The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination

Chapter 2

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But musical ideas. .h.i.t a barrier with the final step of the realization of Essence, Actuality, a dialectic between Reflection and Appearance. "The utterance of the actual is the actual itself."39 In other words: We are no longer talking about what we, individually or even collectively, think the meaning of the first four notes might be. We are talking about what the meaning actually is.

Can any interpretation of the opening of Beethoven"s Fifth-or, indeed, of any piece of music-rise to that level of certainty? The sheer contradictory profusion of images and agendas surrounding the first four notes alone would indicate otherwise. In Hegelian terms, the protean nature of such interpretations is an indication that music and art are still historically stuck in a process of determining Essence, as the rest of society runs ahead in Hegel"s logical process. Hegel made this point explicitly all the way back in his inaugural Difference essay: "The entire system of relations const.i.tuting life has become detached from art, and thus the concept of art"s all-embracing coherence has been lost, and transformed into the concept either of superst.i.tion or of entertainment."40 It"s hard to think of any nontrivial statement one could make about the Fifth that would make it all the way to the stage of Actuality, always tripping over the barrier between subjective opinion and objective statement.

It"s at this point that it becomes obvious just how contrived a target the opening of Beethoven"s Fifth is for Hegel"s logic, a square peg being crammed into a round philosophical hole. But it was the ill fit, perhaps, that encouraged Hegel"s ambivalence about music in his aesthetic thinking. At various points, Hegel seems to be trying to have it both ways about music"s capacity for meaning.41 On the one hand, "[T]he real region of [musical] compositions remains a rather formal inwardness, pure sound";42 on the other hand, without "spiritual content and expression," music is not true art, is "empty and meaningless."43 At times, Hegel"s definitions of music verge on self-negation. "The meaning to be expressed in a musical theme," he writes, "is already exhausted in the theme."44 The composer"s subject matter is "a retreat into the inner life"s own freedom, a self-enjoyment, and, in many departments of music, even an a.s.surance that as artist he is free from subject-matter altogether."45 Such inherent subjectivity, historically speaking, stalled music"s advance toward the Absolute in the interpretive free-for-all of Reflection.

Could speculative philosophy ever push our understanding of music past its current Reflective shambles, past each individual listener privileging their own interpretive imagination? Hegel thought not-only literature or, even better, philosophy could get past such subjective "formal inwardness," get past one"s personal "feeling" to engage the objective world and, eventually, reach the Absolute Idea, the ultimate unity, the end-all of Hegel"s historical progress. Hegel admitted the Romantic idea that art and music could give a glimpse of the Absolute, but considered that a symptom of immature systems of religious thought. "As regards the close connection of art with the various religions it may be specially noted that beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute," he wrote; art"s vision of the divine is only as clear as an imperfect religion can make it. In the long run, though, art becomes unnecessary: [E]ven fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme liberation itself. The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought-the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence-is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.46 The limited, irreverent liberation of art is better than nothing, but only a poor subst.i.tute for the Idea. If Beethoven affords a better-than-average view of the promised land, it"s only because he can"t cross over.

Nevertheless, other commentators were only too happy to give Beethoven a privileged place in Hegel-like intellectual hierarchies. American poet Sidney Lanier portrayed the "satisfying symphonies" as something like dialectic syntheses, soothing those "thoughts that fray the restless soul," including "The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate, / Whereof both cannot be, yet are."47 And already by 1867, Ludwig Nohl, in his biography of Beethoven, was opening out the Fifth"s philosophical playing field toward an encompa.s.sed Absolute, extending the expanded Fate of the first four notes over the whole work: In his heart of hearts, Beethoven feels that fate has knocked at his door, only because in his following the dictates of force and action, he has sinned against nature, and that all will is only transitoriness and self-deception.... [T]he song of jubilation in the finale which tells not of the joy and sorrow of one heart only; it lifts the freedom which has been praised and sought for into the higher region of moral will. Thus the symphony in C minor has a significance greater than any mere "work of art." Like the production of religious art, it is a representation of those secret forces which hold the world together.48 But the most lasting incursion of Hegelian concepts into Beethoven"s reputation concerned the composer himself: Beethoven"s career and music, the very fact of his existence, was interpreted as an unprecedented watershed in a progressive view of music history. One of the most influential and subtle exponents of this idea was a Berlin-based lawyer-turned-music-critic named Adolph Bernhard Marx.

IN 1830, the year before he died, Hegel was appointed Rector of the University of Berlin. The same year, the university offered a chair in music to A. B. Marx, who promptly put into pedagogical practice what he had already been preaching through journalism: championing the evident greatness of Austro-German music-Bach, Mozart, Beethoven-in Hegelian terms. As musicologist Scott Burnham has written, it was a matter "of transforming the southern currency of the Viennese musical masters into a more fiercely northern intellectual and political capital."49 Marx is today primarily remembered for codifying and naming what we now call sonata-allegro (or just sonata) form, a structural pattern common to works of the mid- to late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The pattern goes like this: A movement starts with a first theme in the overall key of the piece-the tonic.

Followed by a second theme in a contrasting key, usually the interval of a perfect fifth up from the tonic-the dominant, if the movement is in a major key-or a third away-the relative major, if it is in a minor key.

A third theme brings the opening section to a close in either the dominant key or its relative major.

There follows a freer development section.

After which there comes a recapitulation of the three themes; this time all in the tonic key.

The opening movement of Beethoven"s Fifth fits this pattern to a tee. As it should: sonata form was explicitly modeled on Beethoven"s practice, an after-the-fact attempt to systematize what the next generation regarded as the apex of Cla.s.sical composition. But it also, deliberately, put Beethoven"s music in a privileged position vis-a-vis history.

Marx took pains to present sonata form as the culmination of a Hegelian process. In his 1856 essay "Form in Music," Marx starts at the formal level of the motive ("Only the succession of two or more tones ... shows the spirit persisting in the musical element"50) and works his way up through a series of dialectical oppositions to the "greater whole" of the sonata. "The evolution of this series of forms," he summarizes, "has been the historical task of all artists faithful to their calling." Unlike Hegel, however, Marx"s ladder never runs out of rungs, for music is inseparable from the human spirit: "[T]he series of forms may be deemed infinite; at least no one can point to an end, or cut-off point, of the series, as long as music maintains its place in the realm of human affairs-that is, forever. For that which the human spirit has begotten in accordance with the necessity of its essence is created forever."51 The difficulty of Hegel"s theory of Essence is (perhaps dialectically) also an opportunity, a vacuum that Marx fills with a more exalted view of music than Hegel himself ever took-a vacuum that (as we shall see) the Romantics would fill with similar enthusiasm.

Marx"s most complete exegesis of sonata form came in the third volume of his four-volume Practical and Theoretical Method of Musical Composition. Again, Hegelian hints abound, with Marx seeing a fundamental process of theme-digression-return rising through five levels of rondo form to arrive at sonata form, where the multiplicity of themes is fodder for synthesis: "the whole in its inner unity ... becomes the main concern."52 Marx formulated his definition of sonata form primarily from Beethoven, yet he spends even more s.p.a.ce exploring all those instances where Beethoven seems to push the definition to its breaking point. Marx is, in fact, engaged in an exercise more subtle than just demonstrating Beethoven"s music to be a Hegelian culmination; he is defining sonata form as something that Beethoven has already surpa.s.sed. The laws are set down in order that Marx can show how Beethoven rendered the laws obsolete. Sonata form is a concept through which Beethoven"s essence can shine forth. The implicit lesson for any composition students who happened to be reading: surpa.s.s the previous generation and keep history on the move.

But Marx"s Hegelian definition of sonata form forever closed it off from the possibility of Hegelian progress. "When sonata form did not yet exist, it had a history," Charles Rosen once noted. "Once it had been called into existence by early nineteenth-century theory, history was no longer possible for it; it was defined, fixed, and unalterable."53 But that was, perhaps, the point all along. Early on in his career, Marx had already cast the Fifth as "the first [symphony] to advance beyond the Mozartian point of view."54 In Marx"s a.n.a.lysis, sonata form changed from a basic, flexible framework into a historical boundary for Beethoven"s genius to vault over.

There is a bit of a full-circle aspect to Marx"s formulation. Beethoven thought in terms of a personal Fate to be surmounted: in his Tagebuch Beethoven copied down lengthy excerpts from Zacharias Werner"s dramatic poem Die Sohne des Thals (The Sons of the Valley). Like much of the rest of Beethoven"s journal, the drama is steeped in Masonic atmosphere-it retells one of the more popular legends of Freemasonry"s origins, tracing the order to the fourteenth-century suppression of the Knights Templar. And it also poeticizes a Hegelian transcendence of Fate: The hero bravely presents to Fate the harp Which the Creator placed in his bosom.

It might rage through the strings; But it cannot destroy the marvelous inner accord And the dissonances soon dissolve into pure harmony, Because G.o.d"s peace rustles through the strings.55 A generation later, with Hegel as an enabler, Marx portrayed Beethoven as surmounting historical, rather than personal, Fate.

But such projecting of the Fifth"s narrative onto the whole of human society raises a question, one that parallels the subsequent nineteenth-century rumpus over Hegel"s concept of history: Is the Fifth"s fateful struggle and eventual exultation a mirror of civilization, or its unrealized blueprint? Both explanations came into play as Hegel"s legacy bifurcated; Hegel"s rational-is-real formulation produced competing claimants to Hegel"s mantle. The teams even acquired their own names, at least in hindsight: the Right-, or Old Hegelians versus the Left-, or Young Hegelians. (Both terms proved more useful to historians than to the players themselves: the Right-Hegelians never used the name themselves, and the Young Hegelians, like many intellectual blocs, spent as much time arguing amongst themselves as they did taking on their Old counterparts.) Putting it somewhat simply, a Right-Hegelian could argue that if the real is rational, then the way things are, right now, falls somewhere along Hegel"s path to the absolute, the implication being that the way things are-economically, socially, politically-is as good, and as moral, as it could possibly be. But a radical Left-Hegelian could counter that the continuing existence of societal divisions was clear evidence that Hegel"s Absolute remained unfulfilled, that change is always necessary, that the work goes on.

IN 1839, eighteen-year-old Friedrich Engels was working as an unpaid clerk for a linen exporter in Bremen. Bored and antsy, he pa.s.sed the time by writing letters to his sister. In one letter, he showed off his burgeoning composing skills with a two-part harmonization of Luther"s chorale "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"; Marie Engels must have given her brother some grief over it. "Listen," Friedrich protests, "composing is hard work; you have to pay attention to so many things-the harmony of the chords and the right progression, and that gives a lot of trouble."56 Two years later, Friedrich"s restlessness had only gotten worse. "Thank G.o.d that I too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voila tout," he informs Marie. Still, he is proud of his moustache: "It is now in full flower again and growing and when I have the pleasure-as I don"t doubt I shall-of boozing with you in Mannheim in the spring, you will be amazed at its glory." And Bremen still has its charms. "There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven"s Symphony in C Minor today ... while I can," Friedrich boasts. And, continuing the letter the next day: "What a symphony it was last night! ... What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover"s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements!"57 In his teenage letters, Friedrich Engels comes across as very much the bourgeois scion he was: an indifferent apprentice, a bit of a dilettante, a devotee of beer, cigars, and music. But the letters also hint at an intellectual double life. Metternich"s Carlsbad Decrees had made subversion prevalent by making just about everything subversive; even facial hair could be regarded as a dangerous republican provocation.58 (Hence the moustache.) His taste in music carried rebellious overtones, not just the Fifth"s "celebration of freedom," but also "Ein feste Burg," its opening a distant mirror of Beethoven"s (three repeated notes, followed by a downward leap), a chorale Engels, in later life, would characterize as "the Ma.r.s.eillaise of the Peasant War,"59 the sixteenth-century German uprising that was the largest European rebellion prior to 1789.

And Engels was abandoning the "dreary hole" of Bremen for Berlin, where-while ostensibly fulfilling his military service-he would sit in on Sch.e.l.ling"s lectures, pitting his youthful idolization of Hegel against Sch.e.l.ling"s learned deprecations. (His fellow auditors included both the Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.)60 At the same time his family was grooming him to take over the family"s textile business, Engels was fashioning himself into a political radical.

In true Hegelian fashion, Engels"s road up to working-cla.s.s liberation and down to capitalist exploitation was the same road. Sent to Manchester to learn the family trade, Engels turned what he saw into a book, The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England, a groundbreaking expose of the Industrial Revolution. One of the book"s many admirers was another Young Hegelian, a peripatetic and perpetually impoverished journalist, polemicist, and dialectician named Karl Marx.

Marx and Engels formed one of history"s most influential symbiotic friendships. They dropped an all-time intellectual bombsh.e.l.l by co-writing The Communist Manifesto, then chased the 184849 revolutions around Europe, hoping to get in on the action. (Marx, who was deported from Prussia in the midst of the revolutions, never quite caught up with an uprising, but Engels did, manning the front lines in the south of Germany before escaping back to London.) In order to have the funds to support Marx, whom he always regarded as the more brilliant thinker, Engels reluctantly returned to the family firm, a.s.suming the role of a proper Victorian businessman. After Marx"s death in 1883, Engels kept the faith, defending Marx"s reputation, expanding and promoting Marxist thought, and having a go at finishing the last volume of Capital. The bond between the two was enduring; for all their later activity and notoriety, they never quite abandoned their ident.i.ty as enthusiastic students, arguing Hegel and history over copious amounts of beer.

In fact, it was a pub crawl from later in his life that gave us one of the few glimpses of Marx"s musical taste. Sometime in the 1850s, when London was seemingly flooded with revolutionaries-in-exile, Marx took Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht, a pair of old Young Hegelian a.s.sociates, on a quest "to "take something" in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road," as Liebknecht remembered it, a fairly daunting prospect in that particular district. (Bauer, a frank advocate of terrorism, had apparently remained a drinking buddy even after being intellectually savaged by Marx and Engels in their "Critique of Critical Criticism" The Holy Family; Liebknecht would go on to be a founder of Germany"s Social Democratic party. The Young Hegelians were always a confederation of strange bedfellows.) At the end of this inebriated tour, Bauer took offense at the patriotic deprecations of a group of Englishmen, and Marx joined in the drunken defense of German culture. Liebknecht again: [N]o other country, he said, would have been capable of producing such masters of music as Beethoven, Mozart, Haendel and Haydn, and the Englishmen who had no music were in reality far below the Germans who had been prevented hitherto only by the miserable political and economical conditions from accomplishing any great practical work, but who would yet outcla.s.s all other nations. So fluently I have never heard him speaking English.61 Marx never advanced anything close to a comprehensive philosophy of art; nevertheless, dosed with liquid courage, Marx defended not the German intellectual heritage-not Goethe, not Kant, not Hegel-but its composers, in a progression culminating with Beethoven.

Nowadays, Marx and Engels are still inextricably a.s.sociated with-and blamed for-Communism and all its disgraces. Their most lasting contribution, though, was the materialist conception of history, a redesign of Hegel"s historical engine to run on less mystical fuel. Marx: "My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life."62 For Marx, the best use of the dialectic was not to overcome contradictions, as Hegel preached, but to reveal and focus them: to clarify the content, not reveal a speculative form. History doesn"t resolve conflict, advancing toward an Absolute stand-in for transcendental unity; history happens because of conflicts that are fundamentally unresolvable. If you can dialectically boil your a.n.a.lysis down to these fundamental conflicts-capital versus labor, say, or collective control versus anarchic individualism-you can grasp the levers of history.

Historical materialism even informed Marx"s pub-crawl music critique: to note Beethoven"s achievement in the face of "miserable political and economical conditions" was high praise indeed. Hegel thought that it was the Idea that creates political, social, and economic conditions. Marx thought that Hegel had things completely back-to-front. Marx often thought that way-it was a critical trick he had picked up from one of the leading lights of the Left-Hegelians, a lapsed theologian named Ludwig Feuerbach, who liked to bring metaphysical flights of fancy down to earth by flipping around subject and predicate. For Marx, the Idea doesn"t project circ.u.mstances onto people; people project onto their circ.u.mstances the illusion of an Idea. True greatness was not, as Hegel might have put it, the realization of an ideal Fate; true greatness-Beethoven"s greatness-was to triumph in spite of it.63 But what does the materialist conception of history-and its colonization of the modern worldview-have to do with the Fifth"s subsequent biography? A lot, perhaps; at the very least, a renewed focus on the first movement and its omnipresent motive. Once the motive"s a.s.signed meaning-Fate-became a matter of worldly friction instead of Ideal accord, the sharper contrasts of the opening movement were bound to sound more "real" and immediate than the relentless victory of the end. Initially, the Fifth was particularly celebrated for its Finale, the troublesome scherzo exploding into triumphant, major-key synthesis, a musical Hegelian in-and-of-itself. But as the perception of history shifted toward materialism, the first movement-and its epochal opening-gradually became the symphony"s most famous feature: a dramatic showdown between history and the individual, irreconcilably defiant. The fact that more people know the Fifth"s beginning than its end could be read as evidence that Marx"s historical-materialistic inversion of Hegel, with its embrace of contradiction and struggle, is the more deeply woven into the fabric of society.

Then again, it could just be shorter attention spans. But it is worth noting that it was Engels, the onetime prospective composer, who initially formulated historical materialism-and who later forever complicated Marxist thought by insisting that the dialectic was not just an intellectual tool: "[D]ialectical laws are really laws of development of nature."64 If the dialectic is inherent in creation itself, the struggle and triumph of the Fifth Symphony"s narrative could be applied to the whole of existence.

AS MARXISM shifted into Marxism-Leninism, the materialist interpretation of history took a detour, one reminiscent of how the revolutionary impression of Beethoven"s music was interpreted. Karl Kautsky, an evangelist for "traditional" Marxism, had criticized the Bolshevik Revolution, arguing that the Russian proletariat wasn"t ready for Communism, that the revolution had, in effect, happened too early-beating history to the punch, as it were. As a result, he predicted, the conditions were ripe for another Reign of Terror. "If the morality of the communists has not formed itself before the beginning of socialisation," Kautsky warned, "it will be too late to develop it after expropriation has taken place."65 Leon Trotsky ridiculed Kautsky"s critique: "[T]he Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it"66 (emphasis added). The Slovenian Hegelian-Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj iek has noted how Trotsky"s formulation has a parallel in modern att.i.tudes toward innovation and cultural history. He quotes T. S. Eliot: "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity between old and new."67 It"s an expanded perspective on the idea that truly revolutionary works of art create their own audience-except in this view, such works actually create (and re-create) their own history. It is not hard to find notions like this applied to Beethoven and his symphonic style: one need look no further than the other Marx, Adolph Bernhard, who even during Beethoven"s lifetime was already justifying a progressive view of his hero"s music in terms similar to Eliot"s: The preliminary works of philosophers of art are useful to us, and we find the way paved that they first had to prepare laboriously. Above all, however, we make reference to the fact that art first had to reach the stage of perfection where it provided material for a higher point of view.68 Of course, hanging that expectation on Beethoven"s symphonies practically ensured that they would be continually reinterpreted to justify each newer "higher point of view"-which is exactly what happened. The idea of Beethoven"s Fifth-or any other piece of music-being "timeless" originates with this (largely successful) effort to portray Beethoven as a figure in the vanguard of a progressive view of history.

In attempting to control that progression, the Soviet state ironically gradually came to rely on Beethoven"s being a specifically historical figure. At the outset of the Bolshevik regime, the Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of how "Beethoven ... not only expressed the complexities of his own personality, but reflected most forcefully the storms of the Great Revolution."69 Lunacharsky was using Beethoven as a yardstick for demonstrating that the Russian avant-gardists of the time-Scriabin, Prokofiev-were also expressing socialist ideals. By the time of the 1927 Beethoven centennial, however, things had changed: Lenin was dead, Stalin was tightening his grip on power, and socialist ideals were better expressed by Beethoven"s music, Lunacharsky p.r.o.nounced, than by any contemporary "futurists and hooligan opponents of the cla.s.sics."70 The straitjacket can be sensed in another momentous Fifth Symphony, that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Written in 1937, it was the composer"s response to his own Stalinist difficulties, the frightening shift in his official reputation after his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was judged to be contrary to the tenets of socialist realism. Shostakovich"s Fifth shadows Beethoven"s both in its minor-to-major struggle-to-triumph trajectory, and in its obsessive use and reuse of short motives. And, like Beethoven, Shostakovich produced a work whose greatness is in no small part due to the ambiguity of its powerful rhetoric, creating a template for enduring reinterpretation: "a richly coded utterance," as Richard Taruskin has put it, "but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompa.s.sed or definitively paraphrased."71 Shostakovich"s Fifth mixed triumph and uneasiness enough for both Soviet officialdom and its discontents to claim its narrative.

But the symphony"s opening theme hints at the increasingly suffocating presence of the Beethovenian paragon. Shostakovich jump-starts with a series of angular, dotted-rhythm leaps, up and down, but the vaults are herded into a mutter: by the fourth bar, the bravado has been abraded into a single note, rapped three times, staccato. In Shostakovich"s version, Beethoven"s repeated-note opening becomes a hesitant cessation: an ominous, unanswered tapping, quashing the defiance of those impulsive leaps. It is as if Beethoven"s Fifth were run backward and the finale"s dotted-rhythm outbursts subsumed back into the opening"s grim announcement. (In Stalin"s Russia, after all, a knock on the door could be all too literally fatal.) The open-ended nature of the interpretation of Beethoven"s Fifth complicated its status in Communist regimes, even as the Party relied on Beethoven"s Fifth to fire up revolutionary fervor. Functionaries of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the official East German socialist youth group, noted the music"s usefulness to a journalist in the 1960s: "What I like about Beethoven is the militant element. We recently heard his Fifth Symphony ... "and now the eyes of the youth friends light up." "72 Militant Beethoven could, however, become dangerous once revolutions turned monolithic: Beethoven"s Egmont Overture (which plays like a potent distillation of the Fifth"s struggle) became the soundtrack of the 1956 uprising in Communist Hungary; during the similar 1968 rebellion in Czechoslovakia, "as tension and expectations rose, Radio Free Prague played over and over Beethoven"s Fifth Symphony."73 In Communist China, the vague knocking of the first four notes made Beethoven"s Fifth a p.a.w.n in the Cultural Revolution. Western cla.s.sical music in China had been drastically undermined by the Revolution-the faculty of the Shanghai Conservatory was decimated as professors were arrested or driven to suicide74-and Beethoven was officially eschewed in favor of ideologically pure operas and ballets created under the direction of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong"s wife. The power struggle between Jiang and Premier Zhou Enlai turned symphonic as rapprochement with the United States (the prospect of which Jiang despised) moved forward. For one of Henry Kissinger"s trips to Beijing to plan Richard Nixon"s 1972 visit, Zhou had the idea of marking the occasion with a concert by China"s Central Philharmonic. "Kissinger"s German," Zhou instructed Li Delun, the Philharmonic"s conductor. "You should play Beethoven."75 But which Beethoven? Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the Central Philharmonic had often performed the symphonies; called into a meeting with Jiang Qing and Yu Huiyong, the minister of culture and Jiang"s chief musical consultant, Li expressed a preference for the Fifth, as it was the piece the Philharmonic performed best. But Yu insisted that the Fifth was contrary to the spirit of Communist China, since-post hoc the first four notes-it was about fatalism.

Li had stepped into a Byzantine intellectual power struggle, one of Jiang Qing"s perennial propaganda battles against those who would try to reverse the course of revolutionary history in favor of the status quo.76 It was the Old and Young Hegelians all over again: the Fifth lacked sufficient specificity as to just which kind of fate it was in favor of. Jiang and Yu subst.i.tuted Beethoven"s Sixth, Beethoven"s nature pictures presumably being less open to troublesome interpretation. (Jiang Qing pulled the same switch on Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra on their 1973 visit, leading to a certain amount of last-minute scrambling, as the group had only brought parts for the Fifth, not the Sixth.77) After Mao"s death, Yu Huiyong would commit suicide by drinking a bottle of sulfuric acid. The Cultural Revolution was over, the milestone having been marked, in part, by Li Delun and the Central Philharmonic returning to the symphony they played best, Beethoven"s Fifth, a performance broadcast throughout China in March of 1977. Xu Ximing, head of the Shanghai Music Lovers" a.s.sociation, recognized the significance. "It is about the light that comes after a period of great difficulty," he recalled, "so it was very appropriate."78 (Then again, in 1997, during the ceremonial transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, Chinese police drowned out protesters with a PA broadcast of the Fifth.79) Elsewhere in the Communist world, Trotsky"s dynamically created majority had long since ossified into a bureaucracy of oppression, with a cynicism toward progress to rival Metternich"s. The order failed to make room for Trotsky himself, who was forced out of party and country. Asylum in Norway turned into house arrest, an internment slightly alleviated by a radio: "Beethoven was a great help to us, but the music was a rarity"-drowned out by propaganda broadcasts from both Stalin and Hitler.80 Trotsky was shipped from Norway to Mexico, where he was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1940. Even in exile, though, Trotsky had kept the historical-materialist faith, the same tenets that elaborated the perception of the Fifth"s opening into a tolling of the fate of all mankind: And what of your personal fate?-I hear a question, in which curiosity is mixed with irony.... I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one"s personal fate. On the contrary, I appraise my fate objectively and live it subjectively, only as it is inextricably bound up with the course of social development.81 "Mankind" does not advance, it does not even exist.

-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power ALL ALONG, there had been another lane on the Fifth"s journey to canonic greatness, running parallel to Hegel and Marx, but surpa.s.sing both of them in its conception of Fate. Its surveyor was the era"s great iconoclast, promoting a worldview fiercely generous and exuberantly desolate: Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1888, in the months preceding his sudden mental breakdown, Nietzsche wrote his own version of an autobiography: Ecce h.o.m.o, a breezy, c.o.c.ky tour of his own works and thought processes. At the close of a chapter ent.i.tled "Why I Am So Clever," Nietzsche offered this prescription: "My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it-all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary-but love it."82 Nietzsche"s amor fati, his love of Fate, was the final mutation in the nineteenth-century evolution of concepts of Fate and History. Quite simply, after Nietzsche, there was no place left for Fate to go: in a way, it became philosophically indistinguishable from the whole of creation. Schindler"s investing of the Fifth with a single share of Fate had unwittingly proved one of the canniest metaphysical investments possible. And yet Nietzsche himself would warn against the dividend.

Amor fati grew out of Nietzsche"s contemplation of the old idea of eternal recurrence, the idea that, contrary to Hegel, history was not progressive but constantly cycled through the same patterns over and over again. It"s as if Hegel"s idea of everything perpetually becoming had no Absolute endpoint-becoming is all there is. Nietzsche famously posed the question in his 1882 book The Gay Science: What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence ..."

"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?" Nietzsche posits. "Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a G.o.d and never have I heard anything more divine." "83 The latter response is the quintessence of amor fati.

Nietzsche had the eponymous hero of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra-an allegory saturated with amor fati-ill.u.s.trate Fate as a deceptive gateway. "This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane ahead of us-that is another eternity," Zarathustra notes. "They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one another: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is written above it: "Moment."

"[A]ll things that can run have already run along this lane"84-up to and including the current moment; what"s more, "all things [are] bound fast together" such that, in turn, the moment symmetrically draws the future toward it.

As an example, the Canadian philosopher Peter Hallward provides another of history"s great heroes of fate: Caesar"s only real task is to become worthy of the events he has been created to embody. Amor fati. What Caesar actually does adds nothing to what he virtually is. When Caesar actually crosses the Rubicon this involves no deliberation or choice since it is simply part of the entire, immediate expression of Caesarness, it simply unrolls or "unfolds something that was encompa.s.sed for all times in the notion of Caesar"-and a world in which Caesar did not cross the Rubicon would thus have to be an entirely different world.85 Hallward"s formulation clashes with every bit of our intuition about causality and agency, but also brings to the fore two of the more important facets of Nietzsche"s thought: his bias against free will, and his emphasis on affirmation, on embracing one"s becoming.

Amor fati is not just a cosmic version of playing the hand you"re dealt; it defines the game itself as inescapably all-encompa.s.sing. The universe is a perpetual state of becoming; and nothing exists outside of that becoming-including what Nietzsche regards as the irrationally egotistic idea of free will. One of Nietzsche"s favorite words is Verhangnis, which can be translated in multiple directions: literally "hanging together," but also meaning "fate" or even "calamity." It"s all the same thing, and it"s only the distorting habit of regarding ourselves as self-mastered individuals that keeps us from that realization: "[O]ne is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole."86 There"s no way of getting off the roller coaster of Fate: we"re built into it. If you"re enjoying the ride, you"ve achieved greatness.

No wonder Nietzsche doesn"t go in for the Fifth Symphony"s defiance. He prefers to praise "Beethoven"s n.o.ble hermit"s resignation."87 Love your fate.

EARLY IN his career, Nietzsche worked on both philosophy and music, pursuing the latter with more raw talent than skill, a deficit that earned him a fair amount of scorn after the twenty-four-year-old professor of philology inserted himself into Richard Wagner"s circle in the late 1860s. Nietzsche and Wagner talked over what became Nietzsche"s first book, The Birth of Tragedy; Wagner defended the book when it came under attack from Nietzsche"s more hidebound colleagues. But Wagner also made a point of left-handedly complimenting Nietzsche"s piano improvisations, telling him "you play too well for a professor."88 Nietzsche fared no better with his written compositions, having never mastered forms beyond miniatures; Hans von Bulow criticized one as "the most extreme piece of fantastic extravagance, the most undelightful and the most antimusical drafts on musical paper that I have faced in a long time. Frequently I had to ask myself: is the whole thing a joke, perhaps you intended a parody of the so-called music of the future?"89 Nietzsche, intellectually tougher than his enthusiastic-professor mien may have let on, went from lauding Wagner and his artwork (Kunstwerk) of the future to denouncing him, accusing him of being corrupted by Christianity, and enthusiastically proclaiming the superiority of Offenbach and Bizet. (Nevertheless, even after breaking with Wagner, in person and in print, Nietzsche recognized the importance of their discussions to his own intellectual journey: "I"d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships."90) The "fantastic extravagance" that Bulow faulted in Nietzsche"s music was the touchstone of his prose; and as with much of his philosophy, Nietzsche"s views on art and music are fluid, pungently aphoristic, and, over time, somewhat self-contradictory. The constant is Nietzsche"s skepticism of art, a skepticism so deep that it can only have grown from an irresistible love: he is forever flying too close to the flame and then musing on just how and why it burns.

In Nietzsche"s estimation, all artists were actors-benevolent liars, usually themselves unaware of their own make-believe. The deception is not in art"s scope but in its importance: art is as meaningful as life itself, but-in the light of the consequences of amor fati-life is not nearly as meaningful as we would like to think. Nietzsche dismissed an artist"s biography, his or her individual fate, as an irrelevant illusion. To interpret the Fifth and its opening motive in a way that emphasizes Beethoven"s own emotional life-his struggle with deafness or loneliness, take your pick-is to fall into the same trap that artists always set, however unwittingly. "Artists are by no means men of great pa.s.sion," Nietzsche wrote, "but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted pa.s.sions will seem more believable if their own life speaks for their experience in this field."91 Perhaps because he knew it so well, Nietzsche regarded music as particularly fertile ground for this sort of con game; music"s "primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to come from the inner world." Listening "for the reason" in music is a modern habit; music "does not speak of the "will" or of the "thing in itself"; the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compa.s.s of the inner life."92 That is, an age that has distorted music from a sensual pleasure into a repository for the Absolute-which is exactly what had happened to Beethoven"s music, the Fifth Symphony especially.

Unusually susceptible to music"s power, Nietzsche was also unusually sensitive to how explanations of its "meaning" could deflect that power. It was a pattern he sensed in other areas of human endeavor as well. One of Nietzsche"s essays in his collection Untimely Meditations was a discussion of history and how it is written, a polemic he called On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Nietzsche"s main target in his History essay is alleged historical objectivity, "a condition in the historian which permits him to observe an event in all its motivations and consequences so purely that it has no effect at all on his own subjectivity"93-which had become the goal of "scientific" historians in the nineteenth century, taking their cue from the German historian Leopold von Ranke and his famous (if somewhat ambiguous) call for a history that "wants only to show what actually happened."94 Nietzsche calls such objectivity "mythology, and bad mythology at that"95-not only impossible but also liable to distort history into something closer to the artificiality of drama, the competing needs of narrative cohesion and disinterested viewpoint finding patterns in historical events where no patterns exist. Such patterns, Nietzsche makes clear, are usually more than a little Hegelian, be it Right or Left: "But what is one to make of this a.s.sertion, hovering as it does between tautology and nonsense, by one celebrated historical virtuoso: "the fact of the matter is that all human actions are subject to the mighty and irresistible direction of the course of things, though it may often not be apparent"?"96 The "virtuoso" in question is none other than Leopold von Ranke,97 but the target is Hegel"s Spirit of History, all its subsequent elaborations and/or simplifications, and its oppressive pressure on the individual will. "If every success is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the "idea," " Nietzsche mocks, "then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder of "success"!"98 The problem, as Nietzsche sees it, is that "history is held in greater honour than life"-dominating and enervating everything that makes life worth living, music included. It is "an injustice against the most vigorous part of our culture" that "such men as Mozart and Beethoven [are] already engulfed by all the learned dust of biography and compelled by the torture-instruments of historical criticism to answer a thousand impertinent questions."99 Maybe this is why, when Nietzsche does get around to prescribing his ideal history, the description sounds more than a little like Beethoven"s Fifth: "[I]ts value will be seen to consist in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensive symbol, and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty."100 IN Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche imagined exhuming Beethoven and asking what he thought of how subsequent generations had used his music: [H]e would probably for a long time stay dumb, undecided whether to raise his hand in a blessing or a curse, but at length say perhaps: "Well, yes! That is neither I nor not-I but some third thing-and if it is not exactly right, it is nonetheless right in its own way. But you had better take care what you"re doing, since it"s you who have to listen to it-and, as our Schiller says, the living are always in the right. So be in the right and let me depart again."101 The story of Fate knocking at the door, which might charitably be described as neither Beethoven nor not-Beethoven, but some third thing, only became more so as the century went on. Whatever the origin of Schindler"s anecdote-a Beethovenian jest, a garbled memory, an out-and-out fiction-it ended up enhancing the Fifth"s stature probably even more than the "friend of Beethoven" could have antic.i.p.ated. From a personal destiny, malleable with enough effort, the notion of Fate would gradually acquire greater and greater significance: Hegel"s historical engine, Marx"s revolutionary sustenance, Nietzsche"s all-pervasive force. Originally interpreted as a vivid portrait of an individual trajectory, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Fifth Symphony could plausibly be said to be about, well, everything.

Back to Munzer"s Mademoiselle: having, in the meantime, caught a glimpse of his governess naked, young Eduard is understandably more pale and nervous-and less pianistically accurate-than usual when instructed to again join her for their duet; Eduard"s mother wants to impress her husband with Beethoven"s symphony, which, in her estimation, "seems so modern" with its "spicy effects": Once again sounded the mysterious, stern, threatening motif. Unwritten dissonance increased its foreboding....

"I don"t know," said her innocuous husband. "To me, it sounds more wrong than spicy, so to speak."

"Adolf," cried his wife indignantly, "that"s just the misfortune of your one-dimensional legal training. You"ve never done anything for your musical education. Now comes the payback: you cannot follow the artistic insight of your family."

The conclusion of the first phrase surpa.s.sed the middle in its considerable unresolved dissonance, because, while this time the young lady played correctly, Eduard was suddenly in F-sharp major.

The lawyer twitched sensitively and moaned audibly, but his wife squirmed, as it were, with delight, and said in a tone of contemptuous profundity: "Richard Strauss!!"102 The scandalous modernity of Richard Strauss-who did, after all, compose a tone poem on Zarathustra-might well have sounded to contemporaries like Beethoven"s C-minor tonality overlaid with Eduard"s F-sharp major, a tritone away, the height of dissonance. But the nineteenth-century shape of history, an inexorable movement toward some inherently better future, demanded it: composers were deemed profound only inasmuch as they pushed the envelope. Such escalation is nowadays taken for granted, to judge by persistent vocabularies of "advance" and "progress" from descendants of Left and Right alike; Beethoven was present at the creation. The grafting of "fate knocking at the door" onto the Fifth"s iconic opening might have been nothing more than a romanticized anecdote, but it did its part to keep goal-oriented civilizations focused on destiny.

Perhaps inevitably, Mademoiselle ends with the governess paying a late-night visit to Eduard. No need to knock-Beethoven has taken care of that already: She smiled and, graciously and lovingly, quietly opened the unlocked door of the boy"s room ...103

Infinities

"The modern school of music, Janet, is like the romantic drama," I added, with a forced attempt at continuing the conversation, for I felt my sadness increasing beyond my control. "I mean the music commencing with Beethoven; not the gay, joy-loving, Athenian Mozart, but from Beethoven, the sad old giant, up to poor Schubert and Schumann and Chopin. There is a whole lifetime of woe, sometimes, in one of their shortest creations. I wonder, Janet, if the Greeks ever suffered and sorrowed as we moderns do? They seem to have been exempt from our curse; they worshipped the beautiful, and raised it to their altars,-made of it G.o.d."

"Their drama, my friend, was the voice of their ideal, not of their real life. The moderns have indeed bowed down before sorrow and pain, lifted them up to their most holy of holies, and there they will remain so long as the quick pulse of anguish throbs in man"s and woman"s heart."

-ANNE M. H. BREWSTER, St. Martin"s Summer (1866) AS A YOUNG MAN just out of the University of Berlin, years before the materialist conception of history crossed paths with Fate and the Fifth, Karl Marx had been briefly pulled into the orbit of none other than Bettina von Arnim, the mythopoeicist of Goethe and Beethoven, then nearing sixty and as provocative as ever. But her spirit apparently proved too indefinable for Marx"s skeptical taste. He wrote a poem mocking her: The child, who, as you know, once wrote to Goethe, In order to point out that he might love her, The child was at the theater one day; A Uniform advanced her way And, with a smile, his eye on her did rest.

