The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (17 page)

In Hoffmann, then, the nineteenth-century philosophical tendencies to depersonalize
and externalize both aesthetics and fate found an ideal vessel. The way he found himself
buffeted by the winds of chance, politics, and war, perhaps he sensed that the one
could vindicate the other, that the terror and awe of the sublime might lend an artistic
redemption to the less exalted terror of life during wartime. Surrendering to art
gives surrender a good name.

AND THEN
, a strange coda: as German nationalism went from aspirational to imperious, German
Romanticism—and, with it, the resonance of the Fifth Symphony—went from mystical to
messianic. By the year of the Beethoven centennial, 1870, the anxiety of the Napoleonic
Wars and the idealism of the revolutions of the 1840s had been supplanted by imperial
brinksmanship, as France (led by once-President, then-Emperor Napoléon III) and Prussia
(guided by the conservatively pragmatic hand of Otto von Bismarck) went to war in
July after much diplomatic sniping; Prussia scored a decisive upset victory, paving
the way for German unification while at the same time scuttling the renascent French
monarchy for good. (King Wilhelm I of Prussia was part of a large gathering that observed
the Prussian victory at Sedan from a hilly vantage, “a glittering concourse of uniformed
notabilities more suitable to an opera-house or a race-course than to a climactic
battle which was to decide the destinies of Europe and perhaps of the world.”
³³
) Bismarck had already secured the allegiance of most of the other German-speaking
states after a brief 1866 clash with the Austrian Empire; a story went around that
Bismarck, who revered Beethoven, had arranged a command performance of the Fifth Symphony
prior to signing the declaration of war. (The concert at which Bismarck heard the
Fifth was actually a month earlier.)

Also by 1870, after twelve years in exile, Richard Wagner was once again a German
in good standing, albeit living in Switzerland; Wagner acquired a zealous and fortuitous
fan in the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but jealousy among the Munich court necessitated
his leaving. (The composer talked the monarch out of abdicating and following him.)
It was still a remarkable change of fortunes.

The 1848 revolutions had taken a full year to reach Dresden, where Wagner was, at
the time, kapellmeister of the Royal Saxon Court—patronage that did not keep Wagner
from supporting the revolution wholeheartedly. He had been radicalized by August Röckel,
a fellow conductor and die-hard activist who lost his own musical position after advocating
armed uprising one
too many times. Röckel was also connected to Beethoven—his father, Joseph August Röckel,
had been Beethoven’s Florestan for the second try at
Fidelio;
his aunt was, possibly, the dedicatee of “Für Elise.”
³⁴
Röckel introduced Wagner to Mikhail Bakunin, who was going from revolution to revolution,
hiding out in Dresden after escaping from Prague—“a really amiable and tender-hearted
man,” in Wagner’s estimation.
³⁵

In his autobiography, Wagner gave the impression of having been pulled into the uprising
by the undertow of the mob (“I suddenly became conscious of the cry raised on all
sides: ‘To the barricades! to the barricades!’ Driven by a mechanical impulse I followed
the stream of people”
³⁶
), but he had, in fact, helped plan the rebellion, even ordering a shipment of grenades.
The Dresden revolution collapsed in violence, and Wagner was forced to flee, first
to Leipzig, then to Paris. He was lucky; Röckel was captured and, after his death
sentence was commuted, spent more than a decade in prison.

During his exile, Wagner worked on his massive operatic tetralogy
Der Ring des Nibelungen
and completed the equally expansive
Tristan und Isolde
, but neither of them would be performed until after his exile ended. His marriage
collapsed; his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a silk-merchant patron,
was in all likelihood unconsummated. He wrote what would prove his most wildly influential
essay,
“Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft”
(“The Artwork of the Future”), and his most wildly offensive,
“Das Judenthum in der Musik”
(“Jewishness in Music”), but neither attracted much initial notice. A beloved pet
parrot, who had just learned to whistle a scrap of the Fifth Symphony, suddenly died.
(“Ah!” he wrote a friend, “if I could say to you what has died for me in this dear
creature!!”
³⁷
)

Wagner was also introduced to the profoundly pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer had published his magnum opus,
The World as Will and Representation
, in 1818. He scorned Hegel and the German Idealists by rewinding back
to Kant; then scorned Kant by rejecting one of Kant’s fundamental concepts, the
Ding an sich
, the thing-in-itself, the object as it exists beyond the context of our senses. Kant
thought the thing-in-itself was, by definition, unknowable; Schopenhauer thought that
our inner experience, our desires, our endeavor to continue to exist—which he called
the “will”—contained knowledge of things-in-themselves. (His specific formulation
was that individual wills were facets of a single, all-knowing Will.) But the individual
will was fundamentally insatiable, forever denying other individual wills, forever
unfulfilled by its real-world translation into “representations,” forever making life
a vale of frustration and suffering. Schopenhauer prescribed ascetic contemplation—the
inner citadel could be, if not a refuge from the will, at least a neutral high ground
from which to observe the hostilities.

It’s easy to see why the Wagner of the 1850s, a one-man band of unfulfilled desire,
would be so strongly attracted to Schopenhauer’s bleak analysis. But the attraction
persisted even as Wagner started fulfilling his desires on a regular basis. For, unlike
Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer had tried to come to terms with music’s power in a way
that Wagner found tellingly sympathetic—and malleable. Wagner’s essay upon the Beethoven
centennial, as much about Schopenhauer as Beethoven, reimagines both figures as stand-ins
for Wagner himself; and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are used to define Beethoven (and,
by extension, Wagner) as the epitome of German-ness.

For Schopenhauer, music, “since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent
of the phenomenal world”—that perpetually miserable domain—“positively ignores it,
and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which
cannot be said of the other arts.” Music “is by no means like the other arts, namely
a copy of the Ideas, but
a copy of the will
itself
.”
³⁸
Wagner takes that ball and runs with it; if music furnishes direct access to the
will, then the composer must possess a unique access to “the Essence of things that
eludes the forms of outer knowledge.”
³⁹
The terms are Schopenhauer’s (and, though Schopenhauer would have been loath to admit
it, Hegel’s), but the empowerment is Wagner’s: “the
individual will
, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as
the
universal Will
.”
⁴⁰

Schopenhauer still might have agreed: “It is just this universality that belongs uniquely
to music, together with the most precise distinctness,” he wrote, “that gives it that
high value as the panacea of all our sorrows.”
⁴¹
But for Wagner, that meant that the creation of music absolved the composer’s exercise
of will from Schopenhauer’s ascetic demands. “[B]reaking-down the floodgates of Appearance,”
he insists, “must necessarily call forth in the inspired musician a state of ecstasy
wherewith no other can compare.” Such ecstasy is surpassed only by that of saints,
and only because saints do not mediate between their ecstasy and “a perpetually recurrent
state of individual consciousness” the way a composer does. That the composer takes
on the suffering that results from such alternation, a “penalty for the state of inspiration
in which he so unutterably entrances us, might make us hold the musician in higher
reverence than other artists, ay, well-nigh give him claim to rank as holy.”
⁴²
And none holier than Beethoven, who had one crucial advantage in his access to the
universal Will: his deafness.

Like the blind seer Tiresias (who, in one legend, was partially requited for his blindness
when Athena opened his ears, giving him the ability to understand birdsong), Beethoven
becomes a musical prophet, “the deaf musician who now, untroubled by life’s uproar,
but listens to his inner harmonies, now from his depths but speaks to that world—for
it has nothing more to tell him. So is genius freed from all outside it, at home forever
with
and in itself.”
⁴³
Wagner locates that freed genius within very specific borders, however:

Wagner’s overtones of religious trial would become a running motive in Beethoven commentary;
as noted by musicologist K. M. Knittel, “writers after Wagner privileged pieces in
which [Beethoven’s] suffering seemed to manifest itself most clearly.”
⁴⁵
Edward Dannreuther, a German-born pianist who became one of Wagner’s great champions
in Britain, asserted that “Beethoven is, in the best sense of the word, an ethical,
a religious teacher.”
⁴⁶
Sir George Grove, in his
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, could write how Beethoven’s life “formed a Valley of the Shadow of Death such as
few men have been called to traverse.”
⁴⁷
When Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist, wireless pioneer, Fabian socialist, and paranormal
enthusiast, published a catechism attempting to reconcile science and Christianity,
he explained the incarnation of the Divine in man with this analogy: “The spirit of
Beethoven is incarnate in his music; and he that hath heard the Fifth Symphony hath
heard Beethoven.”
⁴⁸

W
AGNER COMPLETES
the full turn of the wheel from the Enlightenment to the Romantic, from controlled
logic to subconscious fantasy, from a conviction that reason and rationality can explain
the human condition, to the aesthetic ideal represented in the purposefully incomprehensible
musical strivings of a deaf composer.

Wagner’s deification of deafness came during an outbreak of unusually drama-free circumstances
in his life: living in the Swiss countryside, far from urban intrigues, with his longtime
mistress (and mother of his children) Cosima von Bülow. In 1870, Wagner would finally
marry Cosima, Wagner’s first wife having died, Hans von Bülow having granted Cosima
a divorce, and Cosima having converted from Catholicism. As Knittel concludes, “[Wagner]
was as ‘deaf’ to the troubles of the world as he could ever have hoped to be.”
⁴⁹
The isolation, nevertheless, was not entirely placid, as Cosima related to her diary:

Beethoven’s metronome strikes again. But the opportunity to instruct the children
is in keeping with Wagner’s take on Beethoven’s music. Cosima again:

In his centenary essay, Wagner raised Beethoven to Romantic majority by equating Romantic
sublimity with a child’s innocence: whether in Beethoven’s folklike melodic ideas,
“in which he recognised that nobility of innocence he dreamt of”; in the Sixth Symphony,
in which “the world regains the innocence of its childhood”; or in the “Ode to Joy”
from the Ninth Symphony, “the childlike innocence of which … breathes upon us as with
a saintly breath.”

Beethoven’s goal, in Wagner’s estimation, was “to find the archetype of innocence,”
an innocence Wagner hears in the Fifth’s finale, “where the naïvety of the simple
march-tune … appeals to us the more as the whole symphony now seems to have been nothing
but a straining of our attention for it.” Much of that straining, of course, consists
of Beethoven’s working out of the implications of the opening motive, an intricate
operation that might seem more the result of technical plasticity than intuitive inspiration.
But Wagner is quick to counter that hearing is not necessarily believing: