The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (7 page)

When Méhul’s First was performed in Leipzig in 1838 (under the baton of Mendelssohn),
its resemblance to the Fifth was immediately noted by Robert Schumann: he thought
it “so striking, that there can be no doubt of a reminiscence on one side or the other.”
¹⁰⁰
Schumann’s suspicions notwithstanding, there is no evidence that either composer
was aware of the other’s latest project. But Beethoven did know and admire Méhul’s
operas. Méhul, in turn, was inspired by Beethoven’s earlier efforts to try his own
hand at symphonic composition; French conductor François-Antoine Habeneck recalled
reading through Beethoven’s first two symphonies at the Conservatoire in the early
1800s: “Of all the artists who heard us perform these works, only Méhul really liked
them. It was actually these symphonies that encouraged Méhul to write similar ones
of his own.”
¹⁰¹
Similarities between Méhul’s First and Beethoven’s Fifth were in all likelihood the
product of mutual and common influence, not plagiarism.

If anything, the Fifth’s ubiquitous short-short-short-long tattoo was something Beethoven
borrowed from his French colleague. Méhul uses the rhythm all the time. It turns up
on the second page of his first performed opera,
¹⁰²
Euphrosine
(1790), and at least somewhere in just about everything he wrote. In 1799’s
Ariodant
(Méhul’s favorite among his operas), the accompaniment to the title character’s first-act
aria—

—is built almost entirely from the motive.
¹⁰³
In
Uthal
(1806), a chorus of soldiers uses the rhythm to swear vengeance against the eponymous
Ossianic hero:
¹⁰⁴

Uthal
, with its violin-less orchestra (the better to conjure an atmosphere of rustic shadow),
illustrates Méhul’s love of orchestral effect, another stylistic feature Beethoven
borrowed.
Euphrosine
opens with strings, oboes, and clarinets in ominous octaves—not far from the Fifth’s
string-and-clarinet inception. Again anticipating the Fifth, Méhul frequently beefed
up his orchestra with trombones, as in 1792’s
Stratonice
,
¹⁰⁵
and extreme
forte-piano
(loud-soft) juxtapositions are common.

Beethoven would adapt the Revolutionary style—the cutting-edge musical features developed
by Méhul, Cherubini, Le Sueur—into the music of the future. In France, though, the
style was falling out of favor. While the
Journal de Paris
waxed patriotic over the G-minor Symphony’s 1809 premiere (“M. Méhul has desired
to reconquer for France a branch of music that she had entirely lost”
¹⁰⁶
), others disparaged the connection between Beethoven’s symphonies and Méhul’s: “The
contagion of Teutonic harmony seems to win over the modern school of composition which
has formed at the Conservatoire,” scolded one critic. “They believe in producing an
effect with prodigal use of the most barbaric dissonances and by making a din with
all the instruments of the orchestra.”
¹⁰⁷
Even as Méhul’s biblical opera
Joseph
became a hit in Germany, his career in France started to wane.

Napoléon’s betrayal of democracy enraged Beethoven but depressed Méhul. His entry
in the French
Encyclopédie de la musique
is blunt: “With the establishment of the Empire, when the revolutionary movement
was completely crushed, Méhul’s fecundity ceased.”
¹⁰⁸
Musicologist Alexander Ringer directly connected Méhul’s symphonies to this disillusionment:
“[R]ather than court the unpredictable taste of a public that only yesterday had consisted
of ardent republicans but today shouted
‘Vive l’Empereur!’, the same composer who once argued that public opinion be accepted
as an artistic guidepost now decided to write exclusively in obedience to his own
conscience.”
¹⁰⁹

When Beethoven’s Fifth is heard as a Revolutionary call to arms while Méhul’s very
similar First can be heard as the Revolution’s elegy, one wonders just how much specific
republican sentiment Beethoven would have intended audiences to hear in his own instrumental
Fête
. Maybe Beethoven simply recognized in the Revolutionary style a musical force and
drive missing in Viennese concerts. Then again, maybe Beethoven, a circumspect republican,
intended the Fifth as a musical sleeper cell: a passive-aggressive dose of Revolutionary
music slipped into the Austrian Empire under the guise of an abstract symphony, on
the off chance that it would seed an upheaval of its own.

FRENCH URBAN PLANNER
and philosopher Paul Virilio writes of “dromocratic” society, controlled not by power
or money, but speed (
dromo-
from the Greek
, “road”). The final arbiter of government action is the ever-increasing velocity
of military action. Under such consideration, the stop-and-go of the Fifth’s opening,
its hurtling pace and its braking fermatas, becomes the source of the symphony’s variable
politics. Movement is facilitated while being restricted: for the rest of the symphony,
our attention is shifted from the note on the downbeat to the point at which that
note
moves
, to the unstable rhythmic point between the first and second beats. Beethoven fuels
the momentum of the motive by initially stopping it in its tracks; the energy it takes
to overcome that stasis is renewed every subsequent time, an illusion of perpetual
acceleration. Through Virilio’s dromocratic lens, the opening becomes both the barricade
and the irresistible advance. No wonder it seems so revolutionary.

But, as Virilio observes, “revolution is movement, but movement is not a revolution.”
¹¹⁰
Power is no longer in resisting movement,
but in channeling it. Virilio notes how the Jacobins, the architects of the Reign
of Terror, encouraged the disaffected to keep on the move: “[T]he new organization
of traffic flows that we arbitrarily call the ‘French Revolution’ … is nothing other
than the rational organization of a social abduction. The ‘mass uprising’ of 1793
is
the removal of the masses
.”
¹¹¹
Similarly, a reviewer of an 1830 performance of the Fifth wrote of its “restless
forward motion made up of self-consuming longing.”
¹¹²
A repository of political energies could also function as a corral.

In his autobiography, Igor Stravinsky ruefully quoted an observation from the Soviet
daily
Izvestia
:

“I should like to know,” Stravinsky critiqued, “in what this mentality differs from
the platitudes and commonplace utterances of the publicity-mongers of liberalism in
all the bourgeois democracies long before the social revolution in Russia.” Only in
its directness. But Stravinsky’s wish that Beethoven would be appreciated solely for
his compositional achievement—“It is only the music that matters”—is equally utopian.
¹¹³
Beethoven hitched the Fifth to enough revolutionary stars that the connection was
inevitable; and the connection, in turn, lent the Fifth a measure of historic significance
that helped secure its impregnable canonic status. Even in purely musical terms, the
Fifth was a product of its time: its disorienting, even subversive opening almost
inevitably echoes the upheavals of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftershocks.
But the zeal was shorn of a specific agenda. Beethoven became the prototypical revolutionary
composer, while the true Revolutionaries, the composers of the
Fêtes
, for the most part, faded into obscurity. (Only Cherubini maintained a foothold in
the repertoire.)

Eighteen forty-eight finally brought what everyone had been anticipating or fearing
for more than fifty years, a French revolution that spread throughout Europe. It was
triggered by the cancellation of a dinner; after the French King, Louis-Philippe,
had banned political meetings, the various opposition factions had continued to meet
under the guise of increasingly large feasts, the
Campagne des banquets
of 1847–48. Threats of a massacre quashed a Parisian banquet scheduled for February
22, 1848; within two days, Louis-Philippe had abdicated. (The old
chansons
should have tipped the king off; as one landlady noted, you could tell a revolution
was imminent because of all the singing.
¹¹⁴
)

The 1848 revolution in France would inspire Karl Marx’s famous formulation of history
repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”;
¹¹⁵
by December, the Empire was back up and running. But in the first days of the Second
Republic, on March 5, 1848, the Paris Conservatoire hosted a benefit concert for those
wounded in the previous month’s uprising. The program validated the transfer of Revolutionary
musical authority: “La Marseillaise” was followed by Beethoven’s Fifth.
¹¹⁶
In
Le Monde musical
, Auguste Morel approved of the juxtaposition, but in terms that projected the Fifth’s
Revolutionary trappings onto a blank slate: though “Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor
does not, of course, express any specific idea … it conveys an eminently martial tone,
and when it comes to celebrating a triumph one could not find anything better.”
¹¹⁷

THE TITLE CHARACTER
of Kurt Münzer’s 1919 “erotic novella”
Mademoiselle
is a young governess languishing in a “big, cold German town,” teaching a lawyer’s
children. The eldest son, thirteen-year-old Eduard, has his piano lesson, his thin,
pale fingers stalking the keyboard “like giant spider’s legs”; from the next room,
his mother finds the exercises “simply intolerable,” and suggests a duet—“That thing
by Beethoven … a symphony, isn’t it?”

Eduard’s clumsy conversion into lyrics does no small violence to the tune, but the
connection between sentiment and symphony would have been familiar even to readers
of erotic novellas. That poetic image—fate knocking at the door—first saw the (public)
light of day in 1840, and immediately became ineluctably attached to the Fifth’s opening.
The timing was auspicious: driven by some of the nineteenth century’s most formidable
thinkers—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche—the very idea of Fate was about to experience a momentous
intellectual growth spurt, expanding from a personal lot to an all-encompassing one.
Riding Fate’s philosophical coattails, the symphony—and its first four notes—would
become more famous than ever.

THE STORY
linking the Fifth to fate comes from Beethoven’s biographer, Anton Schindler. In
the first edition of his biography, published in 1840, Schindler connects the image
only to the opening: “Beethoven expressed himself in something like vehement animation,
when describing to me his idea:—‘It is thus that Fate knocks at the door.’ ”
²

By the time of the third edition, 1860, mission creep is starting to set in, and Fate,
it is hinted, is asking after the whole symphony: