The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (27 page)

In March of 1918, Muck was arrested under the terms of a presidential proclamation
regulating enemy aliens. With an unwitting sense of symbolic martyrology, the officials
made their move on the eve of Muck’s long-awaited performance of Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion
; having seized Muck’s score of the piece in a raid on his house (apparently without
warrant), the police pored over the music, sure that the conductor’s markings were
coded espionage.
⁹⁹
(Recall Mrs. Jay’s alleged “ ‘news’ dispatches.”) A series of indiscreet love letters
to a twenty-year-old aspiring singer were also found, and, fanned by
Boston Post
reports fulminating against Muck’s supposed corruption of American womanhood, resulted
in an indictment for violation of postal laws. Faced with prison, Muck opted for internment
and eventual deportation.

Muck was transported to a military base in northern Georgia that became as unapologetic
an enclave of German culture as ever existed. For the duration of the war, Fort Oglethorpe
(built on the Chickamauga battlefield) was home to every German-born businessman,
intellectual, artist, or musician in America deemed dangerous enough—that is, German
enough—to be interned. A combination of detained cruise ship musicians and military
band members provided the camp with performances of Beethoven and the rest of the
canon.
¹⁰⁰
But the
orchestra could only coax a single performance out of Muck; on December 12, 1918,
he led the group in works of Brahms and Beethoven. Muck chose not to conduct the Fifth;
the accepted narrative of individual struggle and triumph was, perhaps, too much of
an irony. Instead, he opted for the anti-Napoléonic
Eroica
—a better outlet for a man whose brief relationship with a powerful republic had turned
sour. Muck and his wife were put on a boat in August of 1919; he never again conducted
in America. In 1939, a year before he died, Muck appeared in public one last time,
accepting the Order of the Golden Eagle from Adolf Hitler.

The same summer Karl Muck sailed back to Europe, Mrs. William Jay announced a cease-fire.
“Germany is on her knees before outraged but forgiving humanity,” she wrote. There
was no need for further protest, “for I know that henceforth materialism will weigh
too heavily against a pro-German attitude, and I pray that the former friends of German
Kultur will uphold the principles of freedom, honesty, and justice, which they now
see triumphant and everlasting.”
¹⁰¹
Her ultimately unwarranted optimism was hardly uncommon. (Mrs. Jay, incidentally,
was the former Lucy Oelrichs. Her father was a German immigrant, the New York agent
for the Norddeutscher Lloyd line of steamships.)

For a time, Henry Lee Higginson had stuck by his Prussian conductor out of pride and
stubbornness, but was scandalized by the revelations of possible moral misconduct.
In the last year of Higginson’s life, the Boston Symphony would decisively pivot away
from Germany and toward French and Russian influence. Muck’s replacement was Henri
Rabaud, a Parisian. When asked whether he would program German composers in Boston,
Rabaud was nonplussed. “Such questions are never asked in Paris,” he remarked. “Why
should we not play beautiful music like Beethoven’s C minor Symphony?”
¹⁰²

B
EETHOVEN
’
S MUSIC
would soon enough retake its place at the center of the canon. But the war—an upheaval
to bookend the Industrial Revolution—meant that a catholic narrative of the Fifth
could no longer be taken for granted; the supposedly universal truths had proven hazardously
malleable.

Or maybe a different, unpalatable truth had been there all along. At the height of
Victoria’s reign, a Manchester journalist, Henry Franks, recalled sitting next to
a blind man at a performance of the Fifth. “That blind man, with the fine instincts
of culture, listened to Beethoven’s symphony in C minor with an upturned face, upon
which the emotions played as visibly as the ripples play upon a lake,” Franks reported.
“I begged him to tell me what he conceived to be the meaning of the theme which recurs
so often. After much hesitation, he said that it meant a warning which has come too
late.”
¹⁰³
Distracted by the spectacle, most everybody else had only heard what they wanted
to hear.

IF
L
UCY
H
ONEYCHURCH
’
S
predilection for Beethoven made for awkward parlor atmosphere in
A Room with a View
, the outbreak of World War I only increased the consternation. In 1958, E. M. Forster
revisited the novel’s characters in a little sequel called “A View Without a Room”;
Lucy and George, we learn, were both conscientious objectors during the war, exacerbating
suspicion over Lucy’s musical taste: “Hun music! She was overheard and reported, and
the police called.” But also woven into his fictional reminiscence was an actual experience
of Forster’s, somewhat closer to the front: an encounter with Beethoven in Egypt,
where Forster had spent the bulk of the war working for the Red Cross.

Forster playfully attributed the propaganda to Cecil Vyse,
A Room with a View
’s self-absorbed, amused aesthete. But tweaking German superiority with Beethoven’s
Flemish heritage was hardly new: the French had already jumped on that bandwagon,
insisting that Beethoven exemplified not German genius, but the
“génie flamand,”
as the poet and critic Raymond Bouyer wrote in his 1905 examination,
Le secret de Beethoven
.
²
Bouyer’s selective genealogy was only a particularly flagrant example of French efforts
to pry Beethoven’s image from the clutches of his German identity. It worked: as Europe
stumbled into a second, more destructive reckoning, in the face of the ne plus ultra
of German nationalism, Beethoven’s Fifth would be brazenly enlisted on the side of
the Allies—appropriately, by way of Belgium.

WHEN
F
RANCE
finally got around to revering Beethoven, it did so with zeal, but on French terms.
The story was that, at the French premiere of the Fifth Symphony, an old veteran of
Napoléon’s army was moved to stand up and cry out, “C’est l’Empereur! vive l’Empereur!”
³
Beethoven might have appreciated the sentiment—he had, after all, bragged of his
ability to meet Napoléon in battle—but casting Beethoven as a new Napoléon was also
a way to bring him into the French fold.

The history of Beethoven in France is that of a hesitant courtship followed by a torrid
affair. According to Schindler (and with the requisite accompanying grain of salt),
the ice was broken via a blind date with the Fifth. Schindler tells of Louis Sina,
a French-born violinist who, as part of Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s string quartet, had performed
at the Viennese apartments of Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lichnowsky. In 1820, Sina
returned to Paris, then largely bereft of Beethoven’s music (the conductor
of the Conservatoire orchestra, François-Antoine Habeneck, had, in Schindler’s telling,
introduced the
Eroica
at a rehearsal, only to be met with laughter from the players). Sina sent an anonymous
letter to Habeneck extolling enough virtues of the C-minor symphony to fire the conductor’s
curiosity. Schindler: “After considerable hesitation, the symphony was rehearsed.
Its reception was favorable! … Without losing any time, other symphonies that had
likewise remained unknown were tried, and lo! to everyone’s surprise they were as
well received as the C minor!”
⁴

Sina’s matchmaking aside, there were institutional reasons for Beethoven’s neglect
as well. French concertgoers would have had little to no opportunity to hear Beethoven
until 1828, the year after Beethoven died: that was when the administration of Charles
X (the last of the Bourbon kings of France, whose reign was the high-water mark of
post-Revolution French ultraroyalism) subsidized a new concert series at the Paris
Conservatoire. Ardor for Beethoven erupted almost overnight. For the second program
of the Société des Concerts, Habeneck programmed the
Eroica
; the third program opened with the Fifth.
⁵
Driven by a “Jeune France” claque of young, passionately zealous artistic types,
audiences reportedly reacted with such fervor that overwhelming, transporting enthusiasm
became almost a fad. (The Fifth became a perennial favorite at the Société des Concerts,
programmed forty times between 1828 and 1848—more than any other symphony.)
⁶

Running with the Jeune-France crowd was Hector Berlioz, the composer who dragged his
teacher Le Sueur to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, and who considered it

Berlioz’s description is Hoffmannesque,
⁸
but he is on a different mission. Hoffmann pointed toward a transcendent clarity;
Berlioz remains focused on vagueness. Hoffmann was promoting Romanticism; Berlioz
is leveraging it.

Some hint at what Berlioz is up to comes in his comparison of the Fifth with the
Eroica
. Beethoven’s Third, Berlioz proposes, was inspired by the composer’s readings of
Homer: “[M]emories of the
Iliad
evidently play a beautiful role.” (This was both canny publicity—Leo Schrade, author
of the pioneering study
Beethoven in France
, noted that a connection with antiquity “has always been in France the best letter
of recommendation”
⁹
—and, no doubt, a projection of Berlioz’s own obsession with the ancient epics.) The
Fifth, by contrast, “seems to spring solely and directly from Beethoven’s own genius.”
Except when it doesn’t:

The German Romantics had revered Beethoven for expressing what was beyond language,
but Berlioz, with his explicitly literary programmatic reading of the Fifth (the first
four notes as the ominous flutter of Desdemona’s handkerchief, maybe?),
is expanding the idea of language to encompass Beethoven. Schrade points out how often
Berlioz describes the symphonies as “poetic” and the composer as a “poet,” epithets
Berlioz used “to denote the supreme degree that cannot be surpassed, and in point
of language a superlative which cannot be further compared.”
¹¹
France was a country where literary elegance and power sat at the summit of cultural
achievement. To insist that Beethoven was not just a composer, but a poet, was to
make him a little more French.

In
The Arcades Project
, his unfinished analysis of nineteenth-century Paris, critic and philosopher Walter
Benjamin devoted an entire section to the flâneur, the perpetually strolling observer
so typical of the city—“Paris created the type of the flâneur,” Benjamin noted.
¹²
The rapport the French had established with Beethoven was paralleled in the flâneur’s
mindset, at least as Benjamin imagined it: “That anamnestic intoxication in which
the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before
his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as
something experienced and lived through.”
¹³
The French experienced the abstract knowledge of Beethoven’s symphonies and thus
adopted him into the French cultural pantheon. Benjamin jotted down a quote from Pierre
Larousse’s 1872
Grand dictionnaire universel
, which, in defining the flâneur, opted for a foreign exemplar:

Adolphe Boschot, a critic who also wrote a biography of Berlioz, noted in 1908 how
the image of Beethoven had become a
standard trope in French art: “In every salon [painters] exhibit for us several canvases
showing the author of the nine symphonies. For this has now become the fashion. Once
upon a time they manufactured Bonapartes or the ‘Temptations of St. Anthony,’ now
they manufacture Beethovens.”
¹⁵