The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (8 page)

Schindler spent the last five years of Beethoven’s life as the composer’s amanuensis,
and then parlayed that association into a long career (he died in 1864) as a purveyor
of Beethoveniana. He was possessive and prickly regarding his musical hero. Conductor
Felix Weingartner sarcastically summed up Schindler’s reputation when he noted that
“the key to [his] character, I think, is sufficiently given by the fact that after
the master’s death he had visiting cards printed with the title ‘Ami de Beethoven’ ”
⁴
—though, in all fairness, maintaining a friendship with Beethoven may have seemed
rather like a full-time vocation. Margaret Fuller, the New England Transcendentalist,
called Schindler “one of those devout Germans who can cling for so many years to a
single flower, nor feel they have rifled all its sweets.”
⁵
Another American, composer and pianist William Mason, got to know Schindler while
studying music in Germany. “He worshiped his idol’s memory,” Mason remembered, “and
was so familiar with his music that the slightest mistake in interpretation or departure
from Beethoven’s invention or design jarred upon his nerves—or possibly he made a
pretense of this.”
⁶

At a concert in Frankfurt, Mason witnessed Schindler typically advertising his own
superior sensitivity to Beethoven’s intentions:

Schindler’s biography ended up erecting a rather large wing of the house of Beethoven
scholarship on a foundation of sand. His account is, thanks to his years of daily
contact with the composer, a primary source, and, indeed, the sole source for many
of the more famous Beethoven stories (fate knocking at the door included). He was
also prone to getting things wrong, making things up, and even concocting outright
forgeries, be they marginal notes in Beethoven’s scores,
⁸
minor pieces of music,
⁹
or, most seriously, the conversation books, the conduits for communication once Beethoven’s
deafness had advanced past the point of chitchat; coming into possession of the books
after Beethoven’s death, Schindler added and altered entries to exaggerate his relationship
with the composer and thus his authority over Beethoven’s legacy—that is, in those
conversation books he didn’t simply destroy.
¹⁰
(Interestingly, many of the forged additions were in the service of justifying Schindler’s
preference for performing Beethoven’s music slower than Beethoven’s metronome markings
would indicate.)

So, like so many of Schindler’s anecdotes, the Fate/Door characterization of the Fifth
and its opening lives on in an indistinct limbo, neither confirmed nor contradicted.
The historical haze, actually, was a boon to the image’s popularity: instead of a
confirmed fact, fixed in time and circumstance, Schindler’s story became a fluid,
adaptable trope. What may have been simply after-the-fact table talk—Schindler could
only have heard the anecdote well over a decade after the Fifth’s premiere—could
be made into a precompositional inspiration. What may have even been a bit of mockery
on Beethoven’s part—Philip Hale, the venerable Boston music critic, was of the opinion
that “Ferdinand Ries was the author of this explanation, and that Beethoven was grimly
sarcastic when Ries, his pupil, made it known to him”
¹¹
—thus becomes an earnest encapsulation of the state of the composer’s soul.

And even if it was an out-and-out fiction, give Schindler credit for at least knowing
what would make a plausible story. Beethoven talked about fate all the time.

IN NOVEMBER OF
1801, Beethoven sent a letter to his friend Franz Wegeler, discussing the miseries
of a quack cure that Beethoven had been prescribed to combat his advancing deafness,
as well as the hopeful prospects of new, different quack cures. (“People talk about
miraculous cures by
galvanism;
what is your opinion?”) But in the end, Beethoven gives himself a pep talk: “You
will find me as happy as I am fated to be on this earth, not unhappy—no, that I could
not bear—I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me
completely—”
¹²
Skip forward eleven years, and Beethoven begins a journal (
Tagebuch
), in which he makes entries on and off from 1812 until 1816. The opening entry finds
a less defiant Beethoven:

Beethoven probably started the journal just after his intense but doomed affair with
the infamous “Immortal Beloved,” so one can understand the dramatic self-pity. Still,
fate is a recurring theme in the
Tagebuch
. Beethoven jots down a line from Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
(act 1, scene 5): “Fate, show thy force:
ourselves we do not owe; / What is decreed must be, and be this so.”
¹⁴
A quote from Homer’s
Iliad
(“But now Fate catches me! / Let me not sink into the dust unresisting and inglorious,
/ But first accomplish great things, of which future generations too shall hear!”
¹⁵
) includes indications of the poetic scansion, a sign that Beethoven was considering
setting it to music. Throughout the
Tagebuch
, as throughout his life, Beethoven’s fatalism varies with his mood. But though Beethoven
can still muster determination, the sheer defiance of his 1801 self is gone.

And somewhere in between these two poles came the 1808 premiere of the Fifth Symphony,
as well as Beethoven’s most well-known statement on fate, the letter now known as
the Heiligenstadt Testament, dated October 6, 1802, addressed to his brothers but
never delivered, and only discovered after his death. (Well into the twentieth century,
Beethoven’s stays in Heiligenstadt were still a relatively fresh bit of local lore.
The house where he wrote the Testament had stayed in the same family, and the old
woman of the house recalled stories her grandmother had told her of the composer’s
“almost savage” irascibility. “[H]e must have been terrible,” she concluded.
¹⁶
)

The Heiligenstadt Testament was Beethoven’s most emotionally raw effort to come to
terms with his advancing deafness. To read it is almost like eavesdropping on Beethoven
pulling himself together—what starts off like a suicide note (“Oh, how could I possibly
admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others”)
ends up as an austere manifesto: “I hope my determination will remain firm to endure
until it pleases the inexorable Parcae to break the thread.” At the same time, the
Testament might be the most self-consciously literary thing Beethoven ever wrote.
It seasons the stream-of-consciousness style of his most personal letters with phrases
that jut out from the prevailing tone like learned quotations, even though they’re
not. For example, the line toward the end of the Testament, “With joy I go to meet
death” (
mit Freuden
eil ich dem Tode entgegen
), calls to mind the faith of martyrs, and certainly may have been intended to echo
something like this poetic evocation of Christ on the way to Golgotha, by the Swiss
writer, physiognomist, and sometime friend of Goethe, Johann Kaspar Lavater:

On the other hand, it could have just as easily come from the secular heroism of,
say, the poems of Ossian (as translated/forged by James Macpherson), which Beethoven
read and admired in translation:

Take even the Testament’s striking opening, seeming to announce the document’s at
least partially public nature: “O you men,” or “O ye mankind”—the original German,
“O ihr Menschen,” sounds biblical enough, but actually appears nowhere in Martin Luther’s
translation of the Bible. Where it does turn up is in the Koran. Friedrich Eberhard
Boysen’s German translation, first published in 1775, uses “O ihr Menschen” for the
Arabic phrase
yaa ay-yuhan naasu
, as in Sura 27:

While there is no hard evidence Beethoven ever read the Koran (either in Boysen’s
translation or the less-popular but favored-by-Goethe 1772 translation by David Friedrich
Megerlin), there is more than enough evidence to say that it would not be at all surprising
if he had. When he first came to Vienna, for instance, Beethoven made the acquaintance
of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an Austrian diplomat who would become a prolific Orientalist,
translator of numerous Arabic and Persian texts, and author of a five-act “historical
drama” called
Mohammed, or the Conquest of Mecca
(1823).

German-speaking intellectual life during Beethoven’s time was permeated with a fashion
for all things Eastern, near and far. European scholarship on the subject had been
primed by imperialism—the British in India, France in the Middle East—but the German
vogue carried with it the prospect of self-invention: against a backdrop of political
division and French occupation, a lot of German writing about ancient India or Persia
can read like a subtle pep talk, a dropped hint that the scattered states of the former
Holy Roman Empire could be a cradle of civilization, too. August Wilhelm von Schlegel
put it plainly: “If the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany
must be considered the Orient of Europe.”
²⁰

In his later years, Beethoven kept a framed quotation on his desk, the inscription
that Plutarch recorded as having been on the statue of Isis at the Egyptian city of
Sais: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet
uncovered.” Beethoven had read the quotation in Schiller’s essay
“Die Sendung Moses”
(“The Mission of Moses”), an analysis of that prophet’s unique qualifications for
engineering the renaissance of a race. The Israelites—like Schiller’s fellow Germans,
perhaps—were too downtrodden to muster the energy to free themselves; what was needed
was an injection of new intellectual blood:

Beethoven remained fascinated by Eastern thought, and his
Tagebuch
contains numerous quotations taken from Eastern sources, Hindu scriptures and Sanskrit
Vedas in particular. (Such proclivities might even have inspired a rueful jest from
his onetime teacher Haydn; once he had outlived his usefulness to Beethoven’s career,
Beethoven largely ceased visiting the elder master, and Haydn took to asking mutual
acquaintances: “How goes it with our Great Mogul?”
²²
)

Beethoven also, throughout his life, maintained close connections with Freemasonry,
a milieu saturated with Eastern images and ideas. The composer apparently never joined
a lodge, but so many of his friends and acquaintances were Masons—Beethoven’s composition
teacher, Christoph Gottlieb Neefe; friend-of-the-family Franz Anton Ries (Ferdinand’s
father); Franz Wegeler, in whom Beethoven confided regarding his advancing deafness—that
one wonders why Beethoven never took the step himself. (Politics, probably—Beethoven
arrived in Vienna just as the Hapsburg emperor was outlawing the societies, an authoritarian
prophylactic in the wake of the French Revolution.) Maynard Solomon has speculated
that the
Tagebuch
was actually a sort of self-study journal in preparation for initiation.
²³

In making the case for Beethoven’s Masonic leanings, it is
almost too tempting to hear in the Fifth’s opening—or at least its popular interpretation—an
echo of such an initiation, especially when confronted with this detail of the elevation
of an Entered Apprentice to the Fellow Craft Degree, from Malcolm Duncan’s 1866
Masonic Ritual and Monitor: