of course, only the perceiving subject could know
whether their judgment is concept free and therefore aesthetically valid, and Kant
admits that the perceiving subject is an unreliable witness, often unaware that a
perception of beauty is based on a concept. That makes it difficult to tell whether
an aesthetic judgment can be
universally
valid, which is Kant’s ultimate goal. We can all too easily fool ourselves into mistakenly
believing that dependent beauty is free, as when Kant takes in a seemingly spontaneous
concert:

In other words, we could consider what one thought to be a yellowhammer’s song and
consider it free beauty, only to have to backpedal furiously to dependent beauty once
we realized it was only the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Kant’s opinion,
we were simply misleading ourselves from the get-go (“our sympathy” confused with
the song’s beauty). Nonetheless, Kant goes on to claim that aesthetic judgments can,
actually, be universally valid, basically by engaging in a little rhetorical second-dealing
and hoping his sleight of hand is good enough that you don’t really notice. And it
is pretty good:

To wit: whenever anybody makes an aesthetic judgment, they are also asserting that
their judgment
should
be accepted by everybody. So the fact that we all make aesthetic judgments means
we all believe that such judgments
should
be universal. Which means (and here’s where you need to keep an eye on those cards)
such judgments
can
be universal, even if the judging individual can never be sure if a given judgment
is even valid. Kant may not be able to pinpoint it, but, like fifty million Beethoven
fans that can’t be wrong, if we all assume the
possibility
of a universally valid aesthetic judgment, it must be out there somewhere.

For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is not something you do, it’s something that
happens to you
, and the philosophical circle to be squared is in knowing that such a judgment is,
in fact, happening.
⁶
And that’s because Kant needs to preserve the human ability to judge even if it goes
against one’s emotions or senses. At its heart, Kant’s philosophy is all about freedom,
the freedom of the individual to decide his own path. For Kant, the ultimate expression
of freedom was in choosing duty over desire, in acting against mere stimulus in favor
of rectitude. From the Romantic point of view, he may have been a killjoy, but he
was at least right to emphasize the freedom that allows joy to be killed.

As much as Kant ingeniously dresses it up, however, his analysis of beauty is still
a weak logical link: it’s no wonder that aesthetics was a primary front along which
the Romantics would assault the Enlightenment. Kant’s basic aesthetic insight hints
at a path the Romantics would practically pave. Aesthetics, for Kant, doesn’t originate
with the subject, but it isn’t anything
intrinsic in the object perceived, either—it is, instead, the mind’s reaction to an
influx of sense-data that’s
too much to think about all at once
. Therein lies the difference between the Enlightenment and the Romantics: Kant pools
that sublime excess into the concept-stocked pond of dependent beauty, but the Romantics
let it overflow all the way to the mind’s horizon, where, if you look hard enough,
you might catch a glimpse of the Divine.

ONE OF THE
first to catch that glimpse, the intellectual progenitor of the
Sturm und Drang
movement, and in turn, the Romantics, was a combative, baby-faced zealot named Johann
Georg Hamann. Born in 1730, Hamann started out as a loyal
Aufklärer
, but in 1757, sent on a diplomatic mission to London that ultimately failed, he proceeded
to indulge in a round of debauchery and dissipation. The discovery that a friend and
companion was also the boy toy of a rich Englishman shocked Hamann to the core, although
it is unclear whether Hamann’s shock was sparked by revulsion or jealousy.
⁷
In any event, the experience drove Hamann to a spiritual crisis. He claimed to have
had a vision, he converted to a mystical Christianity, and he spent the rest of his
life attacking the prevailing rationalist philosophy for having the presumptive gall
to analyze religious faith. (Hamann’s rationalist employer, Christoph Berens, tried
to reconvert him to the Enlightenment cause with the assistance of a forty-five-year-old,
still-largely-unknown Immanuel Kant. Hamann and Kant managed to remain at least casual
friends, even as they mocked each other in print.)

Hamann’s writings sometimes seem to be testing the surfeit-of-sense-data model of
aesthetics by example, in a torrent of dense polemic. His most focused statement on
creativity and genius comes in a 1762 essay,
Aesthetica in nuce
(“Aesthetics in a Nutshell”). Hamann called the essay a “rhapsody in cabbalistic
prose,” a fair warning of his style: bouncing from idea to idea,
dotted with allusions both obvious and obscure as they bob to the surface of Hamann’s
consciousness, the text peppered with footnotes both explanatory and tangentially
digressive. Like a weirdly compelling cross between a haranguing street preacher and
David Foster Wallace, Hamann’s prose makes a bid to break free of normal discourse
and take flight on pure linguistic power. “What for others is style,” he once wrote,
“for me is soul.”
⁸

And that is, in a nutshell, Hamann’s aesthetics. To analyze art is to emasculate it;
to separate sense from understanding is to put asunder what God has joined. “Oh for
a muse like a refiner’s fire, and like a fuller’s soap!” Hamann proclaims (in a Hamann-esque
mash-up of Shakespeare and the Old Testament). “She will dare to purify the natural
use of the senses from the unnatural use of abstractions, which distorts our concept
of things, even as it suppresses the name of the Creator and blasphemes against Him.”
⁹

Hamann’s essay is concerned with poetry, mainly, but within the cabalism is the seed
of Romanticism’s elevation of instrumental music to the summit of art. Beneath Hamann’s
baroque ramblings is a kernel of linguistic insight. “To speak is to translate,” he
writes, “from the tongue of angels into the tongue of men, that is, to translate thoughts
into words—things into names—images into signs; which can be poetic or cyriological,
historic or symbolic or hieroglyphic—and philosophical or characteristic.”
¹⁰
This was one of Hamann’s main objections to the rationalist philosophy of Kant and
his ilk—a failure to realize that the mere act of formulating a philosophical system
in words dimmed the divine spark, a generational loss as action was recorded into
language. The idea that music expresses what language can’t—and the idea of holding
that up as a virtue—follows directly from Hamann’s gist.

