The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (21 page)

Everybody gets a say in the
Concord
Sonata—Emerson has his own movement, and so does the skeptical Hawthorne, his “atmosphere
charged with the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,” as
Ives put it.
⁵²
The third movement portrays “The Alcotts”—Bronson Alcott in counterpoint with his
house full of daughters. Only Thoreau, in the final movement, seems off by himself,
but as the sage of Walden begins to play his flute, Ives writes in an obbligato flute
part—the solitary thinker splitting into multiple performers.

Beethoven is a connecting thread—the first four notes of the Fifth turn up in each
movement of the
Concord
—but even Beethoven is only part of a chorus of voices. The familiar motive thunders
out in the bass on the first page of “Emerson,” only to be immediately subsumed into
a patchwork of other quotations: Beethoven’s op. 106
Hammerklavier
Piano Sonata, Marsh’s “Martyn,” as well as another hymn tune, Heinrich Zeuner’s 1832
“Missionary Chant.”
⁵³
The Fifth will rarely appear in the
Concord
Sonata without being coupled to at least one of its Ivesian
doppelgängers. In “Hawthorne,” it emerges out of a whirl of demonic ragtime, only
to be immediately shunted down the Puritan-guilt alley of “Martyn.” Its entrance is
delayed in “Thoreau” until the philosopher’s flute reverie, at which point it dons
the “Missionary Chant” guise (spreading the gospel of
Walden
), before finishing the piece as a distant tolling bell, high on the keyboard.

Ives’s use of the motive is most fertile and provocative in “The Alcotts.” It opens
with the Fifth tidied into a sweet, major-key harmonization redolent of psalm books
and parlors. It is Ives’s evocation of an idealized childhood, a romanticization of
hardship, patterned after the Marches at home in
Little Women
rather than the actual Alcotts freezing at Fruitlands:

But Ives is programmatically setting up family conflict, not family harmony. Beth’s
playing runs off into improvisatory, chromatic two-part counterpoint, when the Fifth
suddenly bursts in again—Bronson Alcott, perhaps, keeping his daughter on task, ensuring
her lessons are sufficiently high-minded. As Ives embarks on an extended fantasy on
the four-note theme, emphatic and grand, then impressionistic and mysterious, one
can hear his description of Bronson, the “kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his
voice when he sang his oracles—a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous
self-assertion and outside serious benevolence.”
⁵⁵
Ives is giving us both the
cause and the effect of the Transcendental propaganda on behalf of Beethoven and his
music, the sensation of untrammeled power it must have first provided, and its dutiful
assimilation into the next generation’s domesticity. Bronson is apparently in that
perennial parental conundrum, trying to convince his children that he once was cool.

Beth has her revenge, though; in addition to the “old Scotch airs,” she appears to
know other tunes. One is the “Bridal March” from Wagner’s
Lohengrin
, a representative of the new generation Dwight disdained, and which, in the Beethoven-saturated
context of “The Alcotts,” sounds appropriately like the Fifth Symphony flipped upside-down.
The “Bridal March” is followed immediately by another tune, a little curl of melody
that then walks upward: the opening phrase of a minstrel song by A. F. Winnemore,
“A DUETT,” as the 1847 sheet music announces, “Sung by one in imitation of two rival
niggers Gumbo & Sambo.” That alone would be enough to rile Bronson Alcott, an unflinching
abolitionist who was forced to shut down his Temple School in Boston when he admitted—and
refused to expel—an African-American child. But the song also undercuts the Romantic
image of Beethoven, going all the way back to Schindler’s mythologizing. Its title:
“Stop Dat Knocking at De Door.”
⁵⁶

It is, perhaps, Ives’s retort to the sentimentalization of Beethoven, the steady stream
of sad stories about Beethoven’s deafness or loneliness. Ives’s sympathies were with
Bronson, as it were—Beethoven as an object of Transcendental defiance, not comfortable
pity. Ives came no closer to pinning down Transcendentalism than the Transcendentalists
themselves, but though one could get there by emulating their effort, by ringing out
the “tune the Concord bards are ever playing while they pound away at the immensities
with a Beethoven-like sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance,
for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate.”
⁵⁷

As Ives’s music began to trickle into musicians’ consciousness in the 1930s and ’40s,
much of the appeal came from Ives’s status as a kind of Rip van Winkle, an Emersonian
representative man suddenly found living in the modern world. One early Ivesian was
the future film composer Bernard Herrmann, who recalled that he “plowed through the
movements of the
Concord Sonata
” at Camp Tamiment, a socialist summer camp in the Poconos, in the 1930s.
⁵⁸
It’s possible that the sonata spoiled Beethoven for the opinionated Herrmann; Len
Engel, a music editor at Twentieth-Century-Fox, remembered Herrmann holding court
at the commissary:

Herrmann and his jaded ears, however, were preceded by Ives, who came to regard Beethoven’s
actual notes as, perhaps, a little wan next to the construct of Beethoven in the
Sonata
. Clara Clemens, Mark Twain’s daughter (Twain was good friends with Ives’s father-in-law),
invited the Iveses to a Beethoven recital by her husband, the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch
(whose name Ives spelled “Ossssssip,” a sure sign he didn’t consider him manly enough
to tackle such repertoire). Ives came away disappointed: “After two and a half hours
of the (perhaps) best music in the world (around 1829), there is something in substance
(not spirit together) that is gradually missed—that is, it was with me. I remember
feeling towards Beethoven [that he’s]
a great man—but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key.”
⁶⁰

It was not the only Beethoven performance that frustrated Ives. In a draft letter
to Nicolas Slonimsky, Ives blamed the conventionality of American audiences on Toscanini’s
renditions of the symphonies. The rant offers a glimpse of Ives’s usually suppressed
penchant for boiling-over tantrums, the composer’s unfiltered id:

The railing against effeminacy is typical for Ives, but, as Ives scholar Thomas Clarke
Owens has noted, Ives’s silken imagery also symbolizes privilege, a sign of the ambivalence
Ives felt toward wealth and success, and a measure of the energy he expended maintaining
his life’s multiple facets.

The draft was never sent. In its place was a letter from Ives’s wife, Harmony: “It
wasn’t lack of audience & appreciation that made Mr. Ives stop composing. It just
happened—the War & the complete breakdown in health. He had worked tremendously hard
in his quarry all those years & exhausted the vein I suppose.”
⁶²

I
VES HAD
little use for quasi-Hegelian models of musical progress, thinking they confused
personal experience with universal truth. Ives himself admitted to a youthful enthusiasm
for Wagner, but by the time of the
Sonata
, Wagner’s “music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare.” Yet to try to generalize
from that, to “try to prove that as this stream of change flows towards the eventual
ocean of mankind’s perfection … the perpetual flow of the life stream is affected
by and affects each individual riverbed of the universal watersheds,” is to ignore
those figures whose true transcendence trumps mere chronology. “Something makes our
hypotheses seem purely speculative if not useless,” Ives proclaims. “It is men like
Bach and Beethoven.”
⁶³
Ives’s biographer, J. Peter Burkholder, views Ives himself on the same broader, less
precise scale: “Ives’s career and his music are coherent, once one abandons the expectation
that coherence requires consistency, sameness, and a single line of development.”
⁶⁴

The
Concord
Sonata translates Ives’s view of history into musical form: it is cumulative (to
use Burkholder’s term), not goal-oriented. From the very first page, the quotation
of Beethoven’s Fifth begins to accrue meanings and mirrors, one among equals in its
constellation of similarities, the
Hammerklavier
, the “Missionary Chant,” “Martyn.” The rhythm is altered, slowed down, smoothed out;
Beethoven picks up Ivesian dissonances along the way. The four-note motive is there
because of its fame and familiarity, its original power and its power as cliché inseparable.
Beethoven’s music doesn’t come out of the previous generation and lead to the next—it
stands outside time, it transcends time, and history coalesces around it.

In the
Essays
, Ives reserves his most personally resonant compliments for Thoreau—who thought that
the wind blowing through the trees “wears better than the opera, methinks,”
⁶⁵
Thoreau who insisted that the “really inspiring melodies are cheap and universal,”
⁶⁶
Thoreau who called the random counterpoint of a Walden owl and a passing flock of
geese “one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard.”
⁶⁷
For Ives, “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because
he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ ” Thoreau’s symphony was in
nature, “he sang of the submission to Nature … distinguishing between the complexity
of Nature, which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism, which teaches
slavery.” In Ives’s portrayal, Thoreau is Beethoven’s mirror image: both earned the
broadest canvas for their inspiration, but when it came to the accompanying passion,
Beethoven “could not but be ever showing it,” while Thoreau “could not easily expose
it.”
⁶⁸

Ives accommodates both Thoreau’s prickly temperament and his generous ideas by expanding
the tapestry into which he weaves Thoreau’s musical avatar. What’s more, Ives’s defense
of Thoreau—“The unsympathetic treatment accorded Thoreau on account of the false colors
that his personality apparently gave to some of his important ideas and virtues might
be lessened if it were more constantly remembered that a command of his today is but
a mood of yesterday and a contradiction to-morrow”
⁶⁹
—could just as easily be read as a defense of Beethoven, or more to the point, as
a Thoreau or Beethoven that looks a lot like Charles Ives. Philip Corner, a founding
member of the avant-garde Fluxus group, admired Ives’s mutability, musical and philosophical:
“[H]e puts Beethoven’s Fifth into everything he writes. He knows all the good things
humanity has left behind—laid up for his, and our, uses.
Not
to be sacrificed to, lest the world be corrupted by a single true idea.”
⁷⁰
The great majority of Ives’s lives—radical and conservative, nostalgic and
reformer, reclusive artist and evangelizing businessman—were lived at the same time,
as it were, but where others might see contradiction, Ives saw simultaneity. He ascribed
to Thoreau a habit he shared: “he observed acutely even things that did not particularly
interest him”
⁷¹
—except that Ives was interested in, seemingly, everything, consumed by a faith that
the right aggregation of notes could encompass both the thunder and the bell. (Preparing
a revised edition of the sonata, Ives sent emendations and changes to his publisher
for seven years, ten proofs in all; at one point, his editor wrote Harmony Ives, begging
her to rein in her husband’s additions: “The plates absolutely will not stand any
more.”
⁷²
)

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony appears in the music not just as period color, but as its
own library of allusions, eager to be cataloged. The
Concord
Sonata, in a way, represents a culmination, a clearinghouse for all the meanings
attributed to the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, a comprehensive collection of every
varying interpretation and use to which the four notes had ever been put: profound
and trivial, sacred and profane, feral and tame, indefinite and infinite. By the time
Ives’s sonata saw the light of day, Beethoven’s image was beginning to fragment, competing
exegeses set up in opposition. Ives nonetheless believed he could fully encompass
Beethoven’s manifold posthumous existence, that every mask ever applied to those four
notes deserved to have its vote heard. It was his duty, in more ways than one: the
Transcendentalist and the insurance man, tallying up the Beethovenian legacy, making
sure the entire estate is covered.