The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (29 page)

“The Urlinie bears in itself the seeds of all the forces that shape tonal life”; the
Urlinie
supersedes all other musical creation stories. Schenker’s goal is to demonstrate
a work’s Austro-Germanic fitness by reverse-engineering its presented musical surface
all the way back to the
Urlinie
. “With the cooperation of the harmonic degrees,” Schenker goes on, “the
Urlinie
indicates the paths to all elaboration and so also to the composition of the outer
voices, in whose intervals the marriage of strict and free composition is so wonderfully
and mysteriously consummated.”
³⁵
Beginning with the fundamental line and structure, great composers elaborate that
structure, layer by layer, into musical monuments, every transition from simpler to
more complex governed by the strict rules of counterpoint and voice-leading that Schenker,
thorough as he was, had already codified in his harmony and counterpoint guides. Background
pattern to middle-ground expansion to foreground surface: the evolution of true music,
that is, Austro-German music, as helpfully defined by Heinrich Schenker.

It is only after the rant and the reason that Schenker is ready to pull back the curtain
on Beethoven’s Fifth. The different channels actually are working in tandem, yoking
together the emotion and logic of Schenker’s thinking—and hinting at that thinking’s
legal origins. For Schenker’s framework paralleled a particular conservative-Hegelian,
pro-German theory of law
and civilization. It was a theory Schenker would have heard expounded by one of his
law professors at the University of Vienna, Georg Jellinek, who happened also to be
a rabbi’s son. And in the background of the theory was a goal that Schenker and Jellinek,
both proud, highly educated German Jews, never lost sight of: assimilation.

Georg Jellinek’s father, Adolf, head of the Leopoldstädter Tempel, Vienna’s largest
synagogue, advocated Jewish assimilation, the better to be “true, loyal, and selfless
sons of the father-land.”
³⁶
His sons epitomized it: Georg held law professorships in Vienna, Basel, and Heidelberg;
Max, also a professor, specialized in German linguistics, and became a member of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences; Emil moved to France and became, among other business-related
things, a pioneering car dealer. (Emil’s daughter Mercédès lent her name to the cars
being sold.) Georg fashioned himself into the very model of a Prussian academic.
³⁷
Yet assimilation only went so far: Georg Jellinek, despite having converted to Christianity,
was never made a full professor in Vienna on account of his Jewish ancestry.

Jellinek’s view of the law was shaped by the French Revolution—specifically, everything
that he saw as being wrong with it—which put him in the nineteenth-century conservative
mainstream. His thinking was in line with the historical school of jurisprudence,
which predicted doom for any society that tried to impose theoretical “rights” and
“laws” that weren’t rooted in that society’s own history and traditions. In other
words: don’t do what the French did. The most widely read of Jellinek’s writings during
his lifetime was a scholarly takedown of the French Revolutionary
Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen
, showing what the declaration had borrowed from primarily English and colonial American
constitutional sources; to give the French “rights of man” a specific genealogy was
to undermine any claim of their universality. Jellinek instead advocated that laws
and legal institutions evolved, country by country,
out of specific national traits: societal structures, economic relationships, language.

In his effort to refashion laws and institutions as if the Bastille had never been
stormed, Jellinek even achieved the rare feat of making a Hegelian synthesis run in
historical reverse—the real being rational only up to a certain historical point.
The Scylla and Charybdis of Jellinek’s ideal state were the extremes of ancient Roman
law—too much authoritarian order—and modern democratic law—too much unruly individual
freedom and equality. The golden mean was, for Jellinek, the Teutonic law of medieval
feudal German states: an aristocratic class structure, with limited individual freedoms
not imposed on the state as a given right but cultivated within the boundaries provided
by the weak nature of any central authority.
³⁸

Liberty survives in the “intervening spaces”—the
Zwischenräume
—beyond the state’s purview. Freedom is not a right but rather a DMZ between the state
and the individual.

For Jellinek, the study of law was the study of the rules by which a society gradually
evolved, step by complicating step, from basic values to fully functional institutions—a
pattern recapitulated in Schenker’s music theory. And Schenker’s acknowledgment was
often explicit, as in this passage from his posthumously published composition manual
Der freie Satz
(
Free Composition
):

Schenker even borrowed some of Jellinek’s terminology:
Zwischenraum
, for example, becomes the melodic mediation between the end of a trill and the subsequent
note.
⁴¹
Schenker also picked up Jellinek’s disdain for revolutionary arbitrariness; as the
latter criticized imposed rights and freedoms, Schenker dismissed the autarky of Wagner
and his followers, their self-consciously novel harmonic experiments, to say nothing
of the conjectures of atonality. The parallels between Schenkerian theory and Jellinek’s
historical jurisprudence go on and on, and in both directions; for, ultimately, Schenker’s
aim is not just to explain musical greatness but to reinforce the politics he shared
with his professor. To properly understand the music is to properly understand the
world.
⁴²

The pose of objectivity Schenker and Jellinek adopted was in large part just that,
a pose. In his magnum opus, the multivolume
Allgemeine Staatslehre
(
General Theory of the State
), Jellinek insisted that historicism was a truly objective approach. “The doctrine
of public laws,” he wrote, “is
a science of standards
. These standards sharply diverge from propositions about the state as a social phenomenon.”
⁴³
When the first part of Jellinek’s theory was published in France, however, the translator,
Georges Fardis (“with the authorization of the author,” according to the title page),
added an explanation to this section that flipped the scientific claim on its head.
Fardis compared the disputed “natural” origin of laws and rights to the way a natural
scientist would explain a symphony: as “a series of vibrations in the objective world,”
or “the acousto-psychological processes that arise” during a performance. The historicist
perspective was more, well,
Romantic (and the symphony in question thus appropriately chosen):

“Things are similar within the law,” Fardis continues. “The legal world is a world
of ideas, it behaves vis-à-vis the tangible world as the world of art vis-à-vis the
world of natural science.”
⁴⁴
Schenker’s style of analysis, despite its graphs and jargon and chains of evidence,
was likewise more art than science.

The intellectual manner of both Jellinek and Schenker could plausibly be called Talmudic—their
close readings of sources, their marshaling of extensive evidence, their mistrust
of surface truths, always drilling down, looking for deeper, holistic structure. (Nicholas
Cook connects Schenker to another Jewish thinker, Sigmund Freud, given that both their
styles of analysis were “predicated on suspicion of the obvious.”
⁴⁵
) So—getting back to the Fifth, now—when Schenker insists that the fundamental motive
of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth is the first
eight
notes, not the first four, it goes well past mere contrarian provocation. It is,
in fact, the fundamental text of his theory of the
Urlinie
. The first four notes form but a generic first impression, while the first eight
notes hint at the password to the inner sanctum of the true Austro-Germanic musical
tradition. In Schenker’s analysis, the Fifth spells out the entrance requirements
to German civilization.

In looking at the first eight notes of the Fifth, one can see how it might have been
this symphony that inspired Schenker to imagine the
Urlinie
. The fourth and eighth notes, the ones emphasized by the two fermatas—E-flat and
D—give two-thirds of the
Urlinie
right at the outset, setting up a tension that will eventually require the line to
descend one more step, down to C, the tonic. Much of Schenkerian analysis requires
teasing the outlines of such structures out of the busy tapestry of the musical surface,
but in the Fifth’s opening, Beethoven seems to be doing Schenker’s analytical job
for him, placing the
Urlinie
in ready-made, obvious relief.

Musicologist Scott Burnham has elegantly summed up the ties that bind the Fifth and
the
Urlinie:

Schenker allowed that less-percipient listeners might be misled into a shallow hearing
of the opening, grouping the first four notes into a theme rather than the first eight:
how “the fermatas and the sequential formation in the adjoining bars” might fool “the
untrained ear” into “the impression of a motive as early as the first fermata.”
⁴⁷
Untrained ears, it turns out, belonged to a
fairly distinguished crowd—Schenker calls out a lengthy list of Romantics who were
led down the road to a two-bar perdition. With their “dissemination of legends,” Czerny
and Schindler obviously fell into this trap; himself ensconced in legend, Richard
Wagner, “a total stranger to absolute music, succumbed to the mysterious eloquence
of note repetition in the same way.”
⁴⁸
It is the repetition that makes fools of so many: “[M]erely by taking pleasure in
recognizing the motive as it recurs so many times, one imagines that one is actually
hearing and feeling.”
⁴⁹

Schenker painstakingly indicts every previous celebrated interpreter of the Fifth.
Hoffmann? “One can see that Hoffmann’s ear is not ready for higher musical connections,
which makes his presentation merely a hollow duplication in words of the musical events.”
⁵⁰
Schindler’s story of fate knocking at the door? “Pious nonsense!”
⁵¹
Adolph Bernhard Marx is set up and knocked down. Sir George Grove “is nothing more
than a windbag, and sounds so simple-minded.”
⁵²
Paul Bekker’s dramatic narratives are saved for last, epitomizing (to Schenker) the
worst sort of hermeneutics, having the effrontery to look God in the face, as it were.
“To be sure, the work of a Beethoven, being the work of man, addresses mankind. Should
that itself be sufficient grounds to justify, conversely, mankind addressing the work?”
⁵³
(This from a man who, remember, once compared himself to Jesus.)

There are times where Schenker seems so convinced of even the musicians’ lack of understanding
that performance itself is still too great a distortion of musical truth: “For most
people, a symphony by Beethoven has to be performed by an orchestra and a conductor
or in the form of a piano reduction for two or four hands. But what the
performers
play—is it really the symphony by Beethoven? … [W]hat if one had to say that
none
of the known renditions even approximates what is to be expressed? That, indeed,
is the truth of the matter!”
⁵⁴

That was Schenker in the preface to the first volume of his
counterpoint manual, published in 1910. The second volume didn’t appear until 1922,
and the intervening war sharpened his pen: