The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (31 page)

Beethoven was at the center of Furtwängler’s musical universe. His wartime conception
of the Fifth, with the Berlin Philharmonic, was recorded in concert in June of 1943;
Furtwängler never conducted a Fifth more fiercely grand. The repetitions of the motive
almost step on one another’s heels, goading the music forward; the fermatas sear.
The tempo is on the slow side—the first movement hovers around 88 beats per minute—but
delivered with energetic weight, Furtwängler enunciating every phrase, the orchestra
annealing every note.
The flexibility is astounding; after the recapitulation’s oboe solo, the music takes
off, 100 half notes per minute, like a dark flock suddenly turning with the wind.
Was it a rebuke to the Nazis, underlining and emphasizing Beethoven’s powerful freedom,
a forceful reminder of the true Germany Furtwängler was trying to preserve? The Nazis
probably just heard it as another expression of their martial ethos.

Despite their very different temperaments, Arturo Toscanini had nonetheless recommended
Furtwängler to replace him as director of the New York Philharmonic in 1936. (It was
probably at least partially a ploy to pry him loose from the Nazis; Furtwängler declined,
afraid that if he took work outside of Germany, he would not be allowed back in.)
⁸²
Ardently anti-Fascist, Toscanini left Italy in 1938 after a skirmish with the Italian
government over his passport.

In 1943, conducting the NBC Orchestra—created for him—Toscanini marked the fall of
Mussolini with a concert called “Victory Symphony, Act I”; on it he programmed the
first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, promising the rest when Germany was defeated.
Good as his word, Toscanini conducted a complete Fifth on VE-Day, May 8, 1945. It
was his fastest performance: the opening movement actually exceeded Beethoven’s 108-beats-per-minute
marking, the orchestra hurtling across the surface of the score. It was as if Toscanini
was annexing Beethoven back from the Nazis with a blitzkrieg of his own.

A MORE EQUIVOCAL
settling of accounts with the Fifth would come at the hands of the iconoclastic composer
Arnold Schoenberg. Back in 1914, Schoenberg had published a short article called “Why
New Melodies Are Difficult to Understand.” It was a defense of the early atonal rhetoric
that Schoenberg was busy developing—but also an implicit rebuke to the kind of motivic
construction Beethoven’s Fifth exemplified. “The more primitive,
the more artless the melody is, then the more modest the variation and the more numerous
the repetitions,” Schoenberg wrote. “The lower the demands which may be put upon the
capacity for comprehension, the quicker the tempo of repetitions, then the more inferior
must be its inner organization.” The newer, more concentrated melodies would require
a new kind of listener. “Such ‘brevity’ is disagreeable to him who wants to enjoy
his comfort,” he allowed. “But why should the privileges of those who think too slowly
be preserved?”
⁸³

Heinrich Schenker, despite having once taken no less than Wagner to task for succumbing
to the comfort of repetition, took what (for Schenker) might rank as mild offense
at Schoenberg’s article, calling Schoenberg “this Don Quixote of compositionally undeveloped
chords,” comparing him to Paul Bekker—poor company indeed, in Schenker’s eyes. “Never
once in his unspeakably miserable incompetence does he recognize the repetitions in
the works of our masters; there he flails at all those who cannot or will not sink
as rapidly with him into the depths of ignorance,” Schenker wrote.
⁸⁴

In 1939, Schoenberg stumbled across a copy of Schenker’s riposte, and jotted down
his thoughts. He was no longer so down on short, digestible motives as he once was.
And, with Schenker dead, Schoenberg could afford a bit of magnanimity—but only a bit.
“Enough,” he sighed. “He is defenseless today. Indeed, I am, too, for who still reads
this sort of thing?”
⁸⁵

By that time, Schoenberg was living in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles,
California; he had wasted no time in emigrating once Hitler took power, arriving in
America in the fall of 1933. The twelve-tone music that Schoenberg pioneered had not
exactly taken America by storm—“a new chaos, without form, and void,” commented the
New York Sun
⁸⁶
—but the presence of Schoenberg himself was an ideological victory. “Germany’s loss
will be this country’s musical gain,” commented George Gershwin.
⁸⁷

When, in 1942, Schoenberg received a commission from the League of Composers for a
chamber work, he decided that the times justified what was, for him, a novelty: an
explicitly political piece. At first, he considered writing something about bees.
“I could not see,” Schoenberg considered, “why a whole generation of bees or of Germans
should live only in order to produce another generation of the same sort, which on
their part should also fulfill only the same task: to keep the race alive.” Schoenberg
rather thought that bees and Germans were in the thrall of a more ominous fate, surmising
that bees “instinctively believed their destiny was to be successors of mankind, when
this had destroyed itself”; only “a goal of world domination” could sufficiently explain
why Germans had willingly let their society be transformed into a hive of discrimination,
subordination, and killing.
⁸⁸

For a text, Schoenberg first considered the Dutch writer Maurice Maeterlinck, a playwright
whose conception of Fate was so capitalized that he once said he preferred marionettes
to actors. In his 1901 book-length essay,
The Life of the Bee
, Maeterlinck, an amateur beekeeper, arranged his observations of his hobby into elegant
philosophical allegory. At times, the dramatization rises to a sort of expressionist
pitch that Schoenberg might have found appropriate:

But ultimately, Maeterlinck’s description of apian society, however apposite, just
wasn’t edgy enough: “Maeterlinck’s poetic philosophy gilds everything.”
⁹⁰
Instead, Schoenberg had his UCLA student Leonard Stein drive him to Campbell’s Bookstore
in Westwood Village, where he bought a volume of poetry by Lord Byron.
⁹¹
In it was Byron’s fevered 1814 “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.”

