The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (3 page)

If the Fifth Symphony is about Beethoven’s deafness, then what could we read into
its opening rest? A brief jolt of the experience of deafness, perhaps—a deployment
of great energy that remains bereft of sound. Or maybe a remembrance and a reminder:
a moment of silence for Beethoven’s hearing.

THE PITCHES
of the opening phrase produce their own ambiguity, albeit one that, given the symphony’s
familiarity, is, again, well-nigh impossible to recapture. The Fifth is in C minor,
a key
forever associated with Beethoven in his most heaven-storming moods. But, strictly
speaking, C minor is not actually
established
until the seventh measure of the first movement. Beethoven exploits a quirk of music
theory concerning the triad, one of the basic building blocks of Western music: a
stack of three notes, the first, third, and fifth notes of the major or minor scale.
If you take away one of the notes of a triad, it starts to, in effect, gesture in
two directions at once. So the first two pitches of the Fifth Symphony, G and E-flat,
might be two-thirds of a C-minor triad, or they might be two-thirds of an E-flat major
triad. The
second
pair of pitches, F and D, could be part of a dominant-seventh chord built on G (the
most basic harmonic antecedent of C minor), or part of one built on B-flat (the most
basic harmonic antecedent of E-flat major). From a music theory standpoint, the opening
passage is playing fast and loose with the symphony’s key: until the cellos and bassoons
anchor the motive with a sustained middle C in the seventh bar, there’s no way to
tell whether the piece is in a major or minor key.

Modern ears might reflexively assign more dramatic weight to minor keys than to major,
but that wasn’t necessarily the case in Beethoven’s time. Italian theorist Francesco
Galeazzi, writing in 1796, called E-flat major “a heroic key, extremely majestic,
grave and serious.”
²⁸
Not so for C minor. In 1713, German composer and theorist Johann Mattheson wrote,
“An extremely lovely, but also sad key. Because the first quality is too prevalent
and one can easily get tired of too much sweetness, no harm is done when the attempt
is made to enliven the key a little by a somewhat cheerful or regular tempo.”
²⁹

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1749
Encyclopédie
opined that C minor “brings tenderness into the soul.” Writing in 1783, Johann J.
H. Ribock, an accomplished amateur flutist, compared the key “to the colour of a pale
rose and also to the aroma of the same.”
³⁰
Late-eighteenth-century composers created a somewhat more Gothic atmosphere with
C minor—as in Mozart’s K. 491 Piano
Concerto, a brooding piece that Beethoven particularly admired. (“We shall never be
able to do anything like that!” he once told a friend.
³¹
) But for heroism, Mozart opted for E-flat major—in the opening scene of
Die Zauberflöte
, Prince Tamino finds himself set upon by a slithery C-minor monster that the Three
Ladies vanquish with a timely modulation to E-flat: “Triumph!”

In the concert hall, though, the sheer gravity of the Fifth’s opening makes the vague
tonality moot. The major-minor uncertainty in the opening of the Fifth Symphony engendered
next to no contemporary comment—only E. T. A. Hoffmann mentioned it, in his seminal
1810 review of the symphony (“the listener surmises E-flat major,” he surmised
³²
), and he was working from the score, not from a performance. And, harmonically rooted
or not, the
sound
of the Fifth’s opening was actually somewhat traditional for C minor: many C-minor
works of Haydn and Mozart (K. 491 included) also start out with passages in bare unisons
or octaves.
³³
Beethoven adopted that stylistic tic; his largest C-minor essay prior to the Fifth,
the Third Piano Concerto, opens in ominous octaves (and with a theme strongly foreshadowing
the Fifth Symphony’s Finale), as does his Violin Sonata op. 30, no. 2.

But those openings were all quiet in their foreboding. The Fifth imbues the C-minor
dialect with rhetorical force. Beethoven’s orchestration of the opening is optimized
toward weight: all the strings, in their lowest, heaviest registers, plus clarinets,
which round and burnish the strings’ tone. In the original manuscript, Beethoven initially
had the flutes doubling the opening line an octave higher, then thought better of
it and scratched those notes out. No double reeds—oboes, bassoons—and no brass: any
hint of instrumental brightness has been banished. In place of an all-for-one
tutti
opening, Beethoven opts for only those instruments that can combine power with overcast
gloom. The feminine overtones of contemporary C-minor impressions are absent—Leonard
Bernstein heard the orchestration as gender-specific: “Beethoven clearly wanted these
notes to be
a strong, masculine utterance, and he therefore orchestrated entirely with instruments
that play normally in the register of the male singing voice.”
³⁴
At the very least, Beethoven deliberately avoided Mattheson’s advice to leaven C
minor with a bit of cheer.

Beethoven’s appropriation of E-flat major’s dark majesty for his favored C minor was
a success, to judge by a subsequent spate of revised key impressions. While some writings,
still reliant on older traditions, continued the theme of gentle lament, an 1827 musical
dictionary by J. A. Schrader assigned to C minor “rigid, numb grief,” “fear and horror,”
“bitter lamenting,” and “despair.” In 1830, the German organist G. F. Ebhardt heard
in C minor “extreme misery, sometimes raving nonsense.”
³⁵
Part of the shift no doubt came from the Romantic era’s louder dramatic volume; descriptions
of other keys also move toward more emotional extremes. But Beethoven’s own stormy
reputation drove much of that Romantic amplification—and his stormiest key was C minor.
The Fifth Symphony endured as a ready-made example of the new association.

NO OTHER COMPOSER
’
S
working habits have been analyzed as closely as Beethoven’s. It helped that Beethoven’s
sketches survived to be analyzed. Most of Mozart’s sketches, by comparison, were destroyed
after he died, which contributed to the popular impression that he worked out everything
in his head before putting pen to paper.
³⁶
Whereas Beethoven’s sketchbooks, in all their messy, indecipherable glory, seemed
tailor-made for his Romantic admirers, a chance to witness the familiar themes twist
and struggle their way to the surface like Bloch’s Beethovenian trees. Unlike many
of Beethoven’s themes, however, the opening of the Fifth seems to have sprung nearly
fully grown from his head.

The earliest sketches for the Fifth are found in a manuscript referred to as Landsberg
6, or, sometimes, the
Eroica
sketchbook—the bulk of the leaves are filled with workings-out
of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Much of the rest is taken up with early work on Beethoven’s
only completed opera,
Leonore
(later retitled
Fidelio
).
³⁷
Located at the creative locus of three of Beethoven’s most celebrated works—the Third
and Fifth Symphonies and
Fidelio
—Landsberg 6 might be the most famous of Beethoven’s sketchbooks.

Amazingly, it was lost for much of the twentieth century, having vanished from the
Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin at the end of World War II. The library had
acquired it in 1861 from the estate of Ludwig Landsberg, a Prussian-born violinist
and singer who ended up living in Rome. Landsberg amassed manuscripts and early editions
of Renaissance and Baroque music during his more than twenty years in Italy; on trips
between Rome and his native Breslau, he was apparently in the habit of stopping to
buy manuscripts from Viennese dealers as well. When a catalog of his collection was
published after his death (in preparation for its sale), Landsberg’s Beethoven trove—including
eight of the sketchbooks—was listed first, the most obvious treasures.
³⁸
Breslau, now Wroclaw, became part of Poland after World War II. Landsberg, who died
and was buried in Rome, didn’t make it back home, but the highlight of his collection
did: after disappearing from Berlin, Landsberg 6 eventually turned up in the Biblioteka
Jagiellonska in Kraków—a souvenir of Beethoven’s heroic period appropriately transformed
into a trophy of war.

Sometime in early 1804, at the bottom of page 157, tucked into three extra staves
under some scribbled ideas for
Fidelio
, Beethoven sketched out the opening section of the Fifth, in unusually well-developed
embryo:

The transcription—a bit of heroism in itself, given the illegibility of Beethoven’s
handwriting—is by Gustav Nottebohm, a German academic who did the first serious work
on Beethoven’s sketchbooks.
³⁹
(Johannes Brahms, a longtime friend, once pranked Nottebohm by fashioning a fake
Beethoven sketch and then bribing Nottebohm’s favorite grocer to wrap up the scholar’s
cheese and sausage in it.
⁴⁰
) The structure and contour of the opening sentences are already there; the only difference
is in those places where Beethoven softens the three-note repetition of the opening
motive by walking the melody down the scale. Beethoven, perhaps, was already considering
how the motive would make connections between the symphony’s movements; on pages just
prior to this, he was jotting down ideas for the Fifth’s third movement, in which
the motive returns in march form, and the three-note figure does break into a step-by-step
melodic descent. In the context of the opening, though, such filling-in was far too
fussy, the musical equivalent of making a bold claim and then immediately qualifying
it with a lot of hemming and hawing. By the time the Fifth was completed, Beethoven
had decided that the repeated notes made a better effect, that the motive’s rhythmic
profile alone would be strong enough to tie the various movements together.

The rhythmic foot the Fifth lays out—short-short-short-long—was known in Classical
antiquity as a
quartus paeon
. (Any combination of one long syllable with three short ones is a paeon; putting
the long syllable at the end makes it the fourth, or
quartus
, paeon.) Beethoven, who revered the Greek poet Homer, would have read of the paeon’s
namesake, the Olympian physician, in Book V of the
Iliad:
“Thereon Hades went to the house of Jove on great Olympus, angry and full of pain;
and the arrow in his brawny shoulder caused him great anguish till Pæëon healed him
by spreading soothing herbs on the wound, for Hades was not of mortal mould.”
⁴¹

As the divine power of healing gravitated to Apollo, so did
the name, and paeans became hymns to Apollo. Later, the paean also acquired a martial
connotation, a name applied to songs sung by armies heading into battle or, afterward,
giving thanks for victory. (Conveniently, paeans often used the paeon for a metrical
basis.)

Beethoven read Homer only in translation, and any connection he might have made between
the Homeric healer and the rhythmic pattern he liberally applied to his most famous
symphony is pure conjecture. But if the
quartus paeon
was a conscious choice on Beethoven’s part, he couldn’t have picked a more appropriate
confirmation of the symphony’s popular perception: a battle cry and a plea for healing,
all wrapped up in a concise motive.

The ancient Greeks would have appreciated the
quartus paeon
as a source of the Fifth Symphony’s oft-cited rhetorical power. Aristotle didn’t
discuss the paeon in his
Poetics
, but included it in the toolbox of his
Rhetoric
. After dismissing a host of poetic feet as unsuitable to oratory (“prose must be
rhythmical, but not metrical, otherwise it will be a poem”), Aristotle allows for
an exception:

In other words, the slightly off-balance three-versus-two of the paeon (three short
syllables plus a double-length long syllable) relieves the singsong nature of other
poetic rhythms. Thus “the paeon should be retained, because it is the only one of
the rhythms mentioned which is not adapted to a metrical system,
so that it is most likely to be undetected.”
⁴²
The paeon gives prose the dramatic force of epic poetry without its sounding like
poetry. The vague sense of rhetorical
meaning
that contemporary listeners found so novel about the Fifth may have been the by-product
of an ancient Greek toastmasters’ trick. (The Roman rhetorician Quintilian was, in
fact, downright snobbish about the paeon: “Why it pleased [other] writers so much
I do not understand; but possibly most of those who liked it were men that fixed their
attention rather on the language of common life than on that of oratory.”
⁴³
)