The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (22 page)
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Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
Secret Remedies
“One does not always care to feel that fate is knocking at the portal.”
“No,” she said; “but we have nationalized the sisters. They wear evening gowns nowadays,
and we try to propitiate them by asking them to dinner and ‘hoping that they are well.’ ”
—J
ESSIE
V
AN
Z
ILE
B
ELDEN
,
Fate at the Door
(1895)
FOR A FEW YEARS
in the late 1870s, Hans von Bülow and August Manns engaged in a typically Prussian
feud, but it is perhaps a small triumph for the spread of German ideas that their
feud played out in the British press. Since 1855, Manns, a former army bandmaster,
had directed the concerts at London’s Crystal Palace, concerts at which Bülow had
appeared as a piano soloist on several occasions. The chronically impolitic Bülow,
irked at never having been invited to conduct, and dismissive of London’s musical
life in general, began to disparage Manns in the pages of
The London Figaro
; Manns’s slow-burning rage eventually boiled. In November 1878, Bülow took the podium
at St. James’s Hall, conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, and Manns duly reported his impressions
to the press.
It was a grand idea of my noble confrere to prefix three silent bars at the beginning
of the first movement. I wonder
if some New German–principled conductor could add four bars more in order to vex Destiny—who,
as we know, is waiting to knock at the door—into a still greater fury than Herr von
Bülow did last Tuesday. That Destiny was made impatient through being compelled to
wait three bars before it could proceed with its knocking at the door became evident
to all who were present; for it did knock with a vengeance after the first beat, and
rushed off with such a furious impetuosity that my noble colleague got fairly frightened,
and was compelled “to pull up” which had the disastrous effect of destroying, for
the rest of the movement, the plastic pose of his left arm, because the left hand
had to assist the right one in tightening the reins of infuriated Destiny.
1
Manns did not, however, mention the reason for Bülow’s extra gestural care at the
outset: only a small portion of the orchestra was actually watching him, the group
being made up of professors and students from the Royal Normal College and Academy
of Music for the Blind.
I want to lead the Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.
—F
REDDIE
M
ERCURY
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
was felt all the more keenly in a Britain that had regarded the political revolutions
of the eighteenth century as foreign aberrations, and had managed to keep such wolves
at bay. Having resisted change for so long, when the Victorians finally noticed change,
it seemed to burst like a thunderbolt. Regarding the era, scholar Walter E. Houghton
noted how much more history, it seemed, was being cast aside:
“[T]he past which they had out grown was not the Romantic period and not even the
eighteenth century,” Houghton wrote. “It was the Middle Ages.” It was only in the
1830s, when England could no longer cling to the bulwarks of mythical Albion—the Church
of England, the hierarchy of class, the local economies of farms and guilds—that “men
suddenly realized they were living in an age of radical change.”
2
For the Victorians, the best psychological defense was a good offense; hence their
exuberant mythologizing of commerce and industry, which reached an apotheosis in the
Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal Palace, a specially built immensity
of glass and iron. The Exhibition combined a trade show with an industrial pageant;
the Crystal Palace was its cathedral, a sacred space for the worship of stuff.
The organizers of the Great Exhibition saw the effort as utopian and transcendent,
marrying the burgeoning theology of Victorian industry to the hazy infinities of the
Romantics. Prince Albert, a prime mover behind the Exhibition and the founding president
of its Royal Commission, invoked a grand goal: “Nobody who has paid any attention
to the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are
living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to the accomplishment
of that great end to which, indeed, all history points—the realisation of the unity
of mankind.”
A Scottish clergyman, the Rev. John Blakely, approvingly quoted the Prince Consort
in an 1856 volume called
The Theology of Inventions
. “True it is,” Blakely admitted, “that those nations, which met in the Crystal Palace
in mechanical rivalry, have now met in the field of carnage, to decide with the weapons
of death the fate of nations.… But it furnishes no argument against the truth already
announced, regarding the tendency of machinery to promote the brotherhood of nations.”
The Victorian mind could—indeed, almost had to—rationalize the fallout of misery from
the Industrial Revolution as a Divine test; Blakely kept
faith with the factories. Mechanical inventions would “unite the separated sons of
Adam.” The “achievements of the past and the present are but faint types of the future.”
The machinery heralded a revival: “There is a good time coming.”
3
Beethoven made a cameo appearance at the Great Exhibition, in the form of Gustav Blaeser’s
“Statue of Louis van Beethoven upon a pedestal, in bronze; with corner figures, representing
the Spirits of Chivalry, Religion, Sadness, and Joy”
4
—Blaeser’s Beethoven-as-Apollo, a design rejected for the Bonn Beethoven monument,
now standing among other examples of Prussian industry, including an “Ælodion, a six-octave
keyed instrument, with metal springs, or tongues, caused to vibrate by bellows”; a
“large and costly apparatus for the evaporation of syrup, made of beaten copper”;
and a “variety of samples of blue and grey military cloths, such as are supplied for
the clothing of the Royal Prussian army.”
5
Beethoven would attain a more prominent pedestal after the Crystal Palace was relocated
from Hyde Park. The edifice—in essence a giant conservatory, designed by Joseph Paxton,
a gardener and greenhouse architect—was rebuilt on Sydenham Hill, a wealthy suburb
of London. The enterprise also acquired a new head, officially titled (in the unassuming
Victorian manner) Secretary to the Crystal Palace: a railway engineer and music-lover
named George Grove.
Victorian convictions were inculcated in Grove by the Rev. Charles Pritchard, Grove’s
headmaster at the Stockwell and, later, the Clapham Grammar School. Pritchard, according
to Grove’s biographer, “insisted that the main intention of early education should
be the development of the habit of thinking, and he further laid great stress on the
necessity of providing resources for the leisure hours of maturer life.”
6
Both tenets bore fruit. Though an unruly student—“his circumstantial touches were
often trying to the gravity of his instructor”
7
—Grove
would bring to the concert hall the era’s faith in educational improvement.
He became a panjandrum of Victorian music, editing his eponymous
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, and serving as the first director of the Royal College of Music, but his background
was that of an enthusiastic amateur. Grove came to music through, Britishly enough,
Handel’s
Messiah
—while still a teenager, he bought a score for the then-not-inconsiderable amount
of a guinea. While an apprentice engineer, Grove spent his off hours copying scores
in the British Museum. Working for a specialist in the erection of cast-iron lighthouses,
Grove traveled, to Jamaica, to Bermuda. He visited Paris in the revolutionary year
of 1848, prior to the election of Louis-Napoléon; a traveling companion remembered
him blithely jotting down the notes of “God Save the Queen” for a group of musically
minded workers at Notre-Dame.
8
Grove had switched from building lighthouses to building railway stations and bridges
just in time to be caught in the collapse of England’s railway bubble; in 1850, influential
acquaintances arranged for the increasingly idle Grove to be appointed secretary of
the Society of Arts. The president of the Society, Prince Albert, had already convinced
the group to mount an industrial showcase; the twenty-nine-year-old Grove found himself
in the thick of preparations for the Great Exhibition. After the Exhibition closed,
Grove slipped into the secretaryship of the new Crystal Palace without fuss.
With an opportunity to apply the fruits of his all-consuming hobby, Grove took special
interest in the presentation of music at the Crystal Palace. At first, the offerings
were limited to band concerts under the direction of one Henry Schallehn. But Schallehn’s
former assistant, Prussian-born former bandmaster August Manns, shrewdly stayed in
contact with Grove, sending the secretary programs of his foreign concerts. Impressed
by
his high-minded repertoire, Grove wrote Manns that he “would give a great deal to
have such music done in the Crystal Palace.”
9
Schallehn was out; Manns was in.
Manns, who combined military discipline with a certain artist’s-privilege aloofness,
10
convinced Grove to let him field a full orchestra. The Palace’s first great musical
successes were parochial: the chorus-and-orchestra Handel festivals, celebrations
of the country’s most famous adopted musical son. But with the advent of what became
known as the “Analytical Concerts,” combining Manns’s conducting and Grove’s program
notes, the Classical-Romantic canon took up residence at the Crystal Palace: Mendelssohn,
Schubert, Schumann, and, especially, Beethoven.
The concerts at the Crystal Palace illustrated the increasing permeability of class
in Victorian England. Beethoven had been featured as both high and low entertainment
before. The Philharmonic Society of London, founded in 1813—the group commissioned
Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony—presented the symphonies as noble endeavors.
Prince Albert, himself a musician and composer, occasionally designed concerts for
the Philharmonic Society, with Beethoven featured in all but one. (The Fifth was a
princely favorite, appearing on four of the fourteen royally programmed concerts,
more than any other work.)
11
On the other end, perhaps, was Louis Antoine Jullien, a Parisian conductor who, having
fled his debts to London, became a celebrity in the 1840s and ’50s for his flamboyantly
showy direction and presentations of huge orchestras, performing grab-bag programs
of symphonies, operatic airs, and dance music. When the program came around to Beethoven,
Jullien would don clean kid gloves and conduct with a jeweled baton that was brought
to him on a silver platter. He augmented the Fifth Symphony with “parts for four ophicleides
and a saxophone, besides those of his favourite regiment of side-drums,” if a newspaper
complaint is to be believed,
12
but all the same he brought the symphonies to
a public that would have had little or no access to the Philharmonic Society. When
George Grove came to edit his
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, first published in 1878, he took on Jullien’s entry himself. “[W]hat Jullien aimed
at was good, and what he aimed at he did thoroughly well,” Grove wrote.
13
Manns and Grove split the difference between the exclusivity of the Philharmonic Society’s
Hanover Square Rooms and Jullien’s shilling-ticket extravaganzas. The result was quintessential
Victorian uplift, a musical gospel preached in the era’s church of industry, a space
blessed with both a royal box and a convenient, cheap railway connection. Like everything
else in the Crystal Palace, Beethoven’s music became drafted into a campaign of spiritual
and commercial betterment.
The Crystal Palace as reconstructed at Sydenham was both larger and more morally didactic
than its previous incarnation. Architect Owen Jones, who had designed the Palace’s
interior layout at Hyde Park, produced a series of ten Fine Arts Courts for Sydenham,
each devoted to a historical architectural style: Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, even
a court re-creating the decorative ambiance of Jones’s architectural benchmark, the
Alhambra in Spain. The Egyptian Court featured a commemorative inscription translated
into hieroglyphics: “In the 17th year of the reign of her Majesty, the ruler of the
waves, the royal daughter, Victoria lady most gracious, the chiefs, architects, sculptors,
and painters, erected this palace and gardens.”
14
(The artisans who constructed the Fine Arts Courts were largely German, Italian,
and French; when Queen Victoria paid a visit to the construction site, the foreigners
provided a rendition of “God Save the Queen” “in first-rate style,” according to a
reporter.
15
Grove would have been pleased.) The Fine Arts Courts were intended to contribute
to the improvement of Victorian Londoners, suggesting, in the words of historian Jan
Piggott, “a certain politics of empire, a philosophy and even a morality: the fall
of proud, wealthy and luxurious civilizations”
16
—a warning to maintain
propriety and rectitude, lest an increasingly moneyed British society meet the same
fate. (Not for nothing was a Nineveh Court included.) At the same time, the Sydenham
Palace—which, unlike the Exhibition, was organized as a commercial, private enterprise—rented
shops and stalls, making the building as much a shopping mall as a museum. “[I]t may
truly be said, that nowhere can purchases be made with less trouble and fatigue, or
with more advantage to the purchasers,” the Palace’s directors assured patrons.
17
While Prince Albert and the Society of Arts had taken the 1851 Exhibition’s profits
to build what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum, “the public,” as one of
the Society’s correspondents remarked, “have taken their spare cash to shop down at
Sydenham.”
18
