The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (11 page)

Two years later, Friedrich’s restlessness had only gotten worse. “Thank God that I
too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink,
sleep and drudge,
voilà tout,”
he informs Marie. Still, he is proud of his moustache: “It is now in full flower
again and growing and when I have the pleasure—as I don’t doubt I shall—of boozing
with you in Mannheim in the spring, you will be amazed at its glory.” And Bremen still
has its charms. “There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot
hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today … while I can,” Friedrich boasts. And,
continuing the letter the next day: “What a symphony it was last
night! … What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what
a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration
of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements!”
⁵⁷

In his teenage letters, Friedrich Engels comes across as very much the bourgeois scion
he was: an indifferent apprentice, a bit of a dilettante, a devotee of beer, cigars,
and music. But the letters also hint at an intellectual double life. Metternich’s
Carlsbad Decrees had made subversion prevalent by making just about everything subversive;
even facial hair could be regarded as a dangerous republican provocation.
⁵⁸
(Hence the moustache.) His taste in music carried rebellious overtones, not just
the Fifth’s “celebration of freedom,” but also
“Ein feste Burg,”
its opening a distant mirror of Beethoven’s (three repeated notes, followed by a
downward leap), a chorale Engels, in later life, would characterize as “the
Marseillaise
of the Peasant War,”
⁵⁹
the sixteenth-century German uprising that was the largest European rebellion prior
to 1789.

And Engels was abandoning the “dreary hole” of Bremen for Berlin, where—while ostensibly
fulfilling his military service—he would sit in on Schelling’s lectures, pitting his
youthful idolization of Hegel against Schelling’s learned deprecations. (His fellow
auditors included both the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin.)
⁶⁰
At the same time his family was grooming him to take over the family’s textile business,
Engels was fashioning himself into a political radical.

In true Hegelian fashion, Engels’s road up to working-class liberation and down to
capitalist exploitation was the same road. Sent to Manchester to learn the family
trade, Engels turned what he saw into a book,
The Condition of the Working Class in England
, a groundbreaking exposé of the Industrial Revolution. One of the book’s many admirers
was another Young Hegelian, a peripatetic and perpetually impoverished journalist,
polemicist, and dialectician named Karl Marx.

Marx and Engels formed one of history’s most influential symbiotic friendships. They
dropped an all-time intellectual bombshell by co-writing
The Communist Manifesto
, then chased the 1848–49 revolutions around Europe, hoping to get in on the action.
(Marx, who was deported from Prussia in the midst of the revolutions, never quite
caught up with an uprising, but Engels did, manning the front lines in the south of
Germany before escaping back to London.) In order to have the funds to support Marx,
whom he always regarded as the more brilliant thinker, Engels reluctantly returned
to the family firm, assuming the role of a proper Victorian businessman. After Marx’s
death in 1883, Engels kept the faith, defending Marx’s reputation, expanding and promoting
Marxist thought, and having a go at finishing the last volume of
Capital
. The bond between the two was enduring; for all their later activity and notoriety,
they never quite abandoned their identity as enthusiastic students, arguing Hegel
and history over copious amounts of beer.

In fact, it was a pub crawl from later in his life that gave us one of the few glimpses
of Marx’s musical taste. Sometime in the 1850s, when London was seemingly flooded
with revolutionaries-in-exile, Marx took Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a pair
of old Young Hegelian associates, on a quest “to ‘take something’ in every saloon
between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road,” as Liebknecht remembered it, a fairly daunting
prospect in that particular district. (Bauer, a frank advocate of terrorism, had apparently
remained a drinking buddy even after being intellectually savaged by Marx and Engels
in their “Critique of Critical Criticism”
The Holy Family
; Liebknecht would go on to be a founder of Germany’s Social Democratic party. The
Young Hegelians were always a confederation of strange bedfellows.)

At the end of this inebriated tour, Bauer took offense at the patriotic deprecations
of a group of Englishmen, and Marx joined in the drunken defense of German culture.
Liebknecht again:

Marx never advanced anything close to a comprehensive philosophy of art; nevertheless,
dosed with liquid courage, Marx defended not the German intellectual heritage—not
Goethe, not Kant, not Hegel—but its composers, in a progression culminating with Beethoven.

Nowadays, Marx and Engels are still inextricably associated with—and blamed for—Communism
and all its disgraces. Their most lasting contribution, though, was the materialist
conception of history, a redesign of Hegel’s historical engine to run on less mystical
fuel. Marx: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor
political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called
general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in
the material conditions of life.”
⁶²

For Marx, the best use of the dialectic was not to overcome contradictions, as Hegel
preached, but to reveal and focus them: to clarify the content, not reveal a speculative
form. History doesn’t resolve conflict, advancing toward an Absolute stand-in for
transcendental unity; history happens because of conflicts that are fundamentally
unresolvable. If you can dialectically boil your analysis down to these fundamental
conflicts—capital versus labor, say, or collective control versus anarchic individualism—you
can grasp the levers of history.

Historical materialism even informed Marx’s pub-crawl music
critique: to note Beethoven’s achievement in the face of “miserable political and
economical conditions” was high praise indeed. Hegel thought that it was the Idea
that creates political, social, and economic conditions. Marx thought that Hegel had
things completely back-to-front. Marx often thought that way—it was a critical trick
he had picked up from one of the leading lights of the Left-Hegelians, a lapsed theologian
named Ludwig Feuerbach, who liked to bring metaphysical flights of fancy down to earth
by flipping around subject and predicate. For Marx, the Idea doesn’t project circumstances
onto people; people project onto their circumstances the illusion of an Idea. True
greatness was not, as Hegel might have put it, the realization of an ideal Fate; true
greatness—Beethoven’s greatness—was to triumph in spite of it.
⁶³

But what does the materialist conception of history—and its colonization of the modern
worldview—have to do with the Fifth’s subsequent biography? A lot, perhaps; at the
very least, a renewed focus on the first movement and its omnipresent motive. Once
the motive’s assigned meaning—Fate—became a matter of worldly friction instead of
Ideal accord, the sharper contrasts of the opening movement were bound to sound more
“real” and immediate than the relentless victory of the end. Initially, the Fifth
was particularly celebrated for its Finale, the troublesome scherzo exploding into
triumphant, major-key synthesis, a musical Hegelian in-and-of-itself. But as the perception
of history shifted toward materialism, the first movement—and its epochal opening—gradually
became the symphony’s most famous feature: a dramatic showdown between history and
the individual, irreconcilably defiant. The fact that more people know the Fifth’s
beginning than its end could be read as evidence that Marx’s historical-materialistic
inversion of Hegel, with its embrace of contradiction and struggle, is the more deeply
woven into the fabric of society.

Then again, it could just be shorter attention spans. But it is worth noting that
it was Engels, the onetime prospective composer, who initially formulated historical
materialism—and who later forever complicated Marxist thought by insisting that the
dialectic was not just an intellectual tool: “[D]ialectical laws are really laws of
development of nature.”
⁶⁴
If the dialectic is inherent in creation itself, the struggle and triumph of the
Fifth Symphony’s narrative could be applied to the whole of existence.

AS
M
ARXISM
shifted into Marxism-Leninism, the materialist interpretation of history took a detour,
one reminiscent of how the revolutionary impression of Beethoven’s music was interpreted.
Karl Kautsky, an evangelist for “traditional” Marxism, had criticized the Bolshevik
Revolution, arguing that the Russian proletariat wasn’t ready for Communism, that
the revolution had, in effect, happened too early—beating history to the punch, as
it were. As a result, he predicted, the conditions were ripe for another Reign of
Terror. “If the morality of the communists has not formed itself before the beginning
of socialisation,” Kautsky warned, “it will be too late to develop it after expropriation
has taken place.”
⁶⁵
Leon Trotsky ridiculed Kautsky’s critique: “[T]he Soviet regime, which is more closely,
straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve
meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in
dynamically creating it
”
⁶⁶
(emphasis added). The Slovenian Hegelian-Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek
has noted how Trotsky’s formulation has a parallel in modern attitudes toward innovation
and cultural history. He quotes T. S. Eliot: “The existing order is complete before
the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the
whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity
between old and new.”
⁶⁷

It’s an expanded perspective on the idea that truly revolutionary works of art create
their own audience—except in this view, such works actually create (and re-create)
their own history. It is not hard to find notions like this applied to Beethoven and
his symphonic style: one need look no further than the other Marx, Adolph Bernhard,
who even during Beethoven’s lifetime was already justifying a progressive view of
his hero’s music in terms similar to Eliot’s:

Of course, hanging that expectation on Beethoven’s symphonies practically ensured
that they would be continually reinterpreted to justify each newer “higher point of
view”—which is exactly what happened. The idea of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any other piece
of music—being “timeless” originates with this (largely successful) effort to portray
Beethoven as a figure in the vanguard of a progressive view of history.

In attempting to control that progression, the Soviet state ironically gradually came
to rely on Beethoven’s being a specifically historical figure. At the outset of the
Bolshevik regime, the Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of how “Beethoven … not
only expressed the complexities of his own personality, but reflected most forcefully
the storms of the Great Revolution.”
⁶⁹
Lunacharsky was using Beethoven as a yardstick for demonstrating that the Russian
avant-gardists of the time—Scriabin, Prokofiev—were also expressing socialist ideals.
By the time of the 1927 Beethoven centennial, however, things had changed: Lenin was
dead, Stalin was tightening his grip on power, and socialist ideals were better expressed
by
Beethoven’s music, Lunacharsky pronounced, than by any contemporary “futurists and
hooligan opponents of the classics.”
⁷⁰

The straitjacket can be sensed in another momentous Fifth Symphony, that of Dmitri
Shostakovich. Written in 1937, it was the composer’s response to his own Stalinist
difficulties, the frightening shift in his official reputation after his opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
was judged to be contrary to the tenets of socialist realism. Shostakovich’s Fifth
shadows Beethoven’s both in its minor-to-major struggle-to-triumph trajectory, and
in its obsessive use and reuse of short motives. And, like Beethoven, Shostakovich
produced a work whose greatness is in no small part due to the ambiguity of its powerful
rhetoric, creating a template for enduring reinterpretation: “a richly coded utterance,”
as Richard Taruskin has put it, “but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed
or definitively paraphrased.”
⁷¹
Shostakovich’s Fifth mixed triumph and uneasiness enough for both Soviet officialdom
and its discontents to claim its narrative.