At the outset, Byron had been as enamored of Napoléon as Beethoven had been, but Byron’s
crush proved more ironclad. Where Beethoven judged Napoléon in absolute terms—taking
an emperor’s crown was an irrevocable break with democratic ideals—Byron’s point of
view was more pragmatic: crown or no crown, as long as Napoléon continued to frighten
and disturb the rest of conservative Europe, he retained his heroic stature. What
finally disillusioned Byron was not Napoléon’s imperial ambitions or his cult of personality,
but his abdication and exile to Elba; better that he had died, a martyr in battle,
than to have capitulated.

The aristocratic Byron cultivated a revolutionary enthusiasm that bore more than a
whiff of radical chic, but he held the pose impressively well, rarely missing a chance
to rhetorically and poetically castigate what he saw as reactionary power (the Tory
government’s foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, was a favorite target), and inventing
that enduring personification of brooding antiauthoritarianism, the Byronic hero.
Byron’s own persona was both model for and modeled after his template; given how much
he identified with Napoléon as well, for the former First Consul to quit the field
of battle anticlimactically, to reveal
his “fronts of brass, and feet of clay,” as Byron put it, felt like unusually personal
treachery.

At the climax of the “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” Byron imagines Napoléon stewing
in exile:

Byron compares the fate to that of Prometheus, that favorite figure of the Romantics,
what with his Beethoven-like combination of daring, divine access, and subsequent
suffering:

But such approbation as afforded Prometheus (and Beethoven) is denied the compromised
Napoléon:

To drive home the extent of the betrayal, the reference—“O, ’tis the spite of hell,
the fiend’s arch-mock, / To lip a wanton in a secure couch, / And to suppose her chaste!”—is
from Shakespeare: Iago in
Othello
.

Such was the poem’s original ending. But as the editions piled up—the anonymously
published “Ode” was a literary hit—Byron’s publisher requested a few more stanzas
to fill out the pages. Byron obliged him with a Gallant to Napoléon’s Goofus:

The poem’s reference to both Schoenberg’s original home (“And she, proud Austria’s
mournful flower, / Thy still imperial bride; / How bears her breast the torturing
hour?”) and his adopted one completed the allegorical circle.
⁹²
But if the poetic content of Schoenberg’s
Ode
was a rather obvious appropriation of Byron into the fight against perverted German
nationalism, the musical content would make subtle but pointed use of another mascot:
Beethoven.
⁹³

Schoenberg set Byron’s poem not in melody but in
Sprechstimme
, a rhythmically specified and melodically contoured declamation, somewhere between
singing and oratory. The speaker was accompanied by string quartet and piano. Schoenberg
thoroughly plotted the piece: he typed out the poem and then annotated it in extensive
precompositional detail, mapping out motives, planning musical connections between
distant stanzas.
⁹⁴
The music is dense, chromatic, mercurial.

But then, about a quarter of the way in, as the speaker ruefully recalls Napoléon’s
former martial glory—“The triumph, and the vanity, / The rapture of the strife— /
The earthquake voice of Victory”—the violins and piano offer an eminent bit of commentary:
the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. The speaker echoes it:

Schoenberg makes the connection between the Napoleonic era and World War II in a single
stroke.

Schoenberg attached great import to the quotation, which provocatively yoked so much
history into one charged gesture. He showed Leonard Stein “with barely concealed pride
and
excitement” the “serendipitous discovery.” “Now it was rather unusual for Schoenberg
to show anybody his works in progress,” Stein remembered, “so he must have been struck
by the remarkable inspiration which produced in combination the ‘Marseillaise’ and
the motive of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony.”
⁹⁵
The revolutionary echoes could be remastered in service of another century’s struggle.
But Beethoven’s appearance in Schoenberg’s
Ode
is by no means a moment of unclouded triumph. The entire piece, in fact, is arguing
with history, undermining the privileges of a civilization that, in Schoenberg’s opinion,
thought too slowly to be preserved. The friction can be heard in the way Schoenberg
applies the technique he was most identified with: the twelve-tone method.

The twelve-tone method was originally conceived, in part, as a systematic way to remove
any hint of nineteenth-century tonality from a work’s musical vocabulary. By basing
a piece around a row—the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, rearranged and permutated,
but threaded through a piece consistently, such that no one pitch took precedence
over the other eleven—a composer could escape the fetters of a tonal center, a tonal
point of departure and return (C, for instance, in the case of Beethoven’s Fifth).
Triads—the familiar harmonies of tonal music—were to be avoided, lest they set up
aural expectations of resolution and arrival. The idea was to make sounds, structures,
and rhetoric more fluid, their expressivity more instantaneous and powerful.

The application of twelve-tone principles in the
Ode
, though, is unusually loose. The row is hardly consistent: Schoenberg partitions
the row into three-, four-, six-note sections, which he then freely reorders. Once
Schoenberg preached avoiding octaves, on the ground that they would give too much
weight to the pitches being doubled; but the
Ode
doubles pitches at the octave all over the place. And Schoenberg deliberately flies
in the face of the music’s nominal atonality by constantly engineering his row so
it throws off old-fashioned triads. The
Ode
is a twelve-tone piece that is bending over backward to sound tonal. The piece ends
on a grand, fat E-flat major chord.