The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (2 page)

This is almost certainly not what Beethoven was thinking about when he put a rest
in the first measure of the Fifth Symphony. But, were Beethoven really trying to mess
around with the boundary between his symphony and everything outside of it, he would
have been anticipating the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the guru of deconstruction,
by nearly two hundred
years. Derrida talks about frames in his book
The Truth in Painting
, noting that when we look at a painting, the frame seems part of the wall, but when
we look at the wall, the frame seems part of the painting. Derrida terms this slipstream
between the work and outside the work a
parergon:
“a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out, but that
it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys
its greatest energy.”
⁶

Our minds dissolve the frame as we cross the Rubicon into Art. But Beethoven drags
the edge of the frame into the painting itself, stylizing it to the point that, for
anyone reading the score, at least, this parergon refuses to go quietly, as it were.
Beethoven waits until we’re ready, then gruffly asks if we’re ready yet.

We can
see
the silence on the page, in the form of the rest. But do we hear it in performance?
The rest completes the meter of 2/4—two beats per measure, with the quarter note getting
the beat—which, normally, would mean that the second of the three following eighth
notes would get a little extra emphasis. But most readings give heavy emphasis to
all three eighth notes, steamrolling the meter (which is really only one beat to a
bar anyway—more on that in a minute). Paleobotanist, artist, and sometime composer
Wesley Wehr recalled one consequence of such steamrolling:

Knowledge of the rest is like a secret handshake, admission into the guild. (Bloch,
best known for his 1916 cello-and-orchestra “Rhapsodie hébraïque”
Schelomo
, was also a dedicated photographer who liked to name his images of trees after composers:
“Bloch sees ‘Beethoven’ invariably as a single massive tree appearing to twist and
struggle out of the soil.”
⁸
)

Indeed, one practical reason for the rest is to reassure the performers of the composer’s
professionalism. Beethoven knew that any conductor would signal the downbeat anyway,
so he put in the rest as a placeholder for the conductor’s gesture. And it’s liable
to be a fairly dramatic gesture at that. The meter indicates two beats to the bar,
but no conductor actually indicates both beats, as it would tend to bog down music
that needs speed and forward momentum. Instead, the movement is conducted “in one,”
indicating only the downbeat of every bar.

So the conductor has one snap of the baton to get the orchestra up to full speed.
And the longer the Fifth Symphony has retained its canonical status, the more that
task has come to be seen as perilous. For the two leading pre–World War I pundits
of conducting, Richard Wagner and Felix Weingartner, starting the Fifth was no big
deal. Wagner takes ignition for granted, being far more concerned with the lengths
of the subsequent holds,
⁹
while Weingartner scoffs at his colleague Hans von Bülow’s caution: “Bülow’s practice
of giving one or several bars beforehand is quite unnecessary.”
¹⁰
But jump ahead to the modern era, and one finds the British conductor Norman Del
Mar warning of “would-be adopters of the baton” suffering “the humiliation of being
unable to start the first movement at all.”
¹¹
Gunther Schuller,
American composer and conductor, is equally dire, calling the opening “one of the
most feared conducting challenges in the entire classical literature.”
¹²
Del Mar reaches this conclusion: “It is useless to try and formulate the way this
is done in terms of conventional stick technique. It is direction by pure force of
gesture and depends entirely on the will-power and total conviction of the conductor.”
¹³

It is only a coincidence that the eighth rest resembles the trigger of a starter’s
pistol:

IF ONLY
for the blink of an eye, the eighth rest leaves the symphony hanging in fraught silence,
a condition that, even at the time of the Fifth’s premiere, was already becoming attached
to the Beethoven mythos. The fame of the Fifth Symphony has its biographical match
in Beethoven’s deafness.

Beethoven first noticed a deterioration in his hearing sometime in his twenties; when,
in 1801, he first broached the subject in letters to close friends (“I beg you to
treat what I have told you about my hearing as a great secret,” he wrote to the violinist
Karl Amenda, underlining the request for emphasis
¹⁴
), he had already been seeing physicians about it for at least a year. The initial
symptoms were those of tinnitus—buzzing and ringing
in the ears, a sensitivity to loud noises. (“[I]f anybody shouts, I can’t bear it,”
he complained.
¹⁵
)

It would be difficult to overestimate how disconcerting the onset of such a condition
must have been to the young Beethoven, especially at that point in his career, having
moved to the cultural metropolis of Vienna, on the precarious cusp between notoriety
and lasting success. But it is also important to note that—contrary to much popular
opinion—even at the time he was composing the Fifth Symphony (1804 to 1808, on and
off), Beethoven could still hear fairly well, at least well enough to conduct the
1808 premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and then write his publisher about
correcting the score: “When I gave these works to you, I had not yet heard either
of them performed—and one should not be so like a god as not to have to correct something
here and there in one’s created works.”
¹⁶
His fellow composer-pianist Carl Czerny reported that Beethoven “still heard speech
and music perfectly well until at least 1812.”
¹⁷
While that optimistic characterization is more likely a testament to Beethoven’s
adjustment to his infirmity, it’s clear that the Fifth Symphony was not born out of
an absolute pathological silence.

Tracing the progression of Beethoven’s deafness is difficult not just because of Beethoven’s
own tendency to overdramatize his affliction, but also because of the tendency of
his friends and acquaintances to attribute to deafness symptoms that might just as
easily be traced to another underlying condition: that of, well, being Beethoven.
In 1804, Stephan von Breuning writes to a mutual friend that as a result of Beethoven’s
“waning of hearing … [h]e has become very withdrawn and often mistrustful of his best
friends, and irresolute in many things!”
¹⁸
But, as biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us, the withdrawal, mistrust, and retreat
from everyday concerns were there all along: “During his childhood, Beethoven often
wrapped himself in a cloak of silence as a shield against both the vicissitudes of
external reality and the traumatic events within his family constellation.”
¹⁹
Pushed forward as a Mozart-like prodigy by his alcoholic, dissolute, abusive father,
Beethoven retreated into solitude and daydreaming, the defense of a figurative deafness,
well before any literal manifestation.

If the onset of hearing loss fed into Beethoven’s penchant for isolation, his penchant
for isolation may have, in turn, fed an exaggerated sense of the extent of his deafness.
Recent proposed guidelines for tinnitus diagnosis include the reminder that “it has
become clear in recent years that the ‘problem’ of tinnitus relates far more to the
individual’s psychological response to the abnormal tinnitus signal than to the signal
itself.… [I]n some cases the altered mood state predates tinnitus onset … making it
difficult to know whether tinnitus causes psychological disturbance, or whether psychological
disturbance facilitates the emergence of tinnitus.”
²⁰

Nevertheless, the adaptability of so much of Beethoven’s middle-period “heroic” output
to narratives of crisis and triumph has contributed to a popular sense that his deafness
was sudden and total, rather than gradual. One finds it in an entry from an American
music-lover’s diary, published in
Dwight’s Journal of Music
in 1853: “[Beethoven] was deaf, poor man, when he wrote the 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th,
and 8th Symphonies. Deaf when he composed ‘Fidelio,’ ‘The Ruins of Athens,’ the two
Masses, &c.”
²¹

The unidentified diarist was actually Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who would later undertake
extensive research in Germany and Austria and produce a pioneering Beethoven biography,
the first volume of which appeared in 1866; based on Thayer’s findings, most critics
and scholars would adopt a more nuanced view of Beethoven’s deafness. But the story
of a stone-deaf Beethoven and his dauntless musical response was too good, too inspirational,
not to survive. The American composer Frances McCollin, for example, blind from the
age of five, took powerful inspiration from the story, starting when she attended
a dress rehearsal for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s inaugural concert
in 1900: “[S]he heard the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which made
her think of the deaf Beethoven and she burst into tears.”
²²
McCollin’s story echoes one from the six-year-old Clara Schumann—who, for reasons
similar to Beethoven’s, was so withdrawn as a child that her parents thought she,
too, might be deaf—noting in her diary, “I heard a grand symphony by Beethoven which
excited me greatly.”
²³

The image of a young, completely deaf Beethoven gained a foothold in children’s literature,
offering an educational example of human perseverance (and, maybe, playing on a child’s
delight in paradox: a composer who can’t hear).
McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader
included an excerpt from Harriet Martineau’s
The Crofton Boys
, in which young Hugh Proctor’s mother tries to console him after he has had his foot
amputated:

Even today, one can still find the myth perpetuated here and there.
²⁵

As an up-and-coming composer and performer, Beethoven probably feared that common
knowledge of his encroaching deafness would have hindered his career prospects. The
opposite occurred, as it turned out: within his own lifetime, Beethoven’s deafness
became a celebrated element in the reputations of both the composer and his music.
A snippet of that celebrity is preserved in the conversation books, the trove of one-sided
table talk from Beethoven’s later years, when guests
would jot down their share of the discussion on paper. During one chat, Beethoven’s
nephew Karl informs his uncle of popular perception: “Precisely because of [your deafness]
you are famous. Everyone is astonished, not just that you can compose so well, but
particularly that you can do it in spite of this affliction. If you ask me, I believe
that it even contributes to the originality of your compositions.”
²⁶

On this occasion, Beethoven seems to have taken his nephew slightly to task for overdetermining
the nature of his genius, but there is some evidence that it was Beethoven himself
who planted the seed of that astonishment and fame. By the time of the Fifth’s premiere,
Beethoven had come to terms with his deafness enough to stop concealing it and to
start even subtly advertising it, writing a note to himself in one of his sketchbooks
to “let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.” The musicologist Owen Jander
went so far as to reinterpret the Fifth Symphony in light of this self-admonition,
making it not just a metaphorical struggle with infirmity, but, at least in the slow
march that permeates the third and part of the fourth movements—a march built out
of the symphony’s opening motive—a musical re-creation of the experience of deafness.
The third movement’s translation of its theme into a desaturated skeleton of pizzicato
strings, Jander suggested, was meant to simulate the composer’s increasingly hazy
sense of hearing.
²⁷