The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (34 page)

Nevertheless, Ellison is also picking a fight with Beethoven, and Ellison’s Sunday
punch is the way he rewrites the recognized instance of the Fifth Symphony’s opening
as an expansive, intricate description, neutralizing the music’s temporality by lingering
over each moment. Early in the book, the protagonist muses on what he’s learned from
listening to Louis Armstrong, likening it to a boxing match between a skilled pro
and an amateur. Like the first movement of the Fifth, the prizefighter’s body “was
one violent flow of rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel
held up his arms in stunned surprise.” But the yokel, coming from outside the world
of tradition and conventional tactics, lands his blow. “The smart money hit the canvas.
The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense
of time.”
³⁸
Retelling his protagonist’s experience as a stretched-out version of the Fifth’s
opening, Ellison could get inside Beethoven’s sense of time.

• • •

IN THE STORY
“Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black,” by South African writer Nadine Gordimer, that
particular assertion of Beethoven’s heritage, heard by a white former antiapartheid
activist and slightly alienated academic, prompts a reflection on the unknowable distance
between him and his own ancestors, and how the needs of the present shape the perception
of the past. “Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white,” he notes.
“Now there’s a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It’s the same secret.”
³⁹

The idea of Beethoven having African ancestry inched into the mainstream along with
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Malcolm X often claimed that Beethoven
was black, as in a 1963
Playboy
interview: “Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black
man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the blackamoors that hired themselves
out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was of African
descent.”
⁴⁰

Haydn’s alleged blackness didn’t make much of a ripple, but Beethoven’s did, even
reaching the ears of Schroeder, the Beethoven-idolizing pianist of Charles Schulz’s
comic
Peanuts:
“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that all these years I’ve been playing ‘soul’
music?”
⁴¹

The classification of Beethoven as some fraction black—one-sixteenth, or one-sixty-fourth,
or even one-fourth, depending on where one reads—is often traced back to J. A. Rogers.
A journalist, historian, and quintessential “race man” of the first
half of the twentieth century, Rogers made the assertion that Beethoven was of African
ancestry in the 1940s, in a three-volume study titled
Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands
, citing numerous descriptions of Beethoven’s swarthy complexion and curly hair, hinting
at Moorish ancestors, going so far as to assert that “there is not a single shred
of evidence to support the belief that he was a white man.”
⁴²

That sort of burden-of-proof fallacy might give rational pause, though perhaps it
helped make Rogers the go-to source on Beethoven’s blackness: for those inclined to
believe, a published reference; for those inclined to doubt, an argument that never
ventured beyond the circumstantial. And Rogers’s contention was not new. In the first
decade of the twentieth century, the mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
had asserted a black Beethoven, sardonically noting that “if the greatest of all musicians
were alive today, he would find it somewhat difficult, if not absolutely impossible,
to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities.”
⁴³

There is no positive evidence to support African ancestry for Beethoven. There is
always the possibility that Beethoven’s Flemish ancestors deliberately obscured the
documentation; perhaps the Eighty Years’ War, which dominated the Dutch Renaissance,
occasioned a dalliance between one of Beethoven’s forebears and an occupying Spanish
sailor, one with Moorish or African blood, a connection whitewashed for the sake of
propriety. But, given its fundamental reliance on speculation, the idea of a black
Beethoven ends up as something like the Fifth Symphony: a convenient screen onto which
anyone can project their own concerns.

Those concerns came into conflict in 1988, at Stanford University. During a freshman
orientation at Ujamaa House, an African and African-American-focused dormitory, two
white students got into an argument with a black student over Beethoven’s alleged
blackness; later, the white students drunkenly
defaced a Stanford Symphony poster featuring a picture of Beethoven, coloring it brown,
giving it frizzy hair, big lips, red eyes—Beethoven in blackface—and then hung it
up outside the black student’s room. Tensions rose and feelings frayed amid charges
of overt and covert racism.

The Ujamaa Incident, as it came to be known, engendered passionate if somewhat predictable
reaction from all shades of the political spectrum—from grim denunciations of political
correctness run amok to reinterpretations of legal case theory that attempted to square
regulation of hate speech with the First Amendment. Nobody, though, mentioned the
curiosity of finding Beethoven, a long-dead product of long-dead German city-states,
at the center of a late twentieth-century American clash over race and prejudice.
⁴⁴

On the one hand, the incident was a warped tribute to Beethoven’s iconic status; how
many other figures would inspire such a heated reaction? (One commentator asked if
the reaction would have been the same if one insisted that Beethoven was Danish; the
better comparison would be a claim of blackness for someone as obscure as, say, Jean-François
Le Sueur.)
⁴⁵
But the incident also hinted at how the direction of Beethoven’s fame had shifted
from the music to the man. It was the figure of Beethoven, not the music, that was
still potent enough to occasion both the black student’s debate trump card and the
white students’ ill-considered response.

Critics of the hand-wringing the incident produced suggested that black students overreacted;
but one might also wonder what it was about the possibility of Beethoven being black
that so unnerved the white students. How much difference would an African ancestor
make in the way we hear the Fifth Symphony? The notes would still be the same. Schroeder
wondered if he had been playing soul music; but the whole idea that music has soul
only gained traction with Beethoven in the first place. (Hoffmann, writing of the
Fifth’s innovatory nature:
“Beethoven bears musical romanticism deep within his soul and expresses it in his
works with great genius and presence of mind.”
⁴⁶
) Ralph Ellison once cautioned blacks that they didn’t have a monopoly on soul: “Anyone
who listens to a Beethoven quartet or symphony and can’t hear
soul
is in trouble.”
⁴⁷
In light of the Ujamaa Incident, Ellison’s warning might be extended to all races.

The Stanford Symphony poster the students defaced was, in fact, a recruitment poster—an
ironic footnote to the whole saga of Beethoven’s blackness, since at the heart of
the matter was the question of who got to claim Beethoven. Even as Malcolm X extolled
Beethoven’s blackness, other radical black activists saw Beethoven as recruiting for
the other side, seeing the music-appreciation idolization of Beethoven as a kind of
propaganda designed to assimilate blacks into white modes of living. The Howard University
sociologist Nathan Hare regarded Beethoven as an affectation of “black Anglo-Saxons,”
as he put it; Hare told of a party where “the guests sighed with boredom amid strains
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” until Hare surreptitiously put on a record by Little
Richard.
⁴⁸
The poet and playwright LeRoi Jones was, not surprisingly, even more harsh; in his
1966 black-power “Morality Play”
Madheart
, an archetypically posited Black Man speaks of “the nightmare in all of our hearts.
Our mothers and sisters groveling to white women, wanting to be white women.” Later,
one of those mothers prays to the idols of the (white-controlled) media: “Tony Bennett,
help us please. Beethoven, Peter Gunn … deliver us in our sterling silver headdress … oh
please deliver us.”

“This is enough of this stuff,” the Black Man scolds.
⁴⁹

Dominique-René de Lerma, one of the great scholars of black music, was scholastically
compelled to dismantle the Beethoven-is-black theory as unsupported conjecture, but
found one equally compelling benefit in engaging with Rogers and the idea of Beethoven’s
African-tinged features. “No matter how
circumstantial or speculative Rogers’s arguments might be,” he wrote, they “are most
provocative for those who still think of a black/white dichotomy.”
⁵⁰
(Go back far enough, and we are all African.)

The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., had a musical taste that ran more to opera, and was more likely to cite
spirituals than symphonic composers, though King would occasionally mention Beethoven
as part of a sequence directed at seemingly more humble toilers: “If it falls your
lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures; sweep streets
like Michelangelo carved marble; sweep streets like Beethoven composed music.”
⁵¹
But Beethoven made it into King’s movement, wittingly or not; it was at the 1963
March on Washington—a century after the Boston abolitionists had celebrated Emancipation
with the Fifth—that King honed to perfection a piece of rhetoric he had been trying
out for some weeks, a peroration built on the power of a short, repeated theme, perhaps
the most famous
quartus paeon
in oratorical history:

As Ellison said, the motive does get beneath the skin.

A
1987
PROMOTIONAL AD
for ABC network programming found Beethoven hammering out the Fifth at a piano: “If
Beethoven were alive today, could he make it in the music business?” Beethoven dons
sunglasses, electric guitars wail. “Find out what it takes … this week on
Good Morning America
!”

The first attempt at cross-fertilizing Beethoven’s Fifth and rock-and-roll didn’t
make that much of a splash. “Rock and Roll Symphony,” in two movements (the A and
B sides of a 45), was released in 1961, credited to “The Back Beat Philharmonic.”
The Fifth’s opening is duly invoked before the piece slides into a string-laden, light-rock
instrumental—only to come back around to quote a version of the Fifth’s ending. The
Philharmonic was a one-off, the product of accordionist Frank Metis and guitarist
Randy Starr (the pseudonym of a Manhattan dentist, Dr. Warren Nadel). As The Islanders,
Metis and Starr had previously scored a hit with their instrumental “The Enchanted
Sea.”
Billboard
highlighted the record as one of its “Spotlight Winners of the Week”—“Both sides
come across well and should make strong instrumentals”—but “Rock and Roll Symphony”
failed to chart.
⁵²

In Japan, the Fifth Symphony’s pop infiltration received an assist from California
surf culture, namely, the instrumental rock group The Ventures, whose wildly successful
1965 Japanese tour inspired the genre known as
eleki
(after the electric guitars that defined the sound). One of the leading
eleki
artists, guitarist Takeshi Terauchi, filled his tenth LP,
Let’s Go Classics
, with surf-guitar versions of classical themes. The opening track reworked the opening
of Beethoven’s Fifth; “Let’s Go
Unmei
” (“Let’s Go Fate”) won the 1967 Japan Record Prize for Best Arrangement.

The trend reached Europe the following year. In 1968, the Dutch jazz-rock group Ekseption
won an award at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival, the prize being a record contract with
the conglomerate Philips; Ekseption recorded two songs by the early jazz trumpeter
Bix Beiderbecke, which the record company pronounced too old-fashioned and refused
to release. Having been impressed by an English group, The Nice, whose organ player,
Keith Emerson, liked to combine classical and rock (a combination he would epitomize
with his next group, Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Ekseption’s keyboard player, Rick van
der Linden, was inspired to work up his own rock-flavored, organ-and-bass-heavy arrangement
of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. For fun, he also worked in the theme
from the
Moonlight
Sonata,
as well as a 5/4 version of the opening of Beethoven’s op. 2, no. 1 Piano Sonata.
The band regarded the arrangement as little more than a novelty, but went along and
recorded it.
⁵³
“The Fifth”—backed by an arrangement of Khachaturian’s
Sabre Dance
—spent seven weeks in the top ten in Holland, and was a hit throughout Europe.

The British group Electric Light Orchestra, another rock outfit that flaunted classical
overtones, redeemed an obvious joke by the skill with which they worked the Fifth
into their 1973 cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” using the entire opening
paragraph as a lead-in, and then contrapuntally threading the four-note motive throughout
the arrangement. Yngwie Malmsteen, the Swedish heavy metal guitar hero, signaled the
ambition behind his neoclassical style by playing a highly electrified solo arrangement
of the Fifth on his 1980s concert tours.

It was, however, the advent of disco that would allow Beethoven to leave his most
indelible mark on the pop music landscape. Disco started off as danceable defiance
for a confluence of demographics—black, Latino, gay—shut out from the overwhelmingly
white-straight-male world of mainstream rock. Originally limited to underground parties
and clubs, disco began to enter the mainstream (and the mainstream pop charts) around
1973. In retrospect, it seems amazing that it took even as long as it did for the
disco style—lush, string-laden, with a basic, readily adaptable four-on-the-floor
beat—to be applied to the classical repertoire. But it was only in 1976 that a matchmaker
emerged in jingle writer and former
Tonight Show
arranger Walter Murphy.