"Sir, Bettina wishes to suggest Her curly head to lean upon That choice supply of wondrous brawn."

The Uniform, quite dryly, then replied: "Bettina, let desire be your guide!"

"Fine," she said, "you know, my little mouse, On my head there"s not a single louse!"

The poem was called "Newfangled Romanticism."1 Marx"s doggerel, perhaps, marks the point where Romanticism became a fad, but, by that point, Romanticism had already left its indelible mark. The Romantics were dedicated to bringing back into art the inexplicably sublime, which they thought had been bled out by the Enlightenment"s excessive rationality. They were anything but timid: for a musical exemplar, the Romantics drafted the most singular and dynamic thing around-Beethoven"s Fifth. Both symphony and school would benefit from the a.s.sociation, their fame and influence boosted to ever new heights.

The Romantics heard in Beethoven"s music a representation of a limitless beyond; a result, paradoxically, of Beethoven being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Beethoven was already the greatest composer of an era in which it was suddenly decided that composers were eligible for greatness; he was specializing in instrumental music just when instrumental music made a worst-to-first leap in the aesthetic standings. And, unusually for such shifts of intellectual ground, Beethoven"s transformation from an heir of the Cla.s.sical tradition to a G.o.dfather of the Romantic tradition can be traced to a single source: a review of the Fifth Symphony in the July 4 and 10, 1810, issues of the leading German-language music magazine of the time, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. If Beethoven"s Fifth marks the birth of music as philosophical artifact, the midwife was the reviewer, E. T. A. Hoffmann.

To reconnoiter the Romantic era, its progenitors and propagandists, its crusaders and discontents, is not just an idle historical exercise; the Romantic era never really ended. The free-for-all of individualism, mysticism, and nationalism we loosely gather under the banner of the Romantic aesthetic became so ingrained in Western civilization"s everyday a.s.sumptions about the relationship between art, creator, performer, and audience, that we don"t even notice it anymore. Every time a singer-songwriter is praised for projecting autobiographical authenticity; every time a movie star expresses the desire for a project that"s "more personal"; every time a flop is subsequently recategorized as a before-its-time masterpiece-all these are reverberations of the bombsh.e.l.l of Romanticism, and one of its preeminent delivery systems was Beethoven"s Fifth.

BEETHOVEN"S CURIOSITY kept him current with the Romantics, with the likes of Schiller and Schlegel and Fichte and Herder, but in his Tagebuch, alongside pa.s.sages from Romantic literary efforts, the only contemporary philosophy Beethoven saw fit to copy down was of the previous generation, that of Immanuel Kant: "It is not the chance confluence of ... atoms that has formed the world; innate powers and laws that have their source in wisest Reason are the unchangeable basis of that order."2 To be sure, Beethoven was quoting Kant the forerunner of Naturphilosophie, not Kant the defender of rationalism, but it"s still a reminder that Beethoven was adopted by Romanticism, and not the other way around. Beethoven"s reference was, maybe, partly nostalgic: Kant"s Critique of Pure Reason, the high point of the Aufklarung, the German Enlightenment, came out when Beethoven was eleven, and Beethoven"s early education in Bonn included a healthy serving of Enlightenment zwieback.

Kant revamped his life and personality in order to write his trio of Critiques, turning from a gregarious wit (and sometime card sharp) to a man whose habits were so particular and fixed that Konigsberg housewives, it was said, set their clocks by his daily walk. The Critiques made Kant famous, and an in-demand teacher, but by the time he died, in 1804-the same year Beethoven sketched his first ideas for the Fifth Symphony-his philosophy was already being autopsied by the next generation, the Romantics. Nevertheless, Kant made the Romantic movement possible by his sheer competence; the Critiques pushed the rationalist program as far as it could go, and it was at that boundary that the Romantics found their intellectual focus. Where Kant ran out of road was exactly where Hoffmann and the rest of the Romantics would locate the greatness of Beethoven"s Fifth.

Kant ran out of road trying to critique aesthetics. His Critique of Judgement followed the more well-known Critiques of pure reason and practical reason (i.e., ethics). The half of the Critique of Judgement dealing with aesthetics is not exactly the watertight freighter you might expect from the author of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant expends a lot of effort distinguishing between "free beauty," that is, beauty that is perceived without any intermediary concepts, and "dependent beauty," beauty based on comparison with some preexisting concept in the subject"s mind. Only a perception of free beauty qualifies as a true aesthetic judgment; if there"s an intervening concept, then the subject is merely judging what is agreeable or functionally good. In Kant"s definition: "The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally."3 But, of course, only the perceiving subject could know whether their judgment is concept free and therefore aesthetically valid, and Kant admits that the perceiving subject is an unreliable witness, often unaware that a perception of beauty is based on a concept. That makes it difficult to tell whether an aesthetic judgment can be universally valid, which is Kant"s ultimate goal. We can all too easily fool ourselves into mistakenly believing that dependent beauty is free, as when Kant takes in a seemingly spontaneous concert: Even a bird"s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to be richer for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes.... Yet here most likely our sympathy with the mirth of a dear little creature is confused with the beauty of its song, for if exactly imitated by man (as has been sometimes done with the notes of the nightingale) it would strike our ear as wholly dest.i.tute of taste.4 In other words, we could consider what one thought to be a yellowhammer"s song and consider it free beauty, only to have to backpedal furiously to dependent beauty once we realized it was only the opening of Beethoven"s Fifth Symphony. In Kant"s opinion, we were simply misleading ourselves from the get-go ("our sympathy" confused with the song"s beauty). Nonetheless, Kant goes on to claim that aesthetic judgments can, actually, be universally valid, basically by engaging in a little rhetorical second-dealing and hoping his sleight of hand is good enough that you don"t really notice. And it is pretty good: The judgement of taste exacts agreement from every one; and a person who describes something as beautiful insists that every one ought to give the object in question his approval and follow suit in describing it as beautiful....We are suitors for agreement from every one else, because we are fortified with a ground common to all. Further, we would be able to count on this agreement, provided we were always a.s.sured of the correct subsumption of the case under that ground as the rule of approval.5 To wit: whenever anybody makes an aesthetic judgment, they are also a.s.serting that their judgment should be accepted by everybody. So the fact that we all make aesthetic judgments means we all believe that such judgments should be universal. Which means (and here"s where you need to keep an eye on those cards) such judgments can be universal, even if the judging individual can never be sure if a given judgment is even valid. Kant may not be able to pinpoint it, but, like fifty million Beethoven fans that can"t be wrong, if we all a.s.sume the possibility of a universally valid aesthetic judgment, it must be out there somewhere.

For Kant, an aesthetic judgment is not something you do, it"s something that happens to you, and the philosophical circle to be squared is in knowing that such a judgment is, in fact, happening.6 And that"s because Kant needs to preserve the human ability to judge even if it goes against one"s emotions or senses. At its heart, Kant"s philosophy is all about freedom, the freedom of the individual to decide his own path. For Kant, the ultimate expression of freedom was in choosing duty over desire, in acting against mere stimulus in favor of rect.i.tude. From the Romantic point of view, he may have been a killjoy, but he was at least right to emphasize the freedom that allows joy to be killed.

As much as Kant ingeniously dresses it up, however, his a.n.a.lysis of beauty is still a weak logical link: it"s no wonder that aesthetics was a primary front along which the Romantics would a.s.sault the Enlightenment. Kant"s basic aesthetic insight hints at a path the Romantics would practically pave. Aesthetics, for Kant, doesn"t originate with the subject, but it isn"t anything intrinsic in the object perceived, either-it is, instead, the mind"s reaction to an influx of sense-data that"s too much to think about all at once. Therein lies the difference between the Enlightenment and the Romantics: Kant pools that sublime excess into the concept-stocked pond of dependent beauty, but the Romantics let it overflow all the way to the mind"s horizon, where, if you look hard enough, you might catch a glimpse of the Divine.

ONE OF THE first to catch that glimpse, the intellectual progenitor of the Sturm und Drang movement, and in turn, the Romantics, was a combative, baby-faced zealot named Johann Georg Hamann. Born in 1730, Hamann started out as a loyal Aufklarer, but in 1757, sent on a diplomatic mission to London that ultimately failed, he proceeded to indulge in a round of debauchery and dissipation. The discovery that a friend and companion was also the boy toy of a rich Englishman shocked Hamann to the core, although it is unclear whether Hamann"s shock was sparked by revulsion or jealousy.7 In any event, the experience drove Hamann to a spiritual crisis. He claimed to have had a vision, he converted to a mystical Christianity, and he spent the rest of his life attacking the prevailing rationalist philosophy for having the presumptive gall to a.n.a.lyze religious faith. (Hamann"s rationalist employer, Christoph Berens, tried to reconvert him to the Enlightenment cause with the a.s.sistance of a forty-five-year-old, still-largely-unknown Immanuel Kant. Hamann and Kant managed to remain at least casual friends, even as they mocked each other in print.) Hamann"s writings sometimes seem to be testing the surfeit-of-sense-data model of aesthetics by example, in a torrent of dense polemic. His most focused statement on creativity and genius comes in a 1762 essay, Aesthetica in nuce ("Aesthetics in a Nutsh.e.l.l"). Hamann called the essay a "rhapsody in cabbalistic prose," a fair warning of his style: bouncing from idea to idea, dotted with allusions both obvious and obscure as they bob to the surface of Hamann"s consciousness, the text peppered with footnotes both explanatory and tangentially digressive. Like a weirdly compelling cross between a haranguing street preacher and David Foster Wallace, Hamann"s prose makes a bid to break free of normal discourse and take flight on pure linguistic power. "What for others is style," he once wrote, "for me is soul."8 And that is, in a nutsh.e.l.l, Hamann"s aesthetics. To a.n.a.lyze art is to emasculate it; to separate sense from understanding is to put asunder what G.o.d has joined. "Oh for a muse like a refiner"s fire, and like a fuller"s soap!" Hamann proclaims (in a Hamann-esque mash-up of Shakespeare and the Old Testament). "She will dare to purify the natural use of the senses from the unnatural use of abstractions, which distorts our concept of things, even as it suppresses the name of the Creator and blasphemes against Him."9 Hamann"s essay is concerned with poetry, mainly, but within the cabalism is the seed of Romanticism"s elevation of instrumental music to the summit of art. Beneath Hamann"s baroque ramblings is a kernel of linguistic insight. "To speak is to translate," he writes, "from the tongue of angels into the tongue of men, that is, to translate thoughts into words-things into names-images into signs; which can be poetic or cyriological, historic or symbolic or hieroglyphic-and philosophical or characteristic."10 This was one of Hamann"s main objections to the rationalist philosophy of Kant and his ilk-a failure to realize that the mere act of formulating a philosophical system in words dimmed the divine spark, a generational loss as action was recorded into language. The idea that music expresses what language can"t-and the idea of holding that up as a virtue-follows directly from Hamann"s gist.

For Hamann, the more that art is codified under rules and concepts, the more it corrupts itself by separating it from a Nature that puts such artifice to shame. In Leser und Kunstrichter (Reader and Critic), written the same year as Aesthetica in nuce, Hamann calls Nature a beloved old grandmother. "[T]o commit incest with this grandmother is the most important commandment the Koran of the Arts preaches," he insists, "and it is not obeyed."11 In a reversal that the Romantics would take to the extreme, the audience is excluded from this loving artist-nature family circle like a third wheel.

Beethoven may not have read Hamann, but he certainly ascribed to Hamann"s idea of an una.s.sailable individual creative genius. Ferdinand Ries recalled that Beethoven rebuffed Haydn"s request for him to include "Pupil of Haydn" on the t.i.tle page of his earliest published works: "This Beethoven refused to do because, as he said, though he had taken a few lessons from Haydn, he never had learned anything from him."12 For a young composer who had arrived in Vienna to "receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn"s hands," as Count Waldstein famously put it, such a declaration of artistic independence was both an astute response to a shift in the aesthetic winds and a foreshadowing of the stubborn self-regard that would result in many an irascible-Beethoven anecdote.

But as much as he adopted the new Romantic att.i.tudes in public, to judge by the quotations in his 181216 journal, Beethoven perhaps remained privately skeptical of post-Kantian metaphysics. Kant charted human existence along dualistic longitudes: reason and faith, thought and sensation; the agenda of the irrationalists that followed Kant was to collapse those dualities into underlying union. Maybe the deaf Beethoven, so confident in his imagination but so cruelly betrayed by his own senses, took stubborn comfort in their continued separation.

SUCH WAS the atmosphere in which E. T. A. Hoffmann decisively appropriated the Fifth and its first four notes for the Romantic cause. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm in 1776, but ado

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