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

Chapter 3

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It is easy to consider a performance of Beethoven"s Fifth-or any cla.s.sical repertoire-as a notch in the belt of positive liberty, both in the way we agree to accept the authority of the score (those same first four notes, in the same order, will open every rendition) and the all-too-common atmosphere of improvement, be it moral or aesthetic. It is a short jump from the idea that Beethoven is good for us to the idea that Beethoven was a.s.serting what was good for us, whether we know it or not. Critiques of Western cla.s.sical music often echo Berlin"s critique of positive liberty-it causes us to fool ourselves into thinking we are freer than we are. Ba.s.sist and sociologist Ortiz Walton (the first African-American to perform with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, incidentally) was particularly scathing on this point: The consumer, or concertgoer, like his counterpart in the world of commerce, has been made into a pa.s.sive recipient of various sounds. He either accepts the product or rejects it, but never is he allowed to add his own creativity to it.... So even though one has heard Beethoven"s Symphony Number 5 for the hundredth time, he still keeps listening to it, claiming falsely that he hears something new every time. His partic.i.p.ation is limited to applause after the finale or occasional coughing during the section played loud enough to cover the sound.29 But, then again, music, by its very incorporeal nature, has a tendency toward negative liberty as well. The connection between music and listener brooks no restriction on interpretation; each of us can hear music as each of us pleases. One is free to pick and choose from two centuries of critical interpretation of Beethoven"s Fifth-and, possibly, reject it all-every time fate, as Schindler would have us believe, knocks at the door. Positive liberty helpfully breaks in. Negative liberty peeks through the drapes and decides if it wants to be home.

But Berlin"s two concepts of liberty actually admit a third, what Berlin calls "the retreat to the inner citadel": the carving out of some portion of one"s thought, persona, soul, that is put out of reach of the external world"s stress and strain. Berlin"s description of the conditions that give rise to such a retreat might well apply to much of Hoffmann"s life: "I am the possessor of reason and will; I conceive ends and I desire to pursue them; but if I am prevented from attaining them I no longer feel master of the situation."30 And, in fact, in a telling postscript to his review of the Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann would rework his kingdom of the infinite into such a retreat.

As with so many Europeans during the Napoleonic era, war seemed to follow Hoffmann wherever he went. In 1813, he moved to Dresden; within a month, Napoleon was bombarding the city. Hoffmann took refuge in writing, completing a long fictional dialogue called "The Poet and the Composer"; it was published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung that December. The dialogue is mostly Hoffmann"s take on the venerable operatic contest between music and poetry, as translated into Romantic terms (Hoffmann comes out in favor of a proto-Wagnerian union of both jobs in a single creator). But "The Poet and the Composer" opens with a story set in the midst of urban warfare: "The enemy was at the gates, guns thundered all around, and grenades sizzled through the air amid showers of sparks. The townsfolk, their faces white with fear, ran into their houses; the deserted streets rang with the sound of horses" hooves, as mounted patrols galloped past and with curses drove the remaining soldiers into their redoubts."

This is pure reportage on Hoffmann"s part, a glimpse of his own Dresden existence. But then Hoffmann shifts into a fantasy that reflects the escapism of creative activity (around this time, Hoffmann would note that writing "removes me from the pressures of life outside"31). And we meet someone who seems more than a little familiar: Ludwig sat in his little back room, completely absorbed and lost in the wonderful, brightly coloured world of fantasy that unfolded before him at the piano. He had just completed a symphony, in which he had striven to capture in written notation all the resonances of his innermost soul; the work sought, like Beethoven"s compositions of that type, to speak in heavenly language of the glorious wonders of that far, romantic realm in which we swoon away in inexpressible yearning.

Not Beethoven, but a name-sharing doppelganger, one whose symphony, judging by a description nearly self-plagiarized from Hoffmann"s 1810 review, is itself a double of the Fifth Symphony. But reality intrudes: Then his landlady came into the room, upbraiding him and asking how he could simply play the piano through all that anguish and distress, and whether he wanted to get himself shot dead in his garret. Ludwig did not quite follow the woman"s drift, until with a sudden crash a sh.e.l.l carried away part of the roof and shattered the window panes. Screaming and wailing the landlady ran down the stairs, while Ludwig seized the dearest thing he now possessed, the score of his symphony, and hurried after her down to the cellar.

Here the entire household was gathered. In a quite untypical fit of largesse, the wine seller who lived downstairs had made available a few dozen bottles of his best wine, and the women, fretting and fussing but as always anxiously concerned with physical sustenance and comfort, filled their sewing baskets with tasty morsels from the pantry. They ate, they drank, and their agitation and distress were soon transformed into that agreeable state in which we seek and fancy we find security in neighbourly companionship; that state in which all the petty airs and graces which propriety teaches are subsumed, as it were, into the great round danced to the irresistible beat of fate"s iron fist.32 The irresistible beat of fate"s iron fist. Hoffmann"s cellar might be the most tantalizingly plausible source of either Beethoven"s post hoc explanation of the Fifth"s opening or Schindler"s invented poeticization of it. Hoffmann, though, sets up the symphony in opposition to fate, a fate that nevertheless is irresistibly omnipresent, something you can, at best, temporarily ignore. Choose your illusion, he seems to say: either the "sublime siren voices" of art or the fancied security of "neighbourly companionship." If fate is at the door, the purpose of a symphony might just be to drown out the knocking.

In Hoffmann, then, the nineteenth-century philosophical tendencies to depersonalize and externalize both aesthetics and fate found an ideal vessel. The way he found himself buffeted by the winds of chance, politics, and war, perhaps he sensed that the one could vindicate the other, that the terror and awe of the sublime might lend an artistic redemption to the less exalted terror of life during wartime. Surrendering to art gives surrender a good name.

Here is shewn once more the idiosyncrasy of German nature, that profoundly inward gift which stamps its mark on every form by moulding it afresh from within, and thus is saved from the necessity of outward overthrow. Thus is the German no revolutionary, but a reformer....

-RICHARD WAGNER, "Beethoven"

AND THEN, a strange coda: as German nationalism went from aspirational to imperious, German Romanticism-and, with it, the resonance of the Fifth Symphony-went from mystical to messianic. By the year of the Beethoven centennial, 1870, the anxiety of the Napoleonic Wars and the idealism of the revolutions of the 1840s had been supplanted by imperial brinksmanship, as France (led by once-President, then-Emperor Napoleon III) and Prussia (guided by the conservatively pragmatic hand of Otto von Bismarck) went to war in July after much diplomatic sniping; Prussia scored a decisive upset victory, paving the way for German unification while at the same time scuttling the renascent French monarchy for good. (King Wilhelm I of Prussia was part of a large gathering that observed the Prussian victory at Sedan from a hilly vantage, "a glittering concourse of uniformed notabilities more suitable to an opera-house or a race-course than to a climactic battle which was to decide the destinies of Europe and perhaps of the world."33) Bismarck had already secured the allegiance of most of the other German-speaking states after a brief 1866 clash with the Austrian Empire; a story went around that Bismarck, who revered Beethoven, had arranged a command performance of the Fifth Symphony prior to signing the declaration of war. (The concert at which Bismarck heard the Fifth was actually a month earlier.) Also by 1870, after twelve years in exile, Richard Wagner was once again a German in good standing, albeit living in Switzerland; Wagner acquired a zealous and fortuitous fan in the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, but jealousy among the Munich court necessitated his leaving. (The composer talked the monarch out of abdicating and following him.) It was still a remarkable change of fortunes.

The 1848 revolutions had taken a full year to reach Dresden, where Wagner was, at the time, kapellmeister of the Royal Saxon Court-patronage that did not keep Wagner from supporting the revolution wholeheartedly. He had been radicalized by August Rockel, a fellow conductor and die-hard activist who lost his own musical position after advocating armed uprising one too many times. Rockel was also connected to Beethoven-his father, Joseph August Rockel, had been Beethoven"s Florestan for the second try at Fidelio; his aunt was, possibly, the dedicatee of "Fur Elise."34 Rockel introduced Wagner to Mikhail Bakunin, who was going from revolution to revolution, hiding out in Dresden after escaping from Prague-"a really amiable and tender-hearted man," in Wagner"s estimation.35 In his autobiography, Wagner gave the impression of having been pulled into the uprising by the undertow of the mob ("I suddenly became conscious of the cry raised on all sides: "To the barricades! to the barricades!" Driven by a mechanical impulse I followed the stream of people"36), but he had, in fact, helped plan the rebellion, even ordering a shipment of grenades. The Dresden revolution collapsed in violence, and Wagner was forced to flee, first to Leipzig, then to Paris. He was lucky; Rockel was captured and, after his death sentence was commuted, spent more than a decade in prison.

During his exile, Wagner worked on his ma.s.sive operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and completed the equally expansive Tristan und Isolde, but neither of them would be performed until after his exile ended. His marriage collapsed; his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a silk-merchant patron, was in all likelihood unconsummated. He wrote what would prove his most wildly influential essay, "Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft" ("The Artwork of the Future"), and his most wildly offensive, "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in Music"), but neither attracted much initial notice. A beloved pet parrot, who had just learned to whistle a sc.r.a.p of the Fifth Symphony, suddenly died. ("Ah!" he wrote a friend, "if I could say to you what has died for me in this dear creature!!"37) Wagner was also introduced to the profoundly pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer had published his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, in 1818. He scorned Hegel and the German Idealists by rewinding back to Kant; then scorned Kant by rejecting one of Kant"s fundamental concepts, the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, the object as it exists beyond the context of our senses. Kant thought the thing-in-itself was, by definition, unknowable; Schopenhauer thought that our inner experience, our desires, our endeavor to continue to exist-which he called the "will"-contained knowledge of things-in-themselves. (His specific formulation was that individual wills were facets of a single, all-knowing Will.) But the individual will was fundamentally insatiable, forever denying other individual wills, forever unfulfilled by its real-world translation into "representations," forever making life a vale of frustration and suffering. Schopenhauer prescribed ascetic contemplation-the inner citadel could be, if not a refuge from the will, at least a neutral high ground from which to observe the hostilities.

It"s easy to see why the Wagner of the 1850s, a one-man band of unfulfilled desire, would be so strongly attracted to Schopenhauer"s bleak a.n.a.lysis. But the attraction persisted even as Wagner started fulfilling his desires on a regular basis. For, unlike Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer had tried to come to terms with music"s power in a way that Wagner found tellingly sympathetic-and malleable. Wagner"s essay upon the Beethoven centennial, as much about Schopenhauer as Beethoven, reimagines both figures as stand-ins for Wagner himself; and Schopenhauer"s aesthetics are used to define Beethoven (and, by extension, Wagner) as the epitome of German-ness.

For Schopenhauer, music, "since it pa.s.ses over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phenomenal world"-that perpetually miserable domain-"positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts." Music "is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself."38 Wagner takes that ball and runs with it; if music furnishes direct access to the will, then the composer must possess a unique access to "the Essence of things that eludes the forms of outer knowledge."39 The terms are Schopenhauer"s (and, though Schopenhauer would have been loath to admit it, Hegel"s), but the empowerment is Wagner"s: "the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as the universal Will."40 Schopenhauer still might have agreed: "It is just this universality that belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness," he wrote, "that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows."41 But for Wagner, that meant that the creation of music absolved the composer"s exercise of will from Schopenhauer"s ascetic demands. "[B]reaking-down the floodgates of Appearance," he insists, "must necessarily call forth in the inspired musician a state of ecstasy wherewith no other can compare." Such ecstasy is surpa.s.sed only by that of saints, and only because saints do not mediate between their ecstasy and "a perpetually recurrent state of individual consciousness" the way a composer does. That the composer takes on the suffering that results from such alternation, a "penalty for the state of inspiration in which he so unutterably entrances us, might make us hold the musician in higher reverence than other artists, ay, well-nigh give him claim to rank as holy."42 And none holier than Beethoven, who had one crucial advantage in his access to the universal Will: his deafness.

Like the blind seer Tiresias (who, in one legend, was partially requited for his blindness when Athena opened his ears, giving him the ability to understand birdsong), Beethoven becomes a musical prophet, "the deaf musician who now, untroubled by life"s uproar, but listens to his inner harmonies, now from his depths but speaks to that world-for it has nothing more to tell him. So is genius freed from all outside it, at home forever with and in itself."43 Wagner locates that freed genius within very specific borders, however: We know that it was the "German spirit," so terribly dreaded and hated "across the mountains" [i.e., France], that stepped into the field of Art, as everywhere else, to heal this artfully induced corruption of the European race. As in other realms we have hailed our Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and the rest, as our rescuers from that corruption, to-day we have to shew that in this musician Beethoven, who spoke the purest speech of every nation, the German spirit redeemed the spirit of mankind from deep disgrace.44 Wagner"s overtones of religious trial would become a running motive in Beethoven commentary; as noted by musicologist K. M. Knittel, "writers after Wagner privileged pieces in which [Beethoven"s] suffering seemed to manifest itself most clearly."45 Edward Dannreuther, a German-born pianist who became one of Wagner"s great champions in Britain, a.s.serted that "Beethoven is, in the best sense of the word, an ethical, a religious teacher."46 Sir George Grove, in his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, could write how Beethoven"s life "formed a Valley of the Shadow of Death such as few men have been called to traverse."47 When Sir Oliver Lodge, physicist, wireless pioneer, Fabian socialist, and paranormal enthusiast, published a catechism attempting to reconcile science and Christianity, he explained the incarnation of the Divine in man with this a.n.a.logy: "The spirit of Beethoven is incarnate in his music; and he that hath heard the Fifth Symphony hath heard Beethoven."48 Once more I"m in the ever-juvenile condition of a debutant ... age, with its fruits, absolutely declines to set in.

-RICHARD WAGNER WAGNER COMPLETES the full turn of the wheel from the Enlightenment to the Romantic, from controlled logic to subconscious fantasy, from a conviction that reason and rationality can explain the human condition, to the aesthetic ideal represented in the purposefully incomprehensible musical strivings of a deaf composer.

Wagner"s deification of deafness came during an outbreak of unusually drama-free circ.u.mstances in his life: living in the Swiss countryside, far from urban intrigues, with his longtime mistress (and mother of his children) Cosima von Bulow. In 1870, Wagner would finally marry Cosima, Wagner"s first wife having died, Hans von Bulow having granted Cosima a divorce, and Cosima having converted from Catholicism. As Knittel concludes, "[Wagner] was as "deaf" to the troubles of the world as he could ever have hoped to be."49 The isolation, nevertheless, was not entirely placid, as Cosima related to her diary: Friday, February 18 [1870] Today, children, I committed a grave wrong; I offended our friend, and since this is something I wish never to do again, regarding it as the blackest of sins, I use this instance to identify the pitifulness of our human nature. We were speaking of Beethoven"s C Minor Symphony, and I willfully insisted on a tempo which I felt to be right. That astonished and offended R., and now we are both suffering-I for having done it, he for having experienced willfulness at my hands.50 Beethoven"s metronome strikes again. But the opportunity to instruct the children is in keeping with Wagner"s take on Beethoven"s music. Cosima again: [January 20, 1873] ... R. says he would like to change the time signature of the first movement [of Beethoven"s Fifth] into 4/4 because it is so awkward to beat as written, and the nuances also suffered in this rhythm-it gave rise to too many accents; Beethoven, he thinks, must have felt that people would go wrong in 4/4 and thus wrote it as if for children.51 In his centenary essay, Wagner raised Beethoven to Romantic majority by equating Romantic sublimity with a child"s innocence: whether in Beethoven"s folklike melodic ideas, "in which he recognised that n.o.bility of innocence he dreamt of"; in the Sixth Symphony, in which "the world regains the innocence of its childhood"; or in the "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony, "the childlike innocence of which ... breathes upon us as with a saintly breath."

Beethoven"s goal, in Wagner"s estimation, was "to find the archetype of innocence," an innocence Wagner hears in the Fifth"s finale, "where the naivety of the simple march-tune ... appeals to us the more as the whole symphony now seems to have been nothing but a straining of our attention for it." Much of that straining, of course, consists of Beethoven"s working out of the implications of the opening motive, an intricate operation that might seem more the result of technical plasticity than intuitive inspiration. But Wagner is quick to counter that hearing is not necessarily believing: [T]he C-minor Symphony appeals to us as one of those rarer conceptions of the master"s in which a stress of bitter pa.s.sion, the fundamental note of the commencement, mounts rung by rung through consolation, exaltation, till it breaks into the joy of conscious victory.... [T]hough it might be doubted whether the purity of Musical Conception would not ultimately suffer by the pursuance of this path, through its leading to the dragging-in of fancies altogether foreign to the spirit of Music, yet it cannot be denied that the master was in nowise prompted by a truant fit of aesthetic speculation, but simply and solely by an ideal instinct sprung from Music"s ownest realm.

That ideal instinct, Wagner goes on, "coincided with the struggle to rescue from every plausible objection raised by his experience of life the conscious belief in human nature"s original goodness."52 The experience of life is an objection to innocence; to rescue it is to rewind life"s advance.

In his final nationalistic peroration, Wagner even has the effrontery to mingle such innocence with the then-raging Franco-Prussian War: And beside [German] valour"s victories in this wondrous 1870 no loftier trophy can be set, than the memory of our great Beethoven, who was born to the German Folk one hundred years ago. Whither our arms are urging now, to the primal seat of "insolent fashion," there had his genius begun already the n.o.blest conquest: what our thinkers, our poets, in toilsome transposition, had only touched as with a half-heard word, the Beethovenian Symphony had stirred to its deepest core: the new religion, the world-redeeming gospel of sublimest innocence, was there already understood as by ourselves.53 To double-book German military triumph with German cultural triumph was certainly an inspired move by the German Geist. ("The war is Beethoven"s jubilee," Cosima remarked to Richard.54) But Wagner"s insistence on Beethoven"s youthful qualities was a glimpse of a juvenile strain that would become more and more prominent as the German Confederation turned into Imperial Germany-from Ludwig II"s expensive habit of building fairy-tale castles throughout Bavaria to the destructive childishness of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Then again, petulance was never far from the surface in nineteenth-century Europe. In 1845, there was a Beethoven Festival in Bonn, attended by representatives from throughout Europe, featuring the unveiling of a statue of the city"s most famous son. Franz Liszt, then at the height of his celebrity, had financially rescued the entire project. The King of Prussia escorted Queen Victoria into the concert hall for the festival"s finale, after which followed a huge banquet. If the concert was unsuccessful-long and nearly devoid of Beethoven, apart from the Egmont Overture and a bit of the Archduke Trio, quoted by Liszt in a specially composed cantata-the dinner was worse. Sir George Smart, Beethoven"s English champion, had also made the journey to Bonn; he recorded in his diary that, at the dinner, Liszt made a toast in which he "complimented all nations except the French ... this omission caused dissatisfaction among the French, who, with the Jews, are not popular here." (Liszt"s oversight was probably unintentional, a result of giving his speech in German, a language he was less than comfortable with.) The hall was soon consumed by outbursts of recrimination. "This row was noisy," Smart recorded, "and fearing we might get into a sc.r.a.pe we left the Room." Smart saw the Jewish-born Ignaz Moscheles-Beethoven"s old colleague, who had translated Schindler"s biography into English-leave the banquet, dismayed by anti-Semitic comments. "I am ashamed of my Countrymen!" Moscheles exclaimed.55 Liszt wasn"t invited back to Bonn for the Beethoven centennial in 1870-the city fathers had been too scandalized when Liszt"s ex-mistress, the Irish-born dancer Lola Montez, turned up uninvited at the 1845 banquet, drank too much, and began dancing on a table at the height of the uproar.56 Thus it was that Liszt ended up composing a second Beethoven cantata for the city of Weimar.

The old text, by Bernhard Wolff, was "a sort of Magnificat of human genius conquered by G.o.d," in Liszt"s judgment.57 But the new text, by Adolf Stern, cast Beethoven as a newborn divine, reminding us of "the old legend from distant, pious times of a festival day announced by a star": The star has ascended in this winter"s night, blessed is he for whom the golden ray of splendor lights the way. Hail Beethoven, Hail!58 And heaven and nature sing.

a.s.sociations

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

-RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Self-Reliance" (1841) IN 1840, John Sullivan Dwight was ordained as pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts. The charge at his ordination was given by William Ellery Channing, the leading theologian of Unitarianism; Channing"s 1819 sermon "Unitarian Christianity," a clarion call for tempering faith in the fire of reason, sparked the emergence of American Unitarianism as a national movement.

Now, near the end of his life, Channing gave Dwight the sort of paradoxical advice that elders often give the young as evidence of their hard-won wisdom. "It may be said, that religion relates to the Infinite; that its great object is the Incomprehensible G.o.d; that human life is surrounded with abysses of mystery and darkness; that the themes on which the minister is to speak, stretch out beyond the power of imagination ... that at times he only catches glimpses of truth, and cannot set it forth in all its proportions," Channing orated. "All this is true. But it is also true, that a minister speaks to be understood; and if he cannot make himself intelligible, he should hold his peace."1 Within two years, Dwight had left the ministry and was living at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist utopian commune just outside Boston. When Lowell Mason"s Boston Academy of Music performed Beethoven"s Fifth in 1842, Dwight reviewed it, in the process becoming one of the country"s first serious critics of cla.s.sical music.

The subject is announced with startling directness at the outset, in three short emphatic repet.i.tions of one note falling on the third below, which is held out some time; and then the same phrase echoed, only one degree lower. This grotesque and almost absurd pa.s.sage, coming in so abruptly, like a mere freak or idle dallying with sounds, fills the mind with a strange uncertainty, as it does the ear.

Where the opening theme embarks on its ping-pong of imitation, Dwight glimpsed an abyss of mystery and darkness. "It is as if a fearful secret, some truth of mightiest moment, startled the stillness where we were securely walking, and the heavens and the earth and h.e.l.l were sending back the sound thereof from all quarters, "deep calling to deep," and yet no word of explanation," Dwight preached. "What is it? What can all this mean?"2 Dwight"s cla.s.smate at Harvard Divinity School, future abolitionist Theodore Parker, wasn"t surprised that Dwight didn"t make it as a reverend. Dwight, he said, often "mistook the indefinite for the Infinite."3 Out of such metaphysical optimism would sprout an American cult of Beethoven.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING"S nephew, William Henry Channing, was, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the catalyst for Transcendentalism. "Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840 [Emerson gets the date wrong; it was actually 1836] with George Ripley, to the point whether it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful people together, and make society that deserved the name."4 Emerson took some pains to paint a casual, accidental air around the founding myth of the intellectual school he would eventually become identified with. The circle, in Emerson"s telling, would have been "surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism.... From that time meetings were held for conversation, with very little form, from house to house, of people engaged in studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter it flowed. Nothing could be less formal."5 And yet, Emerson admitted, members of the group not only produced their own publication, The Dial (which "enjoyed its obscurity for four years," Emerson insisted), but also, in 1841, purchased nearly two hundred acres in West Roxbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, inaugurating the social experiment of Brook Farm. The driving force behind Brook Farm was the above-mentioned George Ripley, like Channing and Dwight, a Unitarian minister. The first meeting of what would be called the Transcendentalist Club (the name "given n.o.body knows by whom," according to Emerson) was held at Ripley"s house.

Transcendentalism always resisted pithy definition; another Transcendental Club member joked that the group referred to themselves as "like-minded; I suppose because no two of us thought alike."6 But the movement, everyone involved agreed, was heavily influenced by German Romanticism-Germany being to American intellectuals of the time what Paris would be to their 1920s counterparts. The rendition was more enthusiastic than systematic.

Probably because it transmitted much of the aura and reputation of German Romanticism without any specificity, Beethoven"s music was a central reference point. Lindsay Swift, an early historian of Brook Farm, insisted that, if "the transplantation of German ideas [is] to be held of much account in the simple story of Boston Transcendentalism, the name of Beethoven must enter any reckoning which includes Goethe and Kant. No external influence has been so potent or lasting in Boston as the genuine love for Beethoven, and for the few other names cl.u.s.tering around the greater genius."7 Even Emerson, not much of a music lover, recognized Beethoven"s importance. "The music of Beethoven," he wrote, "is said by those who understand it, to labor with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before."8 Beethoven was part of the Transcendentalist ethos from the start, probably introduced by Margaret Fuller, whose awesome erudition and willed self-a.s.surance bewitched and bothered a fair portion of the circle. ("I find no intellect comparable to my own,"9 she once posited, and she may have been right.) Fuller, drawing on accounts by Goethe and Bettina von Arnim, painted Beethoven in Transcendental colors, shaded with the dialectic: "He traveled inward, downward, till downward was shown to be the same as upward, for the centre was pa.s.sed."10 Fuller, recruited by Emerson to edit The Dial, could have been echoing another Transcendentalist-Bronson Alcott, a pioneering educator, a pa.s.sionate (and sometimes impractical) activist, and, if the encomiums of the rest of the Transcendental Club are to be believed, the true heart of the circle. Alcott"s "Orphic Sayings," spread over three issues of The Dial, were aphorisms in the German Romantic vein, only more impenetrable; parodies of Alcott"s gnomic utterances became a favorite way to mock the New England intellectuals. But Alcott nevertheless came close to both defining the Transcendental ideal and the image of Beethoven they fashioned to match it: We need, what Genius is unconsciously seeking, and, by some daring generalization of the universe, shall a.s.suredly discover, a spiritual calculus, a novum organon, whereby nature shall be divined in the soul, the soul in G.o.d, matter in spirit, polarity resolved into unity; and that power which pulsates in all life, animates and builds all organizations, shall manifest itself as one universal deific energy, present alike at the outskirts and centre of the universe, whose centre and circ.u.mference are one; omniscient, omnipotent, self-subsisting, uncontained, yet containing all things in the unbroken synthesis of its being.11 George Ripley himself tried to sum up the Transcendentalists" philosophy in a letter to his Purchase Street Church congregation: "[T]hey maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, nor historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all-the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure-to perceive spiritual truth when distinctly presented."12 The letter was a last-ditch effort to justify his socially conscious preaching to his increasingly suspicious parishioners, but three months later Ripley tendered his resignation. After giving his farewell sermon in March of 1841, he moved to Brook Farm. Dwight, who was friends with Ripley-Ripley had also preached at Dwight"s Northampton ordination-turned up at Brook Farm in November.

RIPLEY ORGANIZED Brook Farm as a joint-stock company, selling shares for $500 each and promising each shareholder 5 percent interest. Emerson declined to join, as did Margaret Fuller, though both would visit often. (One who did sign on was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who initially enjoyed seeing himself as a man of the soil-"Ownest wife, thy husband has milked a cow!!!" he informed his fiancee.13 But, resistant to Brook Farm"s idealism and disappointed in the return on investment, Hawthorne soon left.) Dwight tolerated being a farmhand; he rather more enjoyed his work in Brook Farm"s school, where he taught Latin and, naturally, music. The curriculum, based around singing and discussion, was heavy on Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and included field trips that took advantage of the burgeoning vogue for the latter. Dwight would lead parties into Boston "to drink in the symphonies, and then walk back the whole way, seven miles at night, and unconscious of fatigue, carrying home with them a new good genius, beautiful and strong, to help them through the next day"s labors," according to George William Curtis, who became famous as a writer, public speaker, and government reformer. Curtis was a teenager at Brook Farm, and formed a lifelong friendship with Dwight. In later life Curtis recalled those walks, the radicals descending into moral peril for spiritual sustenance like musical Dantes: As the last sounds died away, the group of Brook Farmers, who had ventured from the Arcadia of co-operation into the Gehenna of compet.i.tion, gathered up their unsoiled garments and departed. Out of the city, along the bare Tremont road, through green Roxbury and bowery Jamaica Plain, into the deeper and lonelier country, they trudged on, chatting and laughing and singing, sharing the enthusiasm of Dwight, and unconsciously taught by him that the evening had been greater than they knew.14 If Wagner"s brand of nationalist mysticism might be characterized as Hegelianism without socialism, the American energies that produced Brook Farm were socialism without Hegelianism, or at least without the Young Hegelians" ambitious fabric-of-history scope. The Dial extolled Brook Farm"s back-to-the-land ethos ("The lowing of cattle is the natural ba.s.s to the melody of human voices") but reserved the benefits for a certain breed of the intellectually aspirant: "Minds incapable of refinement will not be attracted into this a.s.sociation. It is an Ideal Community, and only to the ideally inclined will it be attractive."15 The commune would, indeed, evolve in response to idealized programs rather than practical concerns. The first shift was toward Fourierism, named for Charles Fourier, a French socialist who came up with a scheme for remaking society that was equal parts far-seeing tolerance and numerological eccentricity. He proposed reorganizing human society into communities called phalanxes, each with an ideal population of 1,620-a number Fourier arrived at by categorizing twelve kinds of human pa.s.sions, which could combine into 810 types of human character, which he then multiplied by two (male and female). Each community would be centered around a phalanstery, a large multipurpose building for which Fourier helpfully provided a detailed architectural layout.

At his most outlandish, Fourier displayed an imagination worthy of science fiction. He a.s.signed personalities to the heavenly bodies: the moon, for example, was a dead mummy that would eventually give way to five living replacements. At its peak, society would reach a stage of Harmony, at which time, Fourier infamously insisted, the oceans would turn to lemonade. Friedrich Engels recommended Fourier, despite his ignorance of Hegelian theory, as a tonic against the tendency of Hegelianism toward arrogant solemnity. "If it has to be," Engels wrote, "I shall prefer to believe with the cheerful Fourier in all these stories rather than in the realm of the absolute spirit, where there is no lemonade at all."16 Fourier"s ideas were brought to America by his student Alfred Brisbane, who soft-pedaled Fourier"s more extravagant fancies; still, enough remained, especially the obsessive streams of impossibly precise numbers, to make even Brisbane"s watered-down Fourierism off-the-wall by modern mainstream standards. And yet some of the leading minds of the day-such as New York writer, publisher, and activist Horace Greeley and, in turn, Ripley, Dwight, and others in the Transcendentalist circle-became, for a time, dedicated Fourierists.

Fourier himself had lived through the French Revolution; the meticulous detail of his prospectus can be read as a reaction to that idealistic descent into chaos. In America, though, his prescriptive zeal was something to empower individual freedom. Personal liberty wasn"t dependent on status, luck, or power; all one had to do was follow directions. "Life brings to each his task," Emerson wrote, "and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,-all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms ... begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step."17 The appeal of Fourier in America wasn"t just his harmonious destination, but that traditional New England holy grail: a turn-by-turn guide for getting there, a path spelled out so that anyone could follow it.

Hand in hand with Fourier"s social theories came the religious speculations of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In his fifties, while working on an anatomical study called The Economy of the Animal Kingdom (attempting to demonstrate that the soul resided in the blood, since it penetrated the entire body), the well-connected eighteenth-century Swedish gentleman-scientist began having vivid dreams, which soon manifested themselves as revelatory experiences. The Lord himself appeared to him, Swedenborg claimed, anointing him His messenger, letting him travel freely among heaven and h.e.l.l, conversing with spirits along the way.

The theology that resulted from Swedenborg"s fact-finding tours of the next world offered a vision-equal parts Eastern religious traditions and proto-Hegelianism-of mankind graduating from its current materialist existence to a higher, spiritual plane. A connection to Fourier"s prospective Harmony was easily made by Transcendental enthusiasts. (Emerson included Swedenborg in his 1850 book Representative Men, along with, among others, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe.) Swedenborg combined the prospect of enlightenment with a prescription of charitable work in a way that appealed to Brook Farmers Ripley and Dwight, both of whom had abandoned the pulpit in search of more concrete action. "Faith without charity is not faith," Swedenborg insisted. "The separation of charity and faith coincides also with the separation of flesh and blood; for the blood separated from the flesh is gore and becomes corruption, and the flesh separated from the blood by degrees grows putrid and produces worms."18 What"s more, both Fourier and Swedenborg preached tolerance. Fourier was, in essence, an early feminist (one factor behind the proposed phalansteries was to free women from the tyranny of the house), and also thought society should be considerate toward alternative s.e.xualities; Swedenborg believed that the New Jerusalem, the final epoch of Christianity, would most likely take hold in Africa, since Africans were "more interior"19 and thus more receptive to enlightenment-a stance that, n.o.ble-savage overtones aside, fit nicely with the Transcendentalists" abolitionist bent.

