The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (12 page)

But the symphony’s opening theme hints at the increasingly suffocating presence of
the Beethovenian paragon. Shostakovich jump-starts with a series of angular, dotted-rhythm
leaps, up and down, but the vaults are herded into a mutter: by the fourth bar, the
bravado has been abraded into a single note, rapped three times, staccato. In Shostakovich’s
version, Beethoven’s repeated-note opening becomes a hesitant cessation: an ominous,
unanswered tapping, quashing the defiance of those impulsive leaps. It is as if Beethoven’s
Fifth were run backward and the finale’s dotted-rhythm outbursts subsumed back into
the opening’s grim announcement. (In Stalin’s Russia, after all, a knock on the door
could be all too literally fatal.)

The open-ended nature of the interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth complicated its status
in Communist regimes, even as the Party relied on Beethoven’s Fifth to fire up revolutionary
fervor. Functionaries of the
Freie Deutsche Jugend
, the official East German
socialist youth group, noted the music’s usefulness to a journalist in the 1960s:
“What I like about Beethoven is the militant element. We recently heard his Fifth
Symphony … ‘and now the eyes of the youth friends light up.’ ”
⁷²
Militant Beethoven could, however, become dangerous once revolutions turned monolithic:
Beethoven’s
Egmont
Overture (which plays like a potent distillation of the Fifth’s struggle) became
the soundtrack of the 1956 uprising in Communist Hungary; during the similar 1968
rebellion in Czechoslovakia, “as tension and expectations rose, Radio Free Prague
played over and over Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
⁷³

In Communist China, the vague knocking of the first four notes made Beethoven’s Fifth
a pawn in the Cultural Revolution. Western classical music in China had been drastically
undermined by the Revolution—the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory was decimated
as professors were arrested or driven to suicide
⁷⁴
—and Beethoven was officially eschewed in favor of ideologically pure operas and ballets
created under the direction of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife. The power struggle between
Jiang and Premier Zhou Enlai turned symphonic as rapprochement with the United States
(the prospect of which Jiang despised) moved forward. For one of Henry Kissinger’s
trips to Beijing to plan Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit, Zhou had the idea of marking
the occasion with a concert by China’s Central Philharmonic. “Kissinger’s German,”
Zhou instructed Li Delun, the Philharmonic’s conductor. “You should play Beethoven.”
⁷⁵

But which Beethoven? Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the Central Philharmonic had
often performed the symphonies; called into a meeting with Jiang Qing and Yu Huiyong,
the minister of culture and Jiang’s chief musical consultant, Li expressed a preference
for the Fifth, as it was the piece the Philharmonic performed best. But Yu insisted
that the Fifth was contrary to the spirit of Communist China, since—post hoc the first
four notes—it was about fatalism.

Li had stepped into a Byzantine intellectual power struggle,
one of Jiang Qing’s perennial propaganda battles against those who would try to reverse
the course of revolutionary history in favor of the status quo.
⁷⁶
It was the Old and Young Hegelians all over again: the Fifth lacked sufficient specificity
as to just which kind of fate it was in favor of. Jiang and Yu substituted Beethoven’s
Sixth, Beethoven’s nature pictures presumably being less open to troublesome interpretation.
(Jiang Qing pulled the same switch on Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra
on their 1973 visit, leading to a certain amount of last-minute scrambling, as the
group had only brought parts for the Fifth, not the Sixth.
⁷⁷
)

After Mao’s death, Yu Huiyong would commit suicide by drinking a bottle of sulfuric
acid. The Cultural Revolution was over, the milestone having been marked, in part,
by Li Delun and the Central Philharmonic returning to the symphony they played best,
Beethoven’s Fifth, a performance broadcast throughout China in March of 1977. Xu Ximing,
head of the Shanghai Music Lovers’ Association, recognized the significance. “It is
about the light that comes after a period of great difficulty,” he recalled, “so it
was very appropriate.”
⁷⁸
(Then again, in 1997, during the ceremonial transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong
from Britain to China, Chinese police drowned out protesters with a PA broadcast of
the Fifth.
⁷⁹
)

Elsewhere in the Communist world, Trotsky’s dynamically created majority had long
since ossified into a bureaucracy of oppression, with a cynicism toward progress to
rival Metternich’s. The order failed to make room for Trotsky himself, who was forced
out of party and country. Asylum in Norway turned into house arrest, an internment
slightly alleviated by a radio: “Beethoven was a great help to us, but the music was
a rarity”—drowned out by propaganda broadcasts from both Stalin and Hitler.
⁸⁰
Trotsky was shipped from Norway to Mexico, where he was assassinated in 1940. Even
in exile, though, Trotsky had kept the historical-materialist faith, the same tenets
that elaborated the perception of the Fifth’s opening into a tolling of the fate of
all mankind:

ALL ALONG
, there had been another lane on the Fifth’s journey to canonic greatness, running
parallel to Hegel and Marx, but surpassing both of them in its conception of Fate.
Its surveyor was the era’s great iconoclast, promoting a worldview fiercely generous
and exuberantly desolate: Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1888, in the months preceding his
sudden mental breakdown, Nietzsche wrote his own version of an autobiography:
Ecce Homo
, a breezy, cocky tour of his own works and thought processes. At the close of a chapter
entitled “Why I Am So Clever,” Nietzsche offered this prescription: “My formula for
greatness in a human being is
amor fati:
that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness
in the face of what is necessary—but
love
it.”
⁸²

Nietzsche’s
amor fati
, his love of Fate, was the final mutation in the nineteenth-century evolution of
concepts of Fate and History. Quite simply, after Nietzsche, there was no place left
for Fate to go: in a way, it became philosophically indistinguishable from the whole
of creation. Schindler’s investing of the Fifth
with a single share of Fate had unwittingly proved one of the canniest metaphysical
investments possible. And yet Nietzsche himself would warn against the dividend.

Amor fati
grew out of Nietzsche’s contemplation of the old idea of eternal recurrence, the
idea that, contrary to Hegel, history was not progressive but constantly cycled through
the same patterns over and over again. It’s as if Hegel’s idea of everything perpetually
becoming
had no Absolute endpoint—becoming is all there is. Nietzsche famously posed the question
in his 1882 book
The Gay Science:

“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke
thus?” Nietzsche posits. “Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you
would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ”
⁸³
The latter response is the quintessence of
amor fati
.

Nietzsche had the eponymous hero of his
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
—an allegory saturated with
amor fati
—illustrate Fate as a deceptive gateway. “This long lane behind us: it goes on for
an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us—that is another eternity,” Zarathustra
notes. “They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another:
and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is
written above it: ‘Moment.’

“[A]ll things that
can
run have already run along this lane”
⁸⁴
—up to and including the current moment; what’s more, “all things [are] bound fast
together” such that, in turn, the moment symmetrically
draws the future toward it
.

As an example, the Canadian philosopher Peter Hallward provides another of history’s
great heroes of fate:

Hallward’s formulation clashes with every bit of our intuition about causality and
agency, but also brings to the fore two of the more important facets of Nietzsche’s
thought: his bias against free will, and his emphasis on affirmation, on embracing
one’s becoming.

Amor fati
is not just a cosmic version of playing the hand you’re dealt; it defines the game
itself as inescapably all-encompassing. The universe is a perpetual state of becoming;
and nothing exists outside of that becoming—including what Nietzsche regards as the
irrationally egotistic idea of free will. One of Nietzsche’s favorite words is
Verhängnis
, which can be translated in multiple directions: literally “hanging together,” but
also meaning “fate” or even “calamity.” It’s all the same thing, and it’s only the
distorting habit of regarding ourselves as self-mastered individuals that keeps us
from that realization: “[O]ne is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one
is
in the whole.”
⁸⁶
There’s no way of
getting off the roller coaster of Fate: we’re built into it. If you’re enjoying the
ride, you’ve achieved greatness.

No wonder Nietzsche doesn’t go in for the Fifth Symphony’s defiance. He prefers to
praise “Beethoven’s noble hermit’s resignation.”
⁸⁷
Love your fate.

EARLY IN
his career, Nietzsche worked on both philosophy and music, pursuing the latter with
more raw talent than skill, a deficit that earned him a fair amount of scorn after
the twenty-four-year-old professor of philology inserted himself into Richard Wagner’s
circle in the late 1860s. Nietzsche and Wagner talked over what became Nietzsche’s
first book,
The Birth of Tragedy
; Wagner defended the book when it came under attack from Nietzsche’s more hidebound
colleagues. But Wagner also made a point of left-handedly complimenting Nietzsche’s
piano improvisations, telling him “you play too well for a professor.”
⁸⁸
Nietzsche fared no better with his written compositions, having never mastered forms
beyond miniatures; Hans von Bülow criticized one as “the most extreme piece of fantastic
extravagance, the most undelightful and the most antimusical drafts on musical paper
that I have faced in a long time. Frequently I had to ask myself: is the whole thing
a joke, perhaps you intended a parody of the so-called music of the future?”
⁸⁹

Nietzsche, intellectually tougher than his enthusiastic-professor mien may have let
on, went from lauding Wagner and his artwork (
Kunstwerk
) of the future to denouncing him, accusing him of being corrupted by Christianity,
and enthusiastically proclaiming the superiority of Offenbach and Bizet. (Nevertheless,
even after breaking with Wagner, in person and in print, Nietzsche recognized the
importance of their discussions to his own intellectual journey: “I’d let go cheap
the whole rest of my human relationships.”
⁹⁰
)

The “fantastic extravagance” that Bülow faulted in Nietzsche’s
music was the touchstone of his prose; and as with much of his philosophy, Nietzsche’s
views on art and music are fluid, pungently aphoristic, and, over time, somewhat self-contradictory.
The constant is Nietzsche’s skepticism of art, a skepticism so deep that it can only
have grown from an irresistible love: he is forever flying too close to the flame
and then musing on just how and why it burns.

In Nietzsche’s estimation, all artists were actors—benevolent liars, usually themselves
unaware of their own make-believe. The deception is not in art’s scope but in its
importance: art is as meaningful as life itself, but—in the light of the consequences
of
amor fati
—life is not nearly as meaningful as we would like to think. Nietzsche dismissed an
artist’s biography, his or her individual fate, as an irrelevant illusion. To interpret
the Fifth and its opening motive in a way that emphasizes Beethoven’s own emotional
life—his struggle with deafness or loneliness, take your pick—is to fall into the
same trap that artists always set, however unwittingly. “Artists are by no means men
of great passion,” Nietzsche wrote, “but they often
pretend
to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable
if their own life speaks for their experience in this field.”
⁹¹