The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (25 page)

Forster tells the Fifth through the ears and imagination of Helen, the most volatile
of the Schlegels—her precipitate, quickly abandoned engagement to Paul Wilcox, the
younger son of his upper-class, business-minded clan, has already set the novel’s
events in motion. Helen envisions “heroes and shipwrecks” in the opening movement;
the relative equanimity of
the Andante doesn’t much interest her, even as it engrosses Frieda, the Schlegels’
German cousin, and Frieda’s equally German companion.

But with the Scherzo, where the symphony’s opening motive returns in clipped, deliberate
translation—the “wonderful movement,” Helen calls it—her poetic impressions combine
Romantic fantasy and Victorian dread. “[T]he music started with a goblin walking quietly
over the universe, from end to end,” she imagines. “Others followed him. They were
not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen.” The goblins
see through the fundamental façade of Victorian decorum: “They merely observed in
passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world.” What’s
left is, as Helen describes it in her favorite melodramatic phrase, “panic and emptiness.”
The return of the Scherzo in the middle of the triumphant Finale only confirms Helen’s
enthrallingly bleak impressions. “The goblins really had been there. They might return—and
they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over—and waste to steam and
froth.”
⁶⁰

Like
Punch
’s Stupendous Amateur, Helen abandons the concert hall after the symphony:

Again, Helen’s impulsiveness fuels the plot: she has absent-mindedly walked off with
the umbrella of Leonard Bast, an anxious lower-class dreamer. (“He was not in the
abyss, but he
could see it.”
⁶²
) The meeting completes the novel’s tripartite, low-to-high hierarchy of class: Basts,
Schlegels, Wilcoxes, soon to be knotted in dramatic tangles. The Wilcox matriarch
tries to leave the family’s suburban cottage, Howards End, to Margaret Schlegel, but
the Wilcox family suppresses her will. The now-widowed Henry Wilcox marries Margaret,
and, through bad business advice, almost offhandedly ruins Leonard Bast. Bast has
an affair with Helen, resulting in her pregnancy, before being killed at the hands
of Charles, the Wilcox scion. No wonder Helen leaves the concert early; if the Fifth
indeed summed up all that could—and does—happen in Helen’s career, one could well
imagine that any further music would be a bit much.

Forster’s pairing of feminine sensation and Beethoven’s music drew on a long-standing
Victorian commonplace; British and American novels of the nineteenth century teem
with young women at the piano, playing their Beethoven. Surveying the throng of fictional
female pianists, Mary Burgan summed up the varying rationales for their cultivation
of the keyboard: “[P]iano expertise was a commodity in the marriage market, a form
of necessary self-discipline, or an innocent entertainment in an otherwise vacuous
existence.”
⁶³
As part of the essential finishing of a refined girl’s education, Beethoven’s music
became inseparable from Victorian femininity. The progress of one Carrie Crookenden
in Lucas Malet’s
The Wages of Sin
was typical, if wryly observed: “Carrie had lessons every year when the family went
up to London. She was working her way through Beethoven; each year she added, with
much conscientious labour a sonata or two to her
répertoire
. She plunged now into the last learned. Her playing was ponderously correct, grandly
dull. Meanwhile emotion picked up her trailing skirts and fled.”
⁶⁴
(Lucas Malet was the pen name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, daughter of Charles Kingsley,
who had worried so eloquently over the lack of religion among the smarter, younger,
Victorians.)

In John Lane Ford’s 1872 novel
Dower and Curse
, wealthy Victor Herbston embarks on a Pygmalion-like scheme to prove his theory of
“the immense power of education … to modify, even to neutralize, the influence of
blood,” adopting the poor orphan Annie Scott. Annie is ostracized by the rest of the
Herbstons, and takes comfort in familiar music:

Annie’s education has at least produced a quintessential Victorian woman.

In Mary Braddon’s 1882
Mount Royal
, another orphan provides another reminder of Beethoven’s status as an ornament of
the upper class. Christabel Tregonell has married into wealth, but when her pianism
is put to light-music service at a dinner party, her husband is disconcerted: “Mr.
Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being indeed, as unmusical a soul as God
ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit
at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand,
than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall
and burlesque.”
⁶⁶

But Beethoven could also gird fictional women against the dual disadvantages of class
and gender. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1860 novella
Lovel the Widower
, Bessy, governess to the title character’s children, harbors a secret—she was once
a music-hall dancer—that would horrify Lovel’s priggish, upper-class mother-in-law.
Nevertheless, threatened with exposure, Bessy, a veteran of Victorian femininity’s
battles with the piano, maintains her equilibrium:

Her past is revealed, but Lovel asks Bessy to marry him, foiling his mother-in-law,
resulting in a happy ending. Well, almost—Thackeray’s narrator was also among Bessy’s
suitors; having lost his immortal beloved, he rallies himself to an ersatz-Beethovenian
resignation. “I am accustomed to disappointment,” he sighs. “Other fellows get the
prizes which I try for. I am used to run second in the dreary race of love. Second?
Psha! Third, Fourth.”
⁶⁸
(Or even Fifth.)

Once in a while, a novelist would take on Beethoven himself. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard,
whose debut novel
Charles Auchester
—peopled with roman à clef versions of Victorian musical celebrities, including Mendelssohn—caught
the admiration of both Disraeli and, across the Atlantic, Emerson (she had “the courage
of genius,” Emerson wrote
⁶⁹
), went on to create a Beethoven bewitched by femininity in her 1858 novel
Rumour
. The book’s Beethoven stand-in, an imperious German composer and organist named Rodomant,
vies with Porphyro, a thinly disguised Louis-Napoléon (!), for the hand of one Princess
Adelaída (!!). Serving at the court of Adelaída’s father, Rodomant, at the novel’s
climax, defiantly violates the law against pulling all the stops on the organ in the
royal chapel.

In pursuit of symphonic perfection, a “fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at
once the symbol and the warning,” Rodomant finally unleashes the full organ, and,
as if in divine retribution, the familiar Beethoven is born: “I have lost my hearing,
and it is for ever.”
⁷¹
Adelaída is crushed when Rodomant leaves the kingdom; but, just as Porphyro is about
to propose marriage, the princess’s beloved carrier dove—entrusted to Rodomant—returns
(and drops dead, having “won its rest, and earned it”
⁷²
), with an entreaty from the composer, mistakenly committed to a Prussian asylum.
Adelaída abandons her throne to tend the irascible genius: “He adored her—but frequently
tormented her—she loved him all the more.”
⁷³

Ridiculous? No less than Sir George Grove himself speculated that the Fifth had a
somewhat related origin. Grove subscribed to Thayer’s (erroneous) hypothesis that
Beethoven had, for four years, been secretly engaged to Countess Theresa Brunsvik,
one of his piano students. Grove noted that the symphony was composed in the middle
of what he supposed to be Beethoven’s engagement, and related a story of how, some
years prior, Beethoven slapped the girl hard on the hand during a lesson and stormed
off in anger, and how Theresa, realizing he had left his hat and coat, ran out into
the street after him. “Are not the two characters exactly expressed” by the opening
two themes—the first four notes being Beethoven, the major-key second section being
Theresa? “It surely would be impossible to convey them in music more perfectly,” Grove
insisted, “the fierce imperious composer, who knew how to ‘put his foot down,’ if
the phrase may be allowed, and the womanly, yielding, devoted girl.”
⁷⁴

• • •

F
ORSTER
, a discerning music lover and fairly accomplished amateur pianist, could make smart
use of such Victorian tropes—for Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of
A Room with a View
, to play Beethoven on the piano might be a contemporary novelistic commonplace, but
for her to choose to play the tempestuous squall of the op. 111 piano sonata (in C
minor, not coincidentally) is an acute characterization on Forster’s part.
⁷⁵
Likewise, the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth within
Howards End
provides an opportunity for deft characterizations of the Schlegel siblings: Margaret’s
real-world practicality, Helen’s flights of fancy, Tibby’s happy pedantry, following
along with the score on his lap. The set-piece also insinuates the atmosphere of English-German
rivalry: when Elgar’s
Pomp and Circumstance
concludes the concert, Margaret’s blustery, über-English aunt happily taps her foot,
while the Schlegels’ German visitors discreetly slip out.
⁷⁶

And
Howards End
also mirrors the structure of the Fifth Symphony as a whole (an idea suggested by
more than one scholar).
⁷⁷
One can read, perhaps, the first “movement” as the bringing together of the Schlegels
and the Wilcoxes, and the introduction of Leonard Bast; the second, beginning with
the funeral of the first Mrs. Wilcox, unfolds, like Beethoven’s Andante, as a double
variation: the growing attraction of Henry Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel, the growing
obsession of Helen Schlegel with bettering Leonard Bast’s lot. For a Scherzo, the
goblins observe Helen’s antiheroic efforts to sabotage both Margaret’s engagement
and Leonard’s marriage. With a double consummation—Margaret
and Henry’s marriage, Helen and Leonard’s affair—the Finale commences; Leonard’s death,
like Beethoven’s revisit of his Scherzo subject, is an aggressive, desperate interlude
encased by a major-key but vaguely hollow triumph.

What would be the unifying motive, the equivalent of the first four notes? Forster
himself suggests one possibility at the novel’s outset. “One may as well begin with
Helen’s letters to her sister,” he begins, and, of course, Helen’s letters begin with
their place of origin: “H
OWARDS
E
ND
.”
⁷⁸
As the Victorian Era dovetailed into the Edwardian, prewar twentieth century, Forster
looked back and saw how much of England’s identity had become bound up in struggles
over real estate, both literal and intellectual: properties, colonies, classes, and
movements. Howards End becomes a blessed plot fought over along customary fronts:
art and business, reform and tradition, propriety and expression, male and female.
That it is the middle-class Schlegels who finally take ownership of the place is a
trenchant allegory—only a year after the novel’s publication, the first Parliament
Act was passed, limiting the power of the House of Lords and decisively accelerating
the decline of the British landed aristocracy.

Equally apt is the conclusion’s ambiguous tone. Forster’s ending has, in fact, long
bothered critics; after Leonard’s death, Charles’s imprisonment, Helen’s pregnancy,
and the near scuttling of Margaret and Henry’s marriage, Forster’s abrupt string of
reconciliations—Margaret reunited with Helen, Margaret preserving her marriage, Margaret
joining the families and perpetuating them, in the form of Helen and Leonard’s son,
whom Margaret and Henry will raise, and who will ultimately inherit Howards End—has
seemed, to many readers, unearned and false. Stephen Spender referred to “the curious
unreality” of the last scene: “[S]o many social skeletons rattle in the cupboards
of
Howards End
that the reader, surely, finds this conclusion almost irrelevant.”
⁷⁹
A. S. Byatt recorded her own disillusionment with the novel: “One used to think:
‘This is wonderful, here is a novelist
who says we must connect the businessman with the world of the arts,’ then you slowly
realise that E. M. Forster actually can’t do it.”
⁸⁰