The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (43 page)

 76
. See the “Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts,” in Alistair M. Duckworth,
Howards End: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 16.

 77
. See, for instance, Anna Foata, “The Knocking at the Door. A Fantasy on Fate, Forster,
and Beethoven’s Fifth,”
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens
44 (1996): 135–45, or Andrea K. Weatherhead,
“Howards End:
Beethoven’s
Fifth,” Twentieth Century Literature
31, no. 2/3 (E. M. Forster Issue) (Summer-Autumn 1985): 247–264. Weatherhead’s use
of musical terminology is highly dubious; a tangle such as “Beethoven’s first themes
in A flat and C major are ‘relative minors.’ They have completely different scales
but may be combined to produce a series of chords in minor thirds” (p. 256)—is, at
the very least, misunderstanding both relative key relationships and mistaking a major
third for a minor. But her overall thesis, that the novel roughly tracks the symphony’s
structure, is plausible. (My own mapping of symphony to novel varies from both Foata
and Weatherhead; for instance, Foata matches the Andante to the relationship between
Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox, and Weatherhead proposes Helen’s repeated cries
of “panic and emptiness” as a unifying motive.)

 78
. Forster,
Howards End
, p. 1.

 79
. Stephen Spender,
The Creative Element
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 90.

 80
. Quoted in “Bah, humbug! The classics we secretly loathe,”
The Times
(London), December 23, 2009,
http://​entertainment.​timesonline.​co.​uk/​tol/​arts_​and_​entertainment/​specials/​article6964184.​ece
.

 81
. One should not even trust the seeming voice of the author. It is one of Forster’s
more elegant confidence games that one should end up assuming that the intrusive,
judgmental, and frequently deflating narrator of
Howards End
is both omniscient and a stand-in for Forster himself. Like the tantalizingly palpable
but elusive composer-stand-in protagonist of the Fifth Symphony, Forster’s narrator
only seems straightforward. Francis Gillen has suggested that the narrator is a kind
of devil’s-advocate Socratic teacher (“I’ll fool you sometimes, suggest, as a good
teacher, a false or oversimplified conclusion, then show you your mistakes in accepting
it,” as he characterizes him); Paul Armstrong makes him a deliberately subversive
figure, asserting conventional authority in order to reveal conventional authority’s
fragile arbitrariness (a notion often linked to Forster’s homosexuality); Elizabeth
Langland questions whether the narrator is even a he at all. See Gillen,
“Howards End
and the Neglected Narrator,”
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction
3, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 140; Armstrong,
Play and the
Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form
(Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 111–26; Langland, “Gesturing Toward an Open
Space: Gender, Form and Language in E. M. Forster’s
Howards End,”
in Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds.,
Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender
(
ed
)
Criticism
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 252–67.

 82
. E. M. Forster, “The C Minor of That Life,” in
Two Cheers for Democracy
, p. 125.

 83
. Forster,
Howards End
, p. 20.

 84
. Ibid., pp. 213–14.

 85
. Ibid., p. 244.

 86
. Shaw, “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall,” in
Complete Plays with Prefaces
, vol. 1, p. 471.

 87
. Ibid., p. 453.

 88
. George Bernard Shaw,
Heartbreak House
, in
Complete Plays with Prefaces
, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1962), p. 595.

 89
.
Hansard Parliamentary Debates
, Commons, 5th series, vol. 73 (1915), column 2326 (debate of July 28, 1915).

 90
. Edward Goldbeck, “Beethoven,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, Jan. 2, 1916, p. 5. Goldbeck’s wife was the actress, singer, and later theatrical
producer Lina Abarbanell; his son-in-law was the composer Marc Blitzstein.

 91
. “Col. William Jay Expires Suddenly,”
The New York Times
, March 29, 1915, p. 9.

 92
. “No Power to Bar Papers: Court Enjoins Mount Vernon from Banning Hearst by Law,”
The New York Times
, June 5, 1918, p. 22. This article is a brief roundup of anti-German sentiment. Other
items: The city of Mount Vernon, New York, tried to ban German-language newspapers;
a school commissioner in Summit, New Jersey, unsuccessfully sought to end German-language
instruction in the town. Another resolution by the same commissioner, “to have all
books entitled ‘Im Vaterland’ collected and reserved until July 4, when they will
be turned over to the Fourth of July celebration committee, with instructions to use
them for a bonfire and to use other German propaganda papers to kindle the blaze,
took the same course.”

 93
. “German Opera Cut from List at Metropolitan,”
New York Tribune
, Nov. 2, 1917, p.1.

 94
. Barbara L. Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Americanism and Music in Boston during
World War I,”
American Music
4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 172.

 95
. “The Boston Orchestra Under Dr. Karl Muck,”
The New York Times
, Oct. 13, 1906, p. 9.

 96
. Frederic Dean, “Some Conductors and Their Batons,”
The Bookman
46, no. 5 (Jan. 1918): 589–90.

 97
. Janet Baker-Carr,
Evening at Symphony: A Portrait of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), p. 56.

 98
. William E. Walter, “Culled From the Mail Pouch: Miss Farrar Remembers Karl Muck’s
War Problem,”
The New York Times
, March 10, 1940, p. 159.

 99
. Edmund A. Bowles, “Karl Muck and His Compatriots: German Conductors in America During
World War I (And How They Coped),”
American Music
25, no. 4 (Winter, 2007): n. 41: 433–34.

100
. The nucleus of the ensemble was a naval band formerly posted to the German protectorate
of Tsing-Tao, China; after the capture of Tsing-Tao by Japanese and British troops
in 1914, the band—noncombatants under the terms of the Geneva Convention—had made
its way to the United States, where its members were detained once America entered
the war. Previously, the Tsing-Tao Band had performed at a 1916 Carnegie Hall memorial
for German war dead. Among the speakers at the concert was the Rev. Dr. G. C. Berkemeier,
one of the leading Lutheran ministers in America. “Dr. Berkemeier said that the war
had united Germany, and that the spirit which prompted her in the war would win. He
was applauded loudly when he said that England was prompted by love of Mammon, France,
by love of Vengeance, and Russia—‘well, Russia, there are all the devils of hell.’ ”
(See “Germans Honor War Dead: Hear Opera Singers and Orators at Carnegie Hall Meeting,”
The New York Times
, May 30, 1916, p. 7.) The band gave the Camp Oglethorpe group its name: the
Tsingtauer Orchester
. See Bowles, “Karl Muck and His Compatriots.”

101
. “Mrs. Jay Quits: Announces She Will Lead No More Uprisings Against German Art,”
The New York Times
, July 3, 1919, p. 11.

102
. “German Music? Maybe; Muck’s Successor Undecided on Symphony Policy,”
New York Tribune
, Oct. 30, 1918, p. 9.

103
. Henry Franks, “Geist,” in
Papers of the Manchester Literary Club
(London: Abel Heywood and Sons, 1878), vol. 4, pp. 95–106.

  1
. E. M. Forster, “A View Without a Room: Old Friends Fifty Years Later,”
The New York Times Book Review
, July 27, 1958, p. 4.

  2
. Quoted in Leo Schrade,
Beethoven in France
(Yale University Press, 1942), p. 187.

  3
. As reported in Alexandre Oublicheff,
Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs
(Paris: Jules Gavelot, 1857), in such a way that hinted at the story’s already-wide
currency.

  4
. Schindler,
Beethoven as I Knew Him
, Donald W. MacArdle, trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1996; orig. 1860), p.
502.

  5
. James H. Johnson,
Listening in Paris: A Cultural History
(University of California Press, 1995), p. 258.

  6
. Beate Angelika Kraus,
Beethoven-Rezeption in Frankreich
(Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus, 2001), p. 111.

  7
. Hector Berlioz,
The Art of Music and Other Essays
, Elizabeth Csicery-Rónay, trans. (Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 19.