Encouraged by Greeley and Brisbane, Brook Farm converted to Fourierism and Swedenborgianism, rebranding themselves from an a.s.sociation to a Phalanx, and taking over editing and printing of the main Fourierist newspaper in America, now renamed The Harbinger. Not all the Brook Farmers went along with change, but Dwight certainly did. He became The Harbinger"s music critic, and promptly began pouring his Beethovenian wine into Fourierist bottles, filing composers under Fourier"s various human pa.s.sions: Handel represented Universal Friendship; Haydn, Paternity; and Mozart, Love. Beethoven was Ambition: "the aspiring Promethean spirit, struggling for release from monotony and falseness, sick of the actual, subduing every sincere sadness by heroic triumphs in art, which are like tears brightening into joys of most rapturous, inspired visions of a coming Era, which shall consummate the Unity of all things."20 Such prose indicates how radical-by-a.s.sociation, at the time, Beethoven"s reputation could and possibly should be considered. To sum up: Dwight was living on a commune, espousing a far-out political system, delving into a mystical religion. He was, as much as one could be in nineteenth-century America, a hippie. And Beethoven"s symphonies were his music of choice. Lest anyone mistake the connection, Dwight spelled it out: "In religion we have Swedenborg; in social economy, Fourier; in music, Beethoven."21 The new idols proved false. With a huge part of the farm"s income siphoned off to fund the construction of a Fourierist phalanstery, commune-wide economizing took a toll on morale; when the nearly finished phalanstery burned to the ground, in March 1846, Brook Farm was, essentially, financially ruined. "The idealists lingered last, loath to leave a spot endeared by so many a.s.sociations, hallowed by so many hopes," wrote one chronicler. "One of the last to go, one of the saddest of heart, one of the most self-sacrificing through it all, was John S. Dwight. It may be truly said that Brook Farm dies in music."22 At least Brook Farm could measure its span in years; Bronson Alcott, the Orphic idealist, saw his own commune, a ninety-acre tract in Harvard, Ma.s.sachusetts, dubbed "Fruitlands" ("We rise with early dawn, begin the day with cold bathing, succeeded by a music lesson, and then a chaste repast"23) fail after only seven months. His daughter Louisa, after writing her wildly successful novel Little Women, revisited the Fruitlands fiasco in a thinly disguised 1873 satire called "Transcendental Wild Oats." Her humor was cutting, but her postmortem, from its Gilded Age vantage, was sympathetic to the fragility of the radical Transcendentalists" idealism in a society increasingly governed by capitalist ambition: The world was not ready for Utopia yet, and those who attempted to found it only got laughed at for their pains.... To live for one"s principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and n.o.ble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians.24 Annie Russell Marble, the daughter of one of Emerson"s favorite ministers and herself a literary critic, was sa.s.sier, calling the Transcendentalists "a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash."25 Nathaniel Hawthorne also put a sardonic spin on his Brook Farm memories in his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance. D. H. Lawrence summarized The Blithedale Romance in pithy style: "[T]he famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp.... Of course they fell out like cats and dogs. Couldn"t stand one another. And all the music they made was the music of their quarrelling."26 In Hawthorne"s case, the rue is also at least a little self-directed. He had left Brook Farm after only five months; even before his final departure, he wrote, "It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an a.s.sociate of the community: there has been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to a.s.sume my name. But this spectre was not myself."27 In the form of Miles Coverdale, the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne would be rebuked for that by the novel"s dark feminine presence, Zen.o.bia (modeled, many thought, on Margaret Fuller): "Have you given up Blithedale forever?" I inquired.

"Why should you think so?" asked she.

"I cannot tell," answered I; "except that it appears all like a dream that we were ever there together."

"It is not so to me," said Zen.o.bia. "I should think it a poor and meagre nature that is capable of but one set of forms, and must convert all the past into a dream merely because the present happens to be unlike it."

Arriving for the interview, Coverdale had "heard a rich, and, as it were, triumphant burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zen.o.bia"s character, although heretofore I had known nothing of her skill upon the instrument."28 Beethoven"s Fifth, maybe? Hawthorne doesn"t say.

SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS resulting from the off-the-shelf adoption of Romantic ideas by the Transcendentalists and their progeny might have derailed thinkers less confident of the exceptional nature of the American experience. Dwight"s writings on Beethoven manage to evoke both the most progressive strains of Transcendentalism and the American habit of co-opting transcendence in the service of more worldly pursuits. In 1851, Dwight produced a survey of "The Sentiment of Various Musical Composers" for the Philadelphia-based Sartain"s Magazine (he liked it enough to recycle it for an early issue of Dwight"s Journal of Music a year later). Beethoven, the best, is saved for last-in terms that make him into an honorary American: "With a many-sidedness like Shakespeare"s, there is still one pervading sentiment in all the music of Beethoven. It has more of the prophetic character than any other. The progressive spirit of this age, the expansive social instinct of these new times, accepts it by a strange sympathy. Many a young music-loving American jumps the previous steps of training, through the taste for Haydn, Mozart, Hummel, &c., and with his whole soul loves at once Beethoven."29 Dwight"s young Americans can be read as model Romantic rule-breakers, but the sentiment could just as well have been invoked in the service of wealth. (Around the same time, the Reverend Darius Mead of New York could rationalize the country"s expanding trade as an aid in the conversion of distant heathens: "The love of lucre-the adventurous spirit of Discovery and Commerce-these agencies, supported and strengthened by rapid improvements in the arts and sciences of civilized and christianized society, have already brought the ends of the earth together, and the valleys are indeed "exalted." "30 Prophetic character, indeed.) Dwight goes on: It is because Beethoven is, to speak by correspondence, like the seventh note in the musical scale. His music is full of that deep, aspiring pa.s.sion, which in its false exercise we call ambition, but which at bottom is most generous, most reverent, and yearns for perfect harmony and order. The demands of the human soul are insatiable-infinite.31 Dwight recycles his customary cross-breeding of Fourierism and Swedenborgianism with the Hoffmann image of Beethoven. But note the cautious qualification of the Fourierist pa.s.sion of ambition. And, exported outside the old, specific Harbinger contexts, the rhetoric can seem to manifest any number of destinies: "So long as anything is not ours, we are poor. So long as any sympathy is denied us, we are bereft and solitary. We are to have all and realize all by a true state of harmony with all. Is not this the meaning of Beethoven"s music?"32 Ambition is generosity; possession ("to have all") is harmony. (One can imagine a stereotypical plutocrat gravely nodding in agreement.) The heroic Beethoven becomes a transfer point between rarefied Transcendentalism and the American pursuit of wealth.

It took George Ripley some fifteen years to pay off the debt of Brook Farm, but he would die a rich man, having made a fortune in royalties from co-editing The New American Cyclopedia. In its entry on the composer, the Cyclopedia evoked both the Transcendentalist-Romantic Beethoven and public monuments to civic wherewithal: As Gothic architecture is the artistic record of the aspirations of the ages during which it grew to perfection, so the orchestral works of Beethoven are the musical record of the great ideas of his time in the form and likeness which they a.s.sumed in his mind. Haydn and Mozart perfected instrumental music in its form-Beethoven touched it, and it became a living soul.33 LIKE MANY a hippie after him, Dwight took his youthful enthusiasms for eternal verities. The Fifth Symphony made its impression on him once and indelibly; eschewing any rea.s.sessment, Dwight would reprint the salient portion of his review of the Academy of Music"s 1842 performance in both The Harbinger and Dwight"s Journal of Music,34 and subsequently, whenever the subject of the Fifth came up, direct the reader"s attention back to the reprints. Dwight was a man eager to make up his mind, and dedicated to keeping it that way.

By standing still as the world shifted around him, Dwight changed from radical to conservative. He admitted as much in the last issue of Dwight"s Journal, published in 1881. "Lacking the genius to make the old seem new, we candidly confess that what now challenges the world as new in music fails to stir us to the depths of soul and feeling that the old masters did and doubtless always will," he wrote.35 But Dwight"s indefatigable promotion of Beethoven"s music as a path to personal and societal progress would bear fruit in the acc.u.mulated wealth of postCivil War America.

To follow Dwight"s career is to watch the foundation of the cla.s.sical-music canon being poured and then gradually hardening. Dwight had only ever heard Beethoven interpreted by either amateur or essentially freelance groups (even the New York Philharmonic, who had performed Beethoven"s Fifth on their inaugural concert in 1842, operated as a cooperative until 1909), but toward the end of his career, Dwight evangelized for permanent orchestras. If Beethoven"s symphonies offered the prospect of moral uplift, the proselytization required professional inst.i.tutions, "musicians who play and rehea.r.s.e together from one end of the season to the other." (Beethoven, who premiered his symphonies with pickup groups, would have been envious.) "The question is: Can our moneyed men, our merchant princes and millionaires, be got to give their money, and give it freely for this object?"36 They could be got-1881 also saw the debut of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, funded by banker and music lover Henry Lee Higginson; the inaugural season featured no fewer than nineteen Beethoven works, including all nine symphonies.

Dwight"s professionalizing crusade had been sparked by the polished performances of German-born conductor Theodore Thomas and his touring orchestra. When Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay asked Thomas over dinner at Delmonico"s if he would move to Chicago to head up a permanent orchestra-for which fifty local barons had contributed $1,000 each-Thomas, the story goes, replied, "I would go to h.e.l.l if they gave me a permanent orchestra." Thomas pushed for the construction of Chicago"s Orchestra Hall; to inaugurate the Hall in 1904, he programmed Beethoven"s Fifth Symphony. When Thomas suddenly died a month later, the directors of the Chicago Auditorium a.s.sociation, another collection of wealthy businessmen, adopted a memorial resolution, calling Thomas "the great missionary-in our country-of the "music of the brain," " music which "elevates, refines, enn.o.bles, inspires, stirs, and impa.s.sions the mysterious weft of the human mind."37 The Transcendentalists" Beethoven had been fully a.s.similated into the Gilded Age.

The concentration of patronage in large cities paralleled the dilution of the Transcendental focus on nature, which had been so crucial to the original generation. Compare Th.o.r.eau-"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil"38-with the town-and-country Transcendentalism of Walt Whitman: "This is the city and I am one of the citizens, / Whatever interests the rest interests me."39 Whitman"s Beethoven likewise seems far from the Concord woods: "Beethoven had the vision of the new need. He interpreted in tones his own environment. What a tone-picture he could have given of our seething, glowing times of great promise! He was the forerunner of the American musician of the modern that will one day appear."40 In a similar way, Dr. Henry T. McEwen, a Presbyterian minister in Amsterdam, New York, soft-pedaled nature"s obvious effects in telling of how one of his parishioners, a traveling singing teacher and sometime composer named Simeon B. Marsh, was inspired to write his best-known piece. Marsh, in McEwen"s telling, was riding through the countryside one autumn morning in 1834 when inspiration struck-but not through the intercession of nature. "The beautiful scenery, because familiar, had nothing new to attract him," McEwen insists; inspiration rather "burned within him." Marsh sat down under an elm-"which then stood," McEwen notes, "where now the four tracks of the New York Central Railway bear a mighty commerce to the sea"-and wrote down his tune on a sc.r.a.p of paper.41 Marsh"s tune, which he named "Martyn," would be matched with Charles Wesley"s poem "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," after which the song became one of the best-known hymns of the nineteenth century. "Martyn" opens with three repeated notes followed by a descending interval of a third, a contour identical to the opening of Beethoven"s Fifth. The resemblance was not lost on an insurance executive, political gadfly, and singular composer-an "American musician of the modern"-Charles Ives.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.

-RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "The American Scholar"

IN 1837-thirty-seven years before Charles Ives was born-an abolitionist activist and newspaper editor, Elijah Lovejoy, was shot to death by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois. A month later, at a protest rally in Boston"s Faneuil Hall, twenty-six-year-old lawyer Wendell Phillips galvanized the abolitionist movement with a speech that made him famous. Phillips himself would perpetuate the myth that "The Murder of Lovejoy" was a spur-of-the-moment oration, recalling how "I suddenly felt myself inspired, and tearing off my overcoat, started for the platform. My wife seized me by the arm, half terrified, and said, "Wendell, what are you going to do?" I replied, "I am going to speak, if I can make myself heard." "42 Charles Ives borrowed Beethoven"s rhetoric to memorialize Wendell Phillips in a piano study called "The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830"s and 1840"s"43; in keeping with his penchant for saturating his music with quotations from other tunes, Ives gave over the climax of the piece to clanging iterations of the opening motive from the Fifth Symphony. The use of the Fifth"s theme was a common thread in Ives"s musical tributes to New England Transcendentalism-Beethoven"s first four notes would ring over and over throughout Ives"s most encyclopedic realization of his Transcendentalist sympathies, his Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Ma.s.s., 184060, probably composed between 1916 and 1919, but drawing on a previous decade"s worth of works and sketches, and subsequently tinkered with for nearly another thirty years.

Ives was a Transcendentalist born too late and a modernist composer born too soon, and both traits were family legacies. The Transcendentalism grew from location-the Ives family was venerable New England stock-and connection, Emerson having been a family friend. The modernism came directly from his father, George, a free-thinking bandleader who seems to have been regarded as the local eccentric of Danbury, Connecticut. ("George Ives was a kind of original creature," recalled one of Charles"s boyhood acquaintances.44) Charles Ives would recall his father standing without hat or coat in the back garden; the church bell next door was ringing. He would rush into the house to the piano, and then back again. "I"ve heard a chord I"ve never heard before-it comes over and over but I can"t seem to catch it." He stayed up most of the night trying to find it in the piano.45 Both father and son would strive sonically to realize such Romantic images, earnestly blurring the line more-b.u.t.toned-down listeners might draw between music and noise. "You won"t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds," George instructed.46 Ives graduated from Yale with a degree in music, and worked for a time as a church organist in New York City, but after the 1902 premiere of his cantata The Celestial Country, he decided that the prospective path of a professional composer in turn-of-the-century America was not for him, and turned his career energies to his day job: selling life insurance. Ives and a friend, Julian Myrick, went into business together, and the Ives & Myrick firm was soon selling close to $2,000,000 in policies a year. Ives trained agents during the day and composed at night. He would always insist that his vocations reinforced each other.

If there were unacknowledged conflicts in Ives"s double life, Transcendentalism helped smooth them over, providing a perspective from which the duality might turn out to be complementary forces. One of his favorite essays was Emerson"s "Compensation," an a.s.sertion of faith in a self-equalizing, organic nature. "The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself," Emerson wrote. "Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you."47 The "exact value" was Ives"s goal in all his varied pursuits, the common thread around which he organized his clamorous life.

"Truth always finds a natural way of telling her story," Ives preached, "and a natural way is an effective way, simple or not." The preaching in this case was not to musicians, but to insurance agents, in a pamphlet ent.i.tled "The Amount to Carry-Measuring the Prospect," originally written as an article for The Eastern Underwriter. Ives"s guide went through several reprints and established him as a pioneer of the modern practice of estate planning. Much of "The Amount to Carry" could easily be read as a Transcendentalist tract. "[T]he influence of science will continue to help mankind realize more fully, the greater moral and spiritual values," Ives wrote. "Life insurance is doing its part in the progress of the greater life values."48 Then again, Emerson"s "Compensation" could just as easily be read as a prophetic description of Ives"s music-or, perhaps, his life: Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.49 Historian Robert M. Crunden notes, "The computations of the actuaries, to Ives and to other progressives, were scientific versions of Walt Whitman"s lists of democratic events and objects. Once enumerated, they could be of a.s.sistance in realizing Transcendental ideals."50 But it was the enumeration that drove Ives, the adding up, the c.u.mulative force of multiplicity. He spent much of his later life advocating for direct democracy, pushing a const.i.tutional amendment that would enshrine a mechanism for popular referendum at the federal level, promoting-even mandating-that every citizen stand up and be counted. Ives sold his proposed amendment with a testimonial: "Wendell Phillips, a student of history and a close observer of men, as George William Curtis says, rejected the fear of the mult.i.tude which springs from the timid feeling that many are ignorant and the few are wise; he believed the saying, too profound for Talleyrand, that EVERYBODY KNOWS MORE THAN ANYBODY."51 Everybody gets a say in the Concord Sonata-Emerson has his own movement, and so does the skeptical Hawthorne, his "atmosphere charged with the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England," as Ives put it.52 The third movement portrays "The Alcotts"-Bronson Alcott in counterpoint with his house full of daughters. Only Th.o.r.eau, in the final movement, seems off by himself, but as the sage of Walden begins to play his flute, Ives writes in an obbligato flute part-the solitary thinker splitting into multiple performers.

Beethoven is a connecting thread-the first four notes of the Fifth turn up in each movement of the Concord-but even Beethoven is only part of a chorus of voices. The familiar motive thunders out in the ba.s.s on the first page of "Emerson," only to be immediately subsumed into a patchwork of other quotations: Beethoven"s op. 106 Hammerklavier Piano Sonata, Marsh"s "Martyn," as well as another hymn tune, Heinrich Zeuner"s 1832 "Missionary Chant."53 The Fifth will rarely appear in the Concord Sonata without being coupled to at least one of its Ivesian doppelgangers. In "Hawthorne," it emerges out of a whirl of demonic ragtime, only to be immediately shunted down the Puritan-guilt alley of "Martyn." Its entrance is delayed in "Th.o.r.eau" until the philosopher"s flute reverie, at which point it dons the "Missionary Chant" guise (spreading the gospel of Walden), before finishing the piece as a distant tolling bell, high on the keyboard.

Ives"s use of the motive is most fertile and provocative in "The Alcotts." It opens with the Fifth tidied into a sweet, major-key harmonization redolent of psalm books and parlors. It is Ives"s evocation of an idealized childhood, a romanticization of hardship, patterned after the Marches at home in Little Women rather than the actual Alcotts freezing at Fruitlands: Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amus.e.m.e.nt of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Th.o.r.eau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.54 But Ives is programmatically setting up family conflict, not family harmony. Beth"s playing runs off into improvisatory, chromatic two-part counterpoint, when the Fifth suddenly bursts in again-Bronson Alcott, perhaps, keeping his daughter on task, ensuring her lessons are sufficiently high-minded. As Ives embarks on an extended fantasy on the four-note theme, emphatic and grand, then impressionistic and mysterious, one can hear his description of Bronson, the "kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles-a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-a.s.sertion and outside serious benevolence."55 Ives is giving us both the cause and the effect of the Transcendental propaganda on behalf of Beethoven and his music, the sensation of untrammeled power it must have first provided, and its dutiful a.s.similation into the next generation"s domesticity. Bronson is apparently in that perennial parental conundrum, trying to convince his children that he once was cool.

Beth has her revenge, though; in addition to the "old Scotch airs," she appears to know other tunes. One is the "Bridal March" from Wagner"s Lohengrin, a representative of the new generation Dwight disdained, and which, in the Beethoven-saturated context of "The Alcotts," sounds appropriately like the Fifth Symphony flipped upside-down. The "Bridal March" is followed immediately by another tune, a little curl of mel

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