The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (5 page)

Nikisch’s is sometimes cited as the first complete Fifth on record, but Friedrich
Kark, a German conductor whose range extended from opera to popular dance music, had
already led a cheerfully rough-and-ready recording with the Odeon-Orchester, a studio
group, in 1910—with a first movement that does, indeed, reach the 108 mark here and
there, albeit in somewhat runaway fashion. Kark aside, for many years, the only conductor
to match Beethoven’s markings (and not always) was the fiery taskmaster Arturo Toscanini.
But Toscanini’s fleetness was at least as much a sign of its own time as an effort
to re-create the sound of Beethoven’s era. Composer Lazare Saminsky called Toscanini
“entirely a musician of our day.… His very aversion to adorning music, for inflating
it with meaning, with extra-musical content, emotionalizing what is but pure line
and form, is the aversion of today’s musician.”
⁶²

Even this approach was subject to its own modernist reaction, as when the quintessential
avant-gardist, Pierre Boulez, conducted a recording of the Fifth in which the first
movement clocked in at an astonishingly deliberate 74 beats per minute. “At the time
it seemed to me people generally took off like bats out of hell in the first movement,”
he later explained. “I probably overcompensated. Certain things set one off.”
⁶³
(Another provocateur, Leopold Stokowski, even managed to out-Schindler
Schindler in one recording, taking the opening at a geologic 40 beats per minute.)
Alternately obeying and ignoring Beethoven’s tempi has created its own historical
rhythm, the present’s undulating dance with the past. (The controversy has even crossed
over into other planes of existence. Attending a table-rapping séance, Robert Schumann
asked the spirit to knock the first two bars of the Fifth. After a pause, the familiar
rhythm commenced—“only slightly too slow,” as Schumann told it. “The tempo is faster,
dear table,” Schumann chided; the table duly sped up.
⁶⁴
)

Those rare performances that adopt Beethoven’s metronome marking can still sound almost
cartoonishly fast. Such a reaction demonstrates either a) the extent to which two
centuries of overdoses of injected Romantic gravitas have distorted Beethoven’s original
conception, or, b) that somehow or other Beethoven got his own tempo wrong. But the
seemingly simple task of confirming Beethoven’s metronome markings can quickly turn
into a game of point/counterpoint. The Vienna of Beethoven’s time apparently favored
faster tempi—Carl Czerny, for instance, published tables of metronome markings for
works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven indicating such.
⁶⁵
On the other hand, both Czerny and Beethoven were setting tempi at the piano, not
in rehearsal with a full orchestra, and the sharper attack and quicker decay of the
piano might have encouraged faster tempi.
⁶⁶

And then, there is the tricky business of Beethoven’s advancing deafness. A Beethoven
relying more on the
sight
of the metronome’s swinging pendulum than its
sound
might have experienced a psychological phenomenon called saccadic chronostasis: watching
a clock tick can produce the illusion that it’s ticking ever so slightly slower than
it actually is.
⁶⁷
Another toss-up: musical training improves accurate tempo perception, but deafness
inhibits it.
⁶⁸

Possibly the first person to notice that the ears were better
than the eyes at judging intervals of time was a German physician named Karl von Vierordt,
whose main claim to fame was figuring out how to measure blood pressure; he invented
the forerunner of the modern sphygmomanometer. He was also curious about how the brain
makes sense of time, publishing a book about it in 1868. Out of his experiments (performed
mainly on himself), he formulated Vierordt’s Law, a fairly robust rule of thumb that
says that humans almost universally underestimate long periods of time, while overestimating
short ones. This logically implied the existence of an “indifference point,” where
our perception crosses the line between under- and overestimation: one spot on the
continuum where our perception of an interval of time is exact.
⁶⁹

The indifference point is not an uncontroversial subject (experimental parameters
seem to affect it to a somewhat unruly degree, scientifically speaking), but—and here’s
where it gets interesting vis-à-vis Beethoven—the most commonly cited figures for
the indifference point are between 625 and 700 milliseconds.
⁷⁰
On a metronome, that would correspond to between 86 and 96 beats per minute—almost
exactly the range of Romantic and post-Romantic performances of the first movement
of the Fifth. Also, the 550-millisecond beat that Beethoven’s 108-bpm marking prescribes
is right in the middle of the range in which people are most sensitive to tempo discrimination.
⁷¹
In other words, in psychological terms, Beethoven’s marking for the Fifth
is
too fast—perhaps
deliberately
too fast. Based on Vierordt’s Law, 108 bpm will always feel like it’s running away
from us, the next beat always falling just before our overestimation wants to place
it; and, what’s more, 108 is right where that’s liable to discombobulate us the most.
All those plodding conductors might have been in search of rhetorical importance—or
they might merely have been instinctively nudging the Fifth’s tempo back toward the
indifference point, each successive downbeat coming where they expect. Consciously
or not, Beethoven gave the Fifth a
tempo marking that exacerbated the symphony’s sense of disorientation; consciously
or not, ever since they got their hands on it, conductors have been trying to ameliorate
it.

The 108 threshold reentered the musical world with the early-music movement, once
its practitioners gained the confidence to classify Beethoven as a candidate for historically
informed performance.
⁷²
The early-music philosophy, with its focus on period instruments, textual fidelity,
and “letting the music speak for itself” (as one sometime skeptic put it),
⁷³
nonetheless, like Toscanini’s machine-like clarity, reflected contemporary needs
as much as Beethoven’s; it was both a construct made possible by modern scholarship
and an assertion of authenticity in an increasingly manufactured, consumerist culture.

The whole concept of “authenticity” fascinated the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul
Sartre, as a symptom of modernity and its discontent; Sartre wrote of “that deep desire,
that fear and anguish at the heart of all authenticity—which are apprehensions
before life
.… This fear is due to the fact that the situations envisaged are on the horizon,
out of reach[.]”
⁷⁴

One is almost tempted to plot the fluctuations in the speed of performances of the
Fifth as a kind of index of alienation over time, with instances of Beethoven’s perceptually
out-of-reach 108 beats per minute indicating, paradoxically, the most insistent need
for an authentic experience.

S
ARTRE ONCE LIKENED
Beethoven’s music to a historical moment of unusual possibility:

For Sartre, Beethoven’s exhortations were all too easily adaptable to revolution and
reaction alike. (Hence the mention of Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, the Irish-born deputy
to the Estates-General who defended Louis XVI and sought to preserve the ancien régime;
whom the great French historian Jules Michelet described as “lachrymose Lally, who
wrote only with tears, and lived with a handkerchief to his eyes.”
⁷⁶
) No stranger to the discord between the personal pursuit of intellectual freedom
and the more restricted menu of political positions available in the public sphere,
Sartre might have envied Beethoven’s comparatively frictionless revolutionary reputation:
energetically radical but politically elusive, embodying the passions of revolution
without ever firmly coming down on any one side.

The French Revolution ended up being the great politico-intellectual winnowing of
the subsequent century, as the boundaries of the European political and philosophical
landscape were reconfigured around the poles of support for the Revolution’s rights-of-man
intentions and horror at its reign-of-terror consequences. The young Beethoven’s sympathies
with the ideals of the Revolution were sincere, as far as they went (“Liberty and
fraternity—but not equality” is how Maynard Solomon aptly sums it up,
⁷⁷
a formula that could be applied to the German Enlightenment as a whole), but his
advertisement of them was selective.

The most famous of Beethoven’s political statements would be his use of Friedrich
von Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, premiered in 1824.
But he was planning a setting as early as 1793.
⁷⁸
That would have been just about the radical-chic zenith for Schiller, who had been
arrested by
the Duke of Württemberg after the sensational 1781 premiere of his play
Die Räuber
, and whose tragedies of authoritarianism and snuffed-out flames of freedom were enough
to warrant the author a grant of honorary French citizenship from the National Assembly
in 1792. But Schiller had already begun to sour on the French Revolution, its violence
and chaos. In 1793, he would begin writing his
On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters
, in which he postulated art as a more reliable source of freedom:

“[I]t is the aesthetic mode of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom,” Schiller
concluded.
⁸⁰
By the time news of his French citizenship reached him, in 1798, Schiller considered
the honor a postcard “from the empire of the dead,”
⁸¹
as he told his now-friend, the conservative Goethe. In 1802, ten years after the
Assembly offered him symbolic fraternity, he accepted the nobiliary particle, becoming
Friedrich von Schiller. (True, he accepted it from the comparatively liberal Charles
Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, but still.)

The young Beethoven was enough of a Schiller fan that he and his friends could trade
quotes from
Don Carlos
in their autograph books. But soon after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna, Louis XVI
was guillotined in Paris, Schiller’s plays were banned by the Hapsburg monarchy, and
Beethoven’s revolutionary enthusiasms became more circumspect. He continued to work
on a setting of
“An die Freude”
—perhaps even finishing it—but ultimately decided to keep it under wraps.
⁸²
By the time Beethoven
returned to the “Ode” in the Ninth Symphony, some three decades later, both the delay
and Schiller’s post-“Ode” moderation had somewhat dulled the connection with the Revolution.

Beethoven’s politics are tricky to unravel, not just because of the novel political
landscape he inhabited, but because his personal intersection with politics, fame,
and necessary livelihood was largely unprecedented. One oft-repeated story of Beethoven
and politics concerns the Third Symphony, the
Eroica
, which Beethoven originally planned to dedicate to—and name after—Napoléon. As Ferdinand
Ries told it:

Beethoven scratched Bonaparte’s name off the title page of the original manuscript
with such vehemence that he wore a hole in the paper, and ensured his future reputation
as a champion of individual freedom. Except that, as late as 1810, some six years
later, Beethoven was considering dedicating another work to the former First Consul.
⁸⁴
Napoléon had abandoned democratic ideals, occupied Vienna—twice—and yet Beethoven
kept circling back. While working on the Fifth, he received a job offer from Jérôme
Bonaparte, Napoléon’s youngest brother, recently made King of Westphalia, a Napoleonic
attempt at German unification; only an intervention of Viennese patronage kept Beethoven
from leaving. Several years later, in 1815, Beethoven entertained dignitaries gathered
to dispose of the
Napoleonic Era at the Congress of Vienna. In the wake of Waterloo, he must have felt
as if his career had dodged a bullet—and yet, after Napoléon left the stage, Beethoven
largely abandoned his heroic style, the style that had made him famous, the style
of the Fifth.
⁸⁵

For all his paper-mutilating rage, Beethoven surely sensed that he and Napoléon were
more alike than not: both coming up from modest backgrounds, both disdainful of the
limitations of traditional class structure and privilege while leveraging tradition
to their own ends. Napoléon paved the way for Beethoven, setting a pattern of innovative
fame—one based as much on a cultivated force of personality as on achievement—that
Beethoven exploited to the hilt. Leo Braudy, preeminent critic of fame, described
the Emperor in terms that could easily apply to Beethoven: “He was at once the man
of destiny—melancholic, brooding, striving alone—and the man of classic order, ensuring
the survival of all those institutions … at whose center he stood.”
⁸⁶
Every anecdote of Beethoven’s disheveled dress, his oblivious demeanor, his contempt
of social ceremony, his reverence for the classics (literary
and
musical: toward the end of his life, Beethoven even bruited about the idea of an
overture on the B-A-C-H theme), proved to be canny moves in a game Napoléon had pioneered.