  8
. Berlioz even adopts Hoffmann’s epic style of alternating emotional impressions with
unusually specific musical descriptions: “There is a striking example in [the first]
movement of the effect produced in some contexts by the excessive doubling of parts,
and also of the untamed quality of the six-four chord above the supertonic, otherwise
known as the second inversion of the dominant chord,” and so forth. Ibid., p. 20.

  9
. Schrade,
Beethoven in France
p. 29.

 10
. Berlioz,
The Art of Music and Other Essays
, p. 19.

 11
. Schrade,
Beethoven in France
, p. 52.

 12
. Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. (Harvard University Press, 2002), p.
417.

 13
. Ibid., p. 417.

 14
. Quoted in ibid., p. 454.

 15
. Quoted in Schrade,
Beethoven in France
, p. 177.

 16
. Quoted in Angelica Zander Rudenstine,
Modern Painting, Drawing & Sculpture Collected by Emily and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr.
, vol. 4 (Harvard University Art Museums, 1988), p. 587.

 17
. Ibid., p. 588.

 18
. Emile-François Julia,
Antoine Bourdelle: Maitre d’œuvre
(Paris: Librairie de France, 1930), p. 110 (
“une sorte de confession involontaire”
).

 19
. Arnold Schering,
Beethoven und der deutsche Idealismus: rede gehalten beim Festakt zur feier der 150
(Leipzig: Verlag von C. F. Kahnt, 1921), pp. 3–4, 20. (
“[E]in niedergebrochenes Volk, stehen wir abermals im Begriff, Beethoven zu feiern”;
“Das Heroische in diesem höchsten Sinne zog ihn du den Helden Homers und Plutarchs,
zu Coriolan, zu Egmont, zu ‘Fidelio’, wo gar ein Weib männliches Heldentum verkörpert.
Er selbst spürte im eigenen Blute etwas von Heroentum. Wenn der furor teutonicus über
ihn kam, so sprühte seine Phantasie Funken und rüttelte an den Schranken des damals
praktisch Möglichen: in der C-Moll-Symphonie, der Eroica, im ersten Satze der neunten
Symphonie, die einem so schwachen Geschlecht wie dem um 1850 geheimes Grauen einflöste.”
)

 20
. “A.E.,”
“Beethoven und die Dichtung”
(review),
Music & Letters
18, no. 2 (April 1937): 208.

 21
. Paul Bekker,
Beethoven
, M. M. Bozman, trans. (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1932), p. 170.

 22
. Ibid., p. 171.

 23
. Leon Botstein, “The Search for Meaning in Beethoven: Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics
in Historical Perspective,” in Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg, eds.,
Beethoven and His World
(Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 355.

 24
. Quoted in David B. Dennis,
Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989
(Yale University Press, 1996), p. 151.

 25
. Alfred Kerr,
Eintagsfliegen, oder Die Macht der Kritik, Die Welt im Drama IV
(Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1917), pp. 163, 165 (
“Die Theater wollen auch leben. Fragt sich, was gespielt werden kann.… Spielt künftig
das Beste, das wir haben. Spielt, was an unsren stolzesten Stolz erinnert. Und wenn
ihr keine Stücke wißt, so nehmt euch fünfzig Musiker. Und sprecht kein Wort. Und spielt
an jedem Abend Beethoven. Beethoven. Beethoven.”
).

 26
. Heinrich Schenker,
Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music
, William Drabkin, trans., vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3.

 27
. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

 28
. Ibid., p. 12.

 29
. Ibid., p. 20.

 30
. Hellmut Federhofer,
Heinrich Schenker: Nach Tagebüchern und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection,
University of California, Riverside
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985), p. 37n. (Emphasis added.)

 31
. Quoted in Nicholas Cook,
The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
(Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 208.

 32
. Allen Forte, “Heinrich Schenker,” in
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, Stanley Sadie, ed., vol. 16 (London: Macmillan, 1980): 627–28.

 33
. Nelson Goodman,
Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 112.

 34
. Ibid., p. 187. For a fascinating exploration of the implications and interpretations
of this passage, see Lydia Goehr, “Three Blind Mice: Goodman, McLuhan, and Adorno
on the Art of Music and Listening in the Age of Global Transmission,”
New German Critique
104, vol. 35, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 1–31.

 35
. Schenker,
Der Tonwille
, vol. 1, p. 21.

 36
. Cook,
The Schenker Project
, p. 203.

 37
. Even stories of Georg Jellinek’s lighter side are Teutonically heavy: “Some of [Jellinek’s]
students will recall the perplexed
Dienstmann
who once appeared at the door of his classroom and stood there as though nailed to
the spot. Upon hearing the stern command ‘Heraus mit dir’ (out with you) of the apparently
enraged professor, the bewilderment of the man-servant changed to sudden fright, followed
by a hasty retreat. For a moment the class believed the professor’s anger genuine,
but it soon dawned upon us that it was a mere outburst of German humor, and all joined
in a hearty laugh over the poor fellow’s discomfiture.” (“George Jellinek,”
The American Journal of International Law
5, no. 3 [July 1911]: 717–18.)

 38
. See Wayne Alpern, “Music Theory as a Mode of Law: The Case of Heinrich Schenker,
Esq.,”
Cardozo Law Review
20 (1998–1999): 1468–74.

 39
. Georg Jellinek,
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens
, Max Farrand, trans. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901), p. 97.

 40
. Heinrich Schenker,
Free Composition
(
Der freie Satz
)
: Volume III of New Musical Theories and Fantasies
, Ernst Oster, trans. (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 3.

 41
. Alpern, “Music Theory as a Mode of Law,” pp. 1474–75.

 42
. See, for instance, this passage from Schenker’s
Harmony:
“The relationships of the tone are established in its systems.… A tone dominates
the others if it subjects them to its superior vital force, within the relationship
fixed in the various systems. In this sense, a system resembles, in anthropomorphic
terms, a constitution, regulation, statute, or whatever other name we use to grasp
conceptually the manifold relationships we enter.” (Heinrich Schenker,
Harmony
, Oswald Jonas, ed.; Elisabeth Mann Borgese, trans. [University of Chicago Press,
1954], p. 84.)

 43
. Georg Jellinek,
Allgemeine Staatslehre
(Berlin: Verlag von O. Häring, 1905), p. 49. (Emphasis added.) (
“Die Staatsrechtslehre ist … eine Normwissenschaft
.
Ihre Normen sind von den Aussagen über das Sein des Staates als sozialer Erscheinung
scharf zu trennen.”
)

 44
. Georg Jellinek,
Introduction à la Doctrine de L’État
, Georges Fardis, ed., trans. (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1904), pp. 84–85. (
“Veut-on se placer dans le domaine de l’esthétique? Le point de vue devient tout autre.…
Il existe ainsi, dans le monde des sensations d’art, une vérité qui n’
a
rien de commun avec celle du monde des connaissances naturelles. La symphonie en ut
mineur de Beethoven est, au point de vue du sentiment et de la perception musicale,
la réalité la plus profonde, la plus indiscutablement vraie, la plus puissante: toute
la science naturelle ne peut rien contre la conscience de cette réalité…. Les choses
se comportent d’une manière analogue eu matière de droit.… Le monde juridique est
un monde d’idées, il se comporte vis-à-vis du monde tangible comme le monde de l’art
vis-à-vis du monde des sciences naturelles.”
)

 45
. Cook,
The Schenker Project
, p. 212.

 46
. Scott Burnham,
Beethoven Hero
(Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 99–100.

 47
. Heinrich Schenker,
Der Tonwille
, vol. 1, p. 27.

 48
. Ibid., pp. 27–29.

 49
. Ibid., p. 29.

 50
. Ibid., p. 187.

 51
. Ibid., p. 187.

 52
. Ibid., p. 196.

 53
. Ibid., p. 30.

 54
. Henrich Schenker,
Counterpoint
, John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym, trans., Book 1 (New York: Schirmer Books, 1987), p.
xviii.

 55
. Ibid., Book 2, pp. xiii.

 56
. Ibid., Book 2, p. xvi.

 57
. Cook,
The Schenker Project
, p. 150.

 58
. Quoted in Dennis,
Beethoven in German Politics
, p. 147.

 59
. Ibid., p. 149.

 60
. Schenker’s argument might also be read as an example of a Teutonically heavy sense
of humor; see Cook,
The Schenker Project
, p. 148.

 61
. “Reunion in San Francisco,”
Billboard
, May 5, 1945, p. 9.

 62
. Paul Johnson, “When Daring Dons Sported Through the Unguarded Groves of Academe,”
The Spectator
282, no. 8914 (June 12, 1999): 29.

 63
. As related in “Tam-tam-tam-ta,”
Der Spiegel
(Sept. 3, 1970). See also Jeremy Bennett,
British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement, 1940–1945
(Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 40.

 64
. C. E. Stevens, “Gildas Sapiens,”
The English Historical Review
56, no. 223 (July 1941): 358.

 65
. See, for example, Sir John Lawrence’s version of the story in Anthony Rudolf,
Sage Eye: The Aesthetic Passion of Jonathan Griffin
(Berkeley, CA: Menard Press, 1992), p. 61. Lawrence attributes to Stevens the notion
of an audible signal, but credits the Morse Code idea to “a large cigar smoking man
from the Ministry of Warfare, whose name I forget.”

 66
. James Blades,
Percussion Instruments and Their History
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1970), p. 68.

 67
. See Franklin Leonard Pope, “The American Inventors of the Telegraph,”
The Century
35, no. 6 (April 1888).

 68
. Samuel F. B. Morse,
Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States: The Numbers Under the
Signature of Brutus, Originally Published in the New York Observer
(“Seventh Edition”) (New York: American and Foreign Christian Union, 1855), pp. 33–34.

 69
. Quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky,
A Thing or Two About Music
(New York: Allen, Towne, & Heath, 1948), p. 81.

 70
. Dennis,
Beethoven in German Politics
, p. 170.

 71
. Ibid., p. 173. A 1953 episode of the television program
This Is Your Life
, telling the story of Hanna Bloch Kohner, a Holocaust survivor, would use the Fifth
to underscore the liberation of Hanna and the other inmates from the Mauthausen concentration
camp. See Jeffrey Shandler,
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust
(Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30–32.

 72
. Both the poster and the card are reproduced in Diane DeBlois and Robert Dalton Harris.
“Morse Code V for Victory: Morale through the Mail in WWII,” Smithsonian National
Postal Museum, September 27, 2008,
http://​www.​postalmuseum.​si.​edu/​symposium2008/​DeBlois-​Harris-​V_​for_​Victory-​paper.​pdf
.

 73
. The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, program for November 11–12, 1943.
(Thanks to Will Robin for finding this program in the New York Philharmonic’s digital
archives:
http://​archives.​nyphil.​org/​index.​php/​artifact/​2e25ab01-​fdca-​416e-​9d2a-​dfae3ddf78b8
.)

 74
. Martin Gilbert,
The Churchill War Papers: The Ever-Widening War, 1941
, vol. 3 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), p. 705.

 75
. Jonathan Aitken,
Heroes and Contemporaries
(London: Continuum, 2006), p. 22.

 76
. As in
Life
magazine, vol. 73, no. 1 (July 7, 1972), p. 21.

 77
. Dennis,
Beethoven in German Politics
, p. 166.

 78
. Schoenberg to Kurt List, January 24, 1946, in Schoenberg,
Arnold Schoenberg: Letters
, Erwin Stein, ed. (University of California Press, 1987), p. 238.

 79
. Sam H. Shirakawa,
The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler
(Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 280.