The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (18 page)

That ideal instinct, Wagner goes on, “coincided with the struggle to rescue from every
plausible objection raised by his experience of life the conscious belief in human
nature’s original goodness.”
⁵²
The experience of life is an objection to innocence; to rescue it is to rewind life’s
advance.

In his final nationalistic peroration, Wagner even has the effrontery to mingle such
innocence with the then-raging Franco-Prussian War:

To double-book German military triumph with German cultural triumph was certainly
an inspired move by the German
Geist
. (“The war is Beethoven’s jubilee,” Cosima remarked to Richard.
⁵⁴
) But Wagner’s insistence on Beethoven’s youthful qualities was a glimpse of a juvenile
strain that would become more and more prominent as the German Confederation turned
into Imperial Germany—from Ludwig II’s expensive habit of building fairy-tale castles
throughout Bavaria to the destructive childishness of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Then again, petulance was never far from the surface in
nineteenth-century Europe. In 1845, there was a Beethoven Festival in Bonn, attended
by representatives from throughout Europe, featuring the unveiling of a statue of
the city’s most famous son. Franz Liszt, then at the height of his celebrity, had
financially rescued the entire project. The King of Prussia escorted Queen Victoria
into the concert hall for the festival’s finale, after which followed a huge banquet.
If the concert was unsuccessful—long and nearly devoid of Beethoven, apart from the
Egmont
Overture and a bit of the
Archduke
Trio, quoted by Liszt in a specially composed cantata—the dinner was worse. Sir George
Smart, Beethoven’s English champion, had also made the journey to Bonn; he recorded
in his diary that, at the dinner, Liszt made a toast in which he “complimented
all
nations except the French … this omission caused dissatisfaction among the French,
who, with the Jews, are not popular here.” (Liszt’s oversight was probably unintentional,
a result of giving his speech in German, a language he was less than comfortable with.)
The hall was soon consumed by outbursts of recrimination. “This row was noisy,” Smart
recorded, “and fearing we might get into a scrape we left the Room.” Smart saw the
Jewish-born Ignaz Moscheles—Beethoven’s old colleague, who had translated Schindler’s
biography into English—leave the banquet, dismayed by anti-Semitic comments. “I am
ashamed of my Countrymen!” Moscheles exclaimed.
⁵⁵

Liszt wasn’t invited back to Bonn for the Beethoven centennial in 1870—the city fathers
had been too scandalized when Liszt’s ex-mistress, the Irish-born dancer Lola Montez,
turned up uninvited at the 1845 banquet, drank too much, and began dancing on a table
at the height of the uproar.
⁵⁶
Thus it was that Liszt ended up composing a second Beethoven cantata for the city
of Weimar.

The old text, by Bernhard Wolff, was “a sort of Magnificat of human genius conquered
by God,” in Liszt’s judgment.
⁵⁷
But the
new text, by Adolf Stern, cast Beethoven as a newborn divine, reminding us of “the
old legend from distant, pious times of a festival day announced by a star”:

And heaven and nature sing.

IN
1840, John Sullivan Dwight was ordained as pastor of the Second Congregational Church
in Northampton, Massachusetts. The charge at his ordination was given by William Ellery
Channing, the leading theologian of Unitarianism; Channing’s 1819 sermon “Unitarian
Christianity,” a clarion call for tempering faith in the fire of reason, sparked the
emergence of American Unitarianism as a national movement.

Now, near the end of his life, Channing gave Dwight the sort of paradoxical advice
that elders often give the young as evidence of their hard-won wisdom. “It may be
said, that religion relates to the Infinite; that its great object is the Incomprehensible
God; that human life is surrounded with abysses of mystery and darkness; that the
themes on which the minister is to speak, stretch out beyond the power of imagination … that
at times he only catches glimpses of truth, and cannot set it forth in all its proportions,”
Channing orated. “All this is true. But it is also true, that a minister speaks to
be understood; and if he cannot make himself intelligible, he should hold his peace.”
¹

Within two years, Dwight had left the ministry and was living at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist
utopian commune just outside Boston. When Lowell Mason’s Boston Academy of Music performed
Beethoven’s Fifth in 1842, Dwight reviewed it, in the process becoming one of the
country’s first serious critics of classical music.

Where the opening theme embarks on its ping-pong of imitation, Dwight glimpsed an
abyss of mystery and darkness. “It is as if a fearful secret, some truth of mightiest
moment, startled the stillness where we were securely walking, and the heavens and
the earth and hell were sending back the sound thereof from all quarters, ‘deep calling
to deep,’ and yet no word of explanation,” Dwight preached. “What is it? What can
all this mean?”
²

Dwight’s classmate at Harvard Divinity School, future abolitionist Theodore Parker,
wasn’t surprised that Dwight didn’t make it as a reverend. Dwight, he said, often
“mistook the indefinite for the Infinite.”
³
Out of such metaphysical optimism would sprout an American cult of Beethoven.

W
ILLIAM
E
LLERY
C
HANNING
’
S
nephew, William Henry Channing, was, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the catalyst
for Transcendentalism. “Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840 [Emerson gets the date wrong;
it was actually 1836] with George Ripley, to the point whether it were possible to
bring cultivated,
thoughtful people together, and make society that deserved the name.”
⁴
Emerson took some pains to paint a casual, accidental air around the founding myth
of the intellectual school he would eventually become identified with. The circle,
in Emerson’s telling, would have been “surprised at this rumor of a school or sect,
and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism.… From that time meetings were held
for conversation, with very little form, from house to house, of people engaged in
studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter
it flowed. Nothing could be less formal.”
⁵

And yet, Emerson admitted, members of the group not only produced their own publication,
The Dial
(which “enjoyed its obscurity for four years,” Emerson insisted), but also, in 1841,
purchased nearly two hundred acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, inaugurating the
social experiment of Brook Farm. The driving force behind Brook Farm was the above-mentioned
George Ripley, like Channing and Dwight, a Unitarian minister. The first meeting of
what would be called the Transcendentalist Club (the name “given nobody knows by whom,”
according to Emerson) was held at Ripley’s house.

Transcendentalism always resisted pithy definition; another Transcendental Club member
joked that the group referred to themselves as “like-minded; I suppose because no
two of us thought alike.”
⁶
But the movement, everyone involved agreed, was heavily influenced by German Romanticism—Germany
being to American intellectuals of the time what Paris would be to their 1920s counterparts.
The rendition was more enthusiastic than systematic.

Probably because it transmitted much of the aura and reputation of German Romanticism
without any specificity, Beethoven’s music was a central reference point. Lindsay
Swift, an early historian of Brook Farm, insisted that, if “the transplantation of
German ideas [is] to be held of much account in the simple story of Boston Transcendentalism,
the name of Beethoven
must enter any reckoning which includes Goethe and Kant. No external influence has
been so potent or lasting in Boston as the genuine love for Beethoven, and for the
few other names clustering around the greater genius.”
⁷

Even Emerson, not much of a music lover, recognized Beethoven’s importance. “The music
of Beethoven,” he wrote, “is said by those who understand it, to labor with vaster
conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before.”
⁸
Beethoven was part of the Transcendentalist ethos from the start, probably introduced
by Margaret Fuller, whose awesome erudition and willed self-assurance bewitched and
bothered a fair portion of the circle. (“I find no intellect comparable to my own,”
⁹
she once posited, and she may have been right.) Fuller, drawing on accounts by Goethe
and Bettina von Arnim, painted Beethoven in Transcendental colors, shaded with the
dialectic: “He traveled inward, downward, till downward was shown to be the same as
upward, for the centre was passed.”
¹⁰

Fuller, recruited by Emerson to edit
The Dial
, could have been echoing another Transcendentalist—Bronson Alcott, a pioneering educator,
a passionate (and sometimes impractical) activist, and, if the encomiums of the rest
of the Transcendental Club are to be believed, the true heart of the circle. Alcott’s
“Orphic Sayings,” spread over three issues of
The Dial
, were aphorisms in the German Romantic vein, only more impenetrable; parodies of
Alcott’s gnomic utterances became a favorite way to mock the New England intellectuals.
But Alcott nevertheless came close to both defining the Transcendental ideal and the
image of Beethoven they fashioned to match it:

George Ripley himself tried to sum up the Transcendentalists’ philosophy in a letter
to his Purchase Street Church congregation: “[T]hey maintain that the truth of religion
does not depend on tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in
the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh
into the world; there is a faculty in all—the most degraded, the most ignorant, the
most obscure—to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented.”
¹²

The letter was a last-ditch effort to justify his socially conscious preaching to
his increasingly suspicious parishioners, but three months later Ripley tendered his
resignation. After giving his farewell sermon in March of 1841, he moved to Brook
Farm. Dwight, who was friends with Ripley—Ripley had also preached at Dwight’s Northampton
ordination—turned up at Brook Farm in November.

R
IPLEY ORGANIZED
Brook Farm as a joint-stock company, selling shares for $500 each and promising each
shareholder 5 percent interest. Emerson declined to join, as did Margaret Fuller,
though both would visit often. (One who did sign on was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who initially
enjoyed seeing himself as a man of the soil—“Ownest wife, thy husband has milked a
cow!!!” he informed his fiancée.
¹³
But, resistant to Brook Farm’s idealism and disappointed in the return on investment,
Hawthorne soon left.)