For Hamann, the more that art is codified under rules and concepts, the more it corrupts
itself by separating it from a Nature that puts such artifice to shame. In
Leser und Kunstrichter
(
Reader and Critic
), written the same year as
Aesthetica in nuce
, Hamann calls Nature a beloved old grandmother. “[T]o commit incest with this grandmother
is the most important commandment the Koran of the Arts preaches,” he insists, “and
it is not obeyed.”
¹¹
In a reversal that the Romantics would take to the extreme, the audience is excluded
from this loving artist-nature family circle like a third wheel.

Beethoven may not have read Hamann, but he certainly ascribed to Hamann’s idea of
an unassailable individual creative genius. Ferdinand Ries recalled that Beethoven
rebuffed Haydn’s request for him to include “Pupil of Haydn” on the title page of
his earliest published works: “This Beethoven refused to do because, as he said, though
he had taken a few lessons from Haydn, he never had learned anything from him.”
¹²
For a young composer who had arrived in Vienna to “receive the spirit of Mozart from
Haydn’s hands,” as Count Waldstein famously put it, such a declaration of artistic
independence was both an astute response to a shift in the aesthetic winds and a foreshadowing
of the stubborn self-regard that would result in many an irascible-Beethoven anecdote.

But as much as he adopted the new Romantic attitudes in public, to judge by the quotations
in his 1812–16 journal, Beethoven perhaps remained privately skeptical of post-Kantian
metaphysics. Kant charted human existence along dualistic longitudes: reason and faith,
thought and sensation; the agenda of the irrationalists that followed Kant was to
collapse those dualities into underlying union. Maybe the deaf Beethoven, so confident
in his imagination but so cruelly betrayed by his own senses, took stubborn comfort
in their continued separation.

SUCH WAS
the atmosphere in which E. T. A. Hoffmann decisively appropriated the Fifth and its
first four notes for the Romantic cause. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm in 1776, but adopted “Amadeus” in his thirties as a tribute
to Mozart. He was, for much of his life, a refugee, pushed around by the political
and military forces of the Napoleonic era. His career as a civil servant and jurist
began in his late teens, when his unseemly attentions toward a married woman caused
him to be spirited away to clerk for an uncle in Prussian Silesia. Another relocation
resulted from Hoffmann’s circulating his malicious caricatures of the local military
brass. A two-year sojourn in Warsaw, where Hoffmann enjoyed the company of literary
society, abruptly ended when Napoléon’s liberation of the city put Prussian officials
out of work. Hoffmann found himself stuck in Berlin, separated from his wife and family.
His young daughter died; a job managing a theater was unraveled by the intrigues of
the leading actor. All the while, Hoffmann continued writing—both musical and literary
efforts.

The temptation to conflate Hoffmann’s biography with his art is omnipresent. A number
of his stories feature lost or dying daughters, for example; in
“Das öde Haus,”
an infant daughter is mysteriously kidnapped by gypsies; in
“Rath Krespel,”
the councillor Krespel’s daughter Antonia fatally exercises her talent for singing;
in
“Der Sandmann,”
the physics professor Spalanzani’s daughter, Olimpia, turns out to be a lifeless
clockwork automaton. Hoffmann’s greatest success as a composer, his 1814 operatic
adaptation of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella
Undine
, tells the story of a fisherman and his wife adopting a water-sprite after their
own daughter accidentally drowns.

More interesting is Hoffmann’s lifelong fascination with doubles and mirrors. Far
from reinforcing the old Kantian dualities, Hoffmann’s doubles instead are constantly
hinting at hidden, underlying unity. His fiction teems with
doppelgängern
—seeming twins, uncanny resemblances, echoing actions—but the doubles are explained
away as either coincidences or parallel, rather than contradictory, phenomena. In
Hoffmann’s masterpiece,
Lebens-Ansichten des Katers-Murr
(
The Life and Opinions of Tom-Cat Murr
), torn-out pages of a printed biography of the musician Johannes Kreisler (one of
Hoffmann’s more famous characters, and the inspiration for Robert Schumann’s
Kreisleriana
) have purportedly been used by Murr to write his own feline memoirs. The book—aptly
described by one scholar as “a confluence with constant linkages, with none of the
contrasts that we might expect”
¹³
—is out to undermine its own duality: the narratives of Kreisler and Murr are tangled
to the point that separating the threads comes to seem a pedantic waste of time.

Hoffmann’s tales remained yet to be written in 1810, when the impoverished writer
embarked on some freelance music reviewing. But his choice of Beethoven’s Fifth for
his first critical exploration foreshadows his later obsessions. The ability to trace
the opening through the entire piece, a musical web of seeming doubles, was enticing
bait, a glimpse of Hoffmann’s own future style—a style not just founded on an ideal
of philosophical unity, but narratively revealing the unity beneath a seemingly dualistic
surface. The first four notes resemble one of Hoffmann’s future protagonists, confronted
with a series of mirror images on the path to a realization of wholeness: