The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (28 page)

The identification with Beethoven would reach an apotheosis with French sculptor Émile-Antoine
Bourdelle, who, as a teenager, perceived a strong resemblance between his own features
and an engraving of the composer: “He thought he was seeing himself,” Bourdelle’s
widow surmised, “and it was perhaps this fact, in the first instance, that attracted
him.”
¹⁶
Bourdelle would produce nearly eighty portraits of Beethoven—sketches, finished drawings,
sculptures—returning to the subject at periodic intervals between the late 1880s and
his death, in 1929. At the very least, Bourdelle’s obsession with Beethoven as a subject
was indicative of a congruence of artistic intent (“It is my task,” Bourdelle wrote,
“to construct my own silent orchestra in which the sounds are expressed in terms of
planes and of light”
¹⁷
); but the progression of his images—Beethoven’s head increasingly distorted, craggy,
expressionistic—hints at something deeper, what one critic called “a kind of involuntary
confession.”
¹⁸
One of Bourdelle’s last essays on the subject, produced shortly before he died, shows
Beethoven, his face set in a stoic scowl, leaning against a massive cross.

THE IMAGE
of Beethoven as a poet was, nonetheless, also adopted by German writers—and, depending
on who was doing the writing, could be read as either sustaining or undermining the
crescendo of German nationalism kick-started by the 1870 defeat of France. One notorious
poeticization came at the hands of musicologist Arnold Schering. In 1920, on the occasion
of Beethoven’s 150th birthday, Schering sought to rally post-Armistice Germany, now,
in comparison with the glory
days of 1870, “a small broken people … once again about to celebrate Beethoven.” To
be great again, Schering advocated a dose of Beethoven’s heroism, as inspired by poets:

Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe: Schering would go on to make those literary
sparks profoundly literal. Starting with his 1934 book
Beethoven in neuer Deutung
(
Beethoven in a New Interpretation
), Schering set out to demonstrate that Beethoven had actually patterned specific
works of music after specific works of literature. The
Eroica
drew on the
Iliad
. The Seventh Symphony followed Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
. The
Appassionata
Sonata was, in reality, scenes from
Macbeth
. The C-sharp minor Piano Sonata, already saddled with the sobriquet
Moonlight
, now became the mirror of act 4 of
King Lear
. In the words of one reviewer, Schering’s speculative hermeneutics stood “in the
same relation to true musical research as modern astrology stands to physical astronomy.”
²⁰

Berlin critic Paul Bekker also characterized Beethoven as a kind of tone poet, a
“Tondichter,”
in his popular book on Beethoven, first published in 1911. At first glance, Bekker’s
description of the Fifth seems to be the standard programmatic boilerplate:

The difference is that Bekker distills that contrast between the
Eroica
’s individual hero and the Fifth’s collective protagonist out of the music itself.
In the
Eroica
, for instance, Beethoven included extra horns, their more prominent tone symbolic
of the hero’s presence. In the Fifth’s opening, however, “where there is no question
of a personal hero, he is content with the traditional complement of instruments.”
In the Finale, Beethoven reinforces the sound with trombones, “which (in his system)
symbolize majestic greatness.” Bekker concludes: “It will thus be seen that again
in the C-minor symphony the orchestra was recreated in accordance with the underlying
‘poetic idea’ of the work.”
²²

Again, Bekker’s analysis might not seem much more than a particularly clever justification
of the usual claims of universality made on the Fifth’s behalf. But it was the cleverness
that so irritated the advocates of German greatness. To reduce Beethoven’s works to
poetic programs was bad enough, but to analyze such poetry not as something Beethoven
musically illustrated, but rather as part and parcel of the musical materials themselves,
was to deny music’s unique aesthetic status—and, by extension, to deny the supposedly
unique German privilege toward all things musical. As conductor and scholar Leon Botstein
put it:

The idea that Beethoven’s secrets could be so democratically available, without the
intercession of elite, specifically German insight into music’s mysteries, bore all
the hallmarks of pernicious cosmopolitan (i.e., Jewish) thinking. Thus the question
of the extent of poetic inspiration in Beethoven’s music became a political wedge.
Indeed, at the same time Arnold Schering was working his literary way through Beethoven’s
catalog, he also characterized “the vague sense of
per aspera ad astra
in the Fifth Symphony” as the “fight for existence waged by a Volk that looks for
its Führer and finally finds it.”
²⁴

At the outset of the First World War, the “Culture Pope,” German critic Alfred Kerr,
had mused on the uneasy place of art during wartime. “The theaters also want to live,”
he wrote. “The question is what can be played.” His solution idealistically combined
Germany’s greatest cultural hero with a naïve optimism that Germans could avoid discussing
him:

IN
1921, Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker began to publish a series of pamphlets
collectively called
Der Tonwille
, “The Will of Tones,” subtitled “Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music.”
Schenker, who had trained as a lawyer before casting his lot with music, had already
written manuals of harmony and counterpoint. Having thus set down music’s statutory
law, as it were,
Der Tonwille
continued as an exercise in case law: detailed analyses of musical works, demonstrating
their adherence to Schenker’s criteria of musical excellence.

The inaugural study of
Der Tonwille
was the first installment of a multipart examination of Beethoven’s Fifth. But before
that, Schenker had some things to get off his chest, in a prefatory essay called “The
Mission of German Genius,” such as it stood in “these grave times, in these most grievous
of times.… Once the artist, in such times, sees how the political parties vying with
one another for power sin against art in general, and against his own art in particular,
through ignorance and ineptitude, then he must be inflamed.”
²⁶

And Schenker is off on a fevered, incantatory tear, a detailed indictment of the degeneration
of German culture. “Shameless betrayal has been perpetrated during the World War on
the genius of Germanity”: by capitalists (“a spiritually and morally venal fringe
group”); by communists (“that trouble-making megalomaniac wage-church of Karl Marx”);
by “certain so-called pacifists and professors, their mouths rank with filth”; by
commentators who “snored their way loudly” through previous wars “but who, when the
Germans had to defend themselves against an invasion long premeditated by nations
whose virulent envy of it exceeded their incompetence, suddenly woke up to discover,
oh-so-smugly, the spiritual and moral truth that peace was more humane than war”;
²⁷
and, most of all, by the siren song of democracy:

And so on, page after page—until Schenker circles back around to his underlying point:
“The task of these pamphlets will thus be to show what constitutes German genius in
music.”
²⁹

Few people embodied the tensions running through early-twentieth-century
Mitteleuropa
as thoroughly as Schenker. From his Viennese vantage, Schenker saw the rise of fin-de-siècle
modernism, cosmopolitan sophistication, and democratic ferment—and hated it all. He
created a style of music theory specifically designed to prove the superiority of
the classic Austro-Germanic repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. And yet the theory’s
mechanism—analytical, legalistic, pointedly devoid of poetic imagery—seemed to breathe
a coolly scientific air in curious counterpoint to its creator’s Kantian notions of
genius and his extremely Right-Hegelian conservatism. One senses he realized the rift,
hoping to compensate with a fiercely argumentative style gleaned from his legal studies:
a two-pronged attack, evidential logic buttressed by emotional appeals to the jury.

No biblical prophet was more convinced of his righteousness. In a codicil to his will,
Schenker provided his own epitaph: “Here lies the body of one who perceived the soul
of music and communicated its laws, as the great musicians understood them,
and as no one before him had done
.”
³⁰
He once wrote to a student about the fate of his “monotheistic music-teaching”: “[A]fter
2,000 years the successors to the Germanic people may disavow Schenker as they disavow
Rabbi Jesus, but all along the teaching has made its effect and achieved propagation
in the world.”
³¹

Schenkerian analysis did propagate—particularly in America, where his techniques became
a standard part of academic music training—but it did so in the absence of his heated
rhetoric: belligerent sections of his treatises were left untranslated, and missionaries
of his ideas focused on the analysis, not the oratory. (Allen Forte’s article on Schenker
for the 1980 edition of
Grove’s Dictionary
, for example, avoids any hint of Schenker’s combative prose, and doesn’t even mention
his legal background.
³²
) Smoothing over Schenker’s sharp edges makes him more palatably modern and universal,
taking him out of the tumult of his own era. But it was the era that drove him, the
chaos he sensed descending on civilization prompting both the escalating rationality
of his theory and the emotional fury with which he shouted it into the whirlwind.

IN HIS CLASSIC TEXT
of analytic aesthetics,
Languages of Art
, American philosopher Nelson Goodman considered “the rather curious fact that in
music, unlike painting, there is no such thing as a forgery of a known work.”
³³
This is because in music (unlike painting) there is a score. We consider a performance
authentic if it follows the score, and it has to follow the score to be authentic:
“If we allow the least deviation, all assurance of work-preservation and score-preservation
is lost; for by a series of one-note errors of omission, addition, and modification,
we can go all the way from Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony
to
Three Blind Mice
.”
³⁴

For Schenker, though, being able to get from Beethoven’s Fifth to “Three Blind Mice,”
step by analytical step, was the sign of true musical understanding. Having commenced
Der Tonwille
with livid indignation, Schenker abruptly shifted into
theoretical discourse: a short essay to introduce the
Urlinie
, the “fundamental line.” This was the concept that increasingly occupied Schenker’s
thought for the rest of his life: a simple descending scale, sometimes eight notes,
sometimes five, but in its most basic form, only three notes (i.e., the opening phrase
of “Three Blind Mice”), ending on the tonic, the pole star and goal of any piece of
tonal music. When a three-note
Urlinie
is combined with a do-sol-do bass line, the result is an
Ursatz
, a fundamental structure, the simple architecture at the core of all Schenker-approved
great music.