The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Part 6

Adorno's insight into the Fifth's fragmentation was a by-product of another American invitation. Shortly after his arrival, Adorno was recruited into a Rockefeller-sponsored study of ma.s.s media, centered at Princeton, and known as the Radio Project. He was already interested in radio and recordings, in the way it affected how people listened to and understood music, the way it promoted what he called "regressive listening": "Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception." And, foreshadowing his diagnosis about the Fifth: "They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition."92 Music over the radio, to Adorno, was all sensuality and no structure. (He once wondered whether "Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf-because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today."93) Adorno left the project in 1941, critical of the project's methodology. Paul Lazarsfeld, the sociologist who headed the project, and Frank Stanton, later to become president of CBS, had come up with a gadget they nicknamed "Little Annie," which could instantaneously and continuously record audience likes and dislikes.94 (It was an early version of that staple of instant polls and focus groups, the dials that a viewer can turn from positive to negative to mirror their reaction.) The flow of data that "Little Annie" and other such methodologies provided was, to Adorno, misleadingly, dangerously context-free. One of the main underpinnings of the critical theory that he and Horkheimer and the Inst.i.tute for Social Research had developed was that reactions always have a social context-in fact, it is the very context of society itself that most reveals its own critique. To regard any data, any reaction, any cultural artifact as somehow separable from the society that produced it was liable to blind one to the ways in which society shapes artifacts and reactions in order to reinforce its own status quo.

No status quo was excepted. The Inst.i.tute and its researchers were Marxists, but Marxists who were dismayed at the way Marxism had been hijacked and bureaucratized in order to lend unqualified support to this or that Communist movement. Adorno's resistance toward such sloganeering would resurface in the late 1960s, after he had returned to Germany, after he had resumed his teaching career, his cla.s.srooms full of young radicals. But when those radicals became soixante-huit would-be revolutionaries, Adorno drew back, censuring their reliance on revolutionary formula rather than critical engagement. His lectures were disrupted by demonstrations; he died during a Swiss retreat, taken after canceling the year's remaining cla.s.ses. His last letter was to his Inst.i.tute colleague, Herbert Marcuse, who had supported the student uprisings. "I am the last person to underestimate the merits of the student movement," Adorno wrote. "But it contains a grain of insanity in which a future totalitarianism is implicit."95 HE WAS BORN Theodor Wiesengrund, but, around the time of his emigration to America, settled instead on Adorno, his mother's maiden name. (For a time, he also wrote reviews under the name "Hektor Rottweiler.")96 His father was a well-to-do a.s.similated Jew, carrying on the family wine trade; his mother was an opera singer of Corsican ancestry and Catholic faith. Theodor enjoyed a fairy-tale childhood, if the fairy tale had been written by a German intellectual. The philosopher Siegfried Kracauer was a family friend; every week they would read Kant, Theodor becoming attuned to "the play of forces at work under the surface of every closed doctrine."97 He learned the canon of cla.s.sical music by playing piano duets with his aunt. He was precocious, sheltered, and spoiled. A friend remembered Adorno enjoying "an existence you just had to love-if you were not dying with jealousy of this beautiful, protected life."98 Adorno was probably the most accomplished musician to ever become a professional philosopher. He was welcomed into the circle of the Second Viennese School, studying piano with Eduard Steuermann, and composition with Alban Berg; the latter relations.h.i.+p was particularly close, with Berg extolling Adorno's music to Schoenberg while Adorno helped facilitate Berg's love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.99 Adorno's music, in the predodecaphonic, freely atonal expressionist style, shows a talent and technique far beyond mere dilettantism. In the early 1930s, he began his most ambitious work, an opera based on Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer called Das Schatz der Indianer-Joe (The Treasure of Indian Joe). The subject might seem a strange fit, but Adorno's libretto brought out themes of fear and conformity lurking within Twain's tale: [Huck and Tom] A man has died

Two saw it happen

All are guilty.

With emphasis As long as they don't talk.100 But the increasing uncertainty of his status in Germany, not to mention the unenthusiastic response of his friend and fellow cultural critic Walter Benjamin, led Adorno to abandon the project after only two numbers.

Adorno focused on his other vocation, philosophy. As might be expected from his childhood weekends, Adorno's philosophy was strongly shaped by the German Idealists, by Kant and, especially, Hegel. But Adorno was wary of the implications of Hegel's dialectic, the way it seemed to be led by the nose toward the Absolute by subjective thought-for Adorno, a subjective point of view didn't exist outside of the objective society that shaped it. This was not simply metaphysical hair-splitting; it was, for Adorno, at the core of why the Enlightenment-born Western world had not only not prevented suffering, but had produced suffering on an unprecedented level. The Idealistic focus on subjectivity had missed the objective suffering happening all around it.

Adorno instead would call for a "negative dialectic," one that would put asunder the illusory unities that subjective thought imposes on the objective world-"to break the compulsion to achieve ident.i.ty, and to break it by means of the energy stored up in that compulsion and congealed in its objectifications."101 In the words of one of Adorno's best interpreters, Robert Hullot-Kentor: "What Adorno wanted to comprehend was the capacity of thought-of ident.i.ty itself-to cause reality to break in on the mind that masters it."102 Adorno's thought used contradiction-often self-contradiction-to jostle reason out of its subjective biases. The result is his difficult, reflexive, fragmentary writing style-there is, as Hullot-Kentor puts it, "the sense, on entering any one of Adorno's essays, that even in their very first words one has already arrived too late to find out for sure what any of the concepts mean."103 But better that than the false a.s.similation of the concepts into a point of view unaware of its own distortions.

ODDLY ENOUGH, a good place to start to understand Adorno's perception of Beethoven is in his a.n.a.lysis of another type of music, an a.n.a.lysis that Adorno, in many ways, got remarkably wrong. Adorno's writings on jazz are infamous. In his 1936 essay "uber Jazz" (originally published under the "Hektor Rottweiler" byline), he rehea.r.s.ed a critique that he never abandoned: jazz was mechanical, rigid music, repackaging an illusion of freedom in such a way that only inculcated the conformity necessary for a capitalist, industrial society to maintain the status quo. Any sensation of freedom in jazz is just a veneer, detached from the underlying structure, a structure that encourages obedience, not rebellion.

Beethoven's syncopation had been "the expression of an acc.u.mulated subjective force which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself."104 But in jazz, "the objective sound" (the harmonic and rhythmic repet.i.tion) "is embellished by a subjective expression" (the misdirections of solos, syncopation, &c.) "which is unable to dominate it and therefore exerts a fundamentally ridiculous and heart-rending effect." The improvisatory elements of jazz are, thus, just sentimental window dressing, a halfhearted revolt "against a collective power which it itself is; for this reason its revolt seems ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum just as syncopation is by the beat."105 The standard backlash against Adorno's jazz writing was that he was simply an insufferable elitist, misreading jazz in order to preserve "high" culture. (As one critic puts it: "The aesthetic net must not be cast too wide lest it drag up trash."106) But to cla.s.sify Adorno's criticism as mere sn.o.bbery is a misreading as well: Adorno had some regard for the low end of the high-low cultural continuum. In his book on film music, written with fellow emigre Hanns Eisler, Adorno allowed that movies "such as 'westerns' or gangster and horror pictures often are in a certain way superior to pretentious grade-A films."107 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer scolded the "culture industry" for its antipathy to difference, no matter the provenance: "The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarra.s.sing to it as that of Schonberg."108 Even cartoons are made to converge on respectability-browbeaten into insisting on "the very ideology which enslaves them," audiences end up favoring the properly punished troublemaking of Donald Duck over the consequence-free hedonism of Betty Boop.109 In other words, Adorno's problem with jazz is not that it isn't high culture-it's that it is neither high-culture nor low-culture enough to elude the culture industry. Only art at the extremes of the high-low continuum could avoid being appropriated: high art because it was transcendent, low art because it was anarchic. Middlebrow culture was Adorno's real target-all the aura of art, but none of its threat to order. Both critics and apologists have noted that Adorno's jazz a.n.a.lyses would better correspond to light jazz, "sweet" jazz, the Paul-Whiteman-like arrangements that would have been prevalent on the radio, if not in those clubs where "hot" jazz reigned. Conflating the styles made hash of Adorno's musicology. But maybe that was part of his point: jazz had been fairly easily defanged for ma.s.s consumption. (Ralph Ellison had Invisible Man's narrator imagine re-creating jazz's potency in a way reminiscent of Stefan Wolpe's Dada experiments with the Fifth: "I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing 'What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue'-all at the same time."110) It is no wonder that it was in America, where the appropriation of culture was conspicuous, even celebrated, that Adorno was most primed to dialectically expose it, and not just in jazz and popular music. Adorno's Philosophy of New Music, which warns of the fetis.h.i.+zing nature of serialism, dates from his exile, as does his and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which took Western rationality to similar task.

But it was also in America that Adorno's fascination with Beethoven crystallized into a book-one he never finished.111 The surviving fragments of the project are a particularly diffuse constellation; one nevertheless can perceive Adorno trying to carve out s.p.a.ce for the exceptional nature of Beethoven's music.

THE FRAGMENTATION of the Fifth was, for Adorno, the mechanism by which ma.s.s media and ma.s.s culture dragged Beethoven toward middlebrow status. "Radio symphonies," as Adorno called them-an on-air mediation of the canon so thoroughgoing that it created a new genre-promoted a kind of music-as-trivia-answer, subst.i.tuting recognition for comprehension, encouraged hearing a part to listening to the whole. It was the difference between musical understanding and music appreciation.

In 1954, the Book-of-the-Month Club introduced "Music-Appreciation Records," in which recordings of the standard repertoire were backed with spoken a.n.a.lysis and musical examples, "to help you understand music better and enjoy it more."112 The free, no-obligation tryout record was Beethoven's Fifth: "You have heard this great work countless times-what have you heard in it? And what may you have failed to hear?" Notice the aim of the two-p.r.o.nged sales pitch-inducing anxiety that one's individual experience both requires re-categorization (what have you heard?), and is still somehow lacking in comparison with majority opinion (what may you have failed to hear?).

Such pressure to conform was at the heart of Adorno's quarrel with ma.s.s media over music, no matter how altruistic ma.s.s media's intent. Adorno once wrote a scathing a.n.a.lysis of NBC's long-running Music Appreciation Hour, a show aimed at schoolchildren, hosted and conducted by Walter Damrosch. The show's procedure was familiar-break a symphony down into its const.i.tuent themes, and point out structural signposts. But such "atomistic listening," in Adorno's reckoning, was a deliberate alienation from music's power. "While apparently urging recognition in order to help people to 'enjoy' music, the Music Appreciation Hour actually encourages enjoyment, not of the music itself, but of the awareness that one knows music."113 Understanding, as Adorno posits it-what he calls a "life-relations.h.i.+p" with music-is open-ended and individual, and thus far too inefficient for ma.s.s media, which relies on the mere illusion of an individual relations.h.i.+p. Recognition, though, is instant gratification; not everyone can experience the Fifth as transcendent, but everyone can recognize when the main theme comes back. It is in such recognition that the media advances its own interests over that of Beethoven's: Here lies the connection between the categories of consumer goods, particularly commercial entertainment, and the sort of practical aesthetics advocated by the Hour. Something must be pleasing and worth its money to be admitted to the market. On the contrary, the work of art really raises postulates of its own, and it is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please the listener.114 Reducing the Fifth to a parade of themes subordinates it by subst.i.tuting a kind of musical score-keeping for a true engagement with the musical whole. It was the same sort of bait-and-switch that Adorno sensed in one of Walter Benjamin's critical experiments: Benjamin had attempted an a.n.a.lysis of Baudelaire consisting solely of juxtaposed quotations of Baudelaire's own writings, a mosaic list that would, in theory, produce a self-evident argument. Adorno chided him: "You superst.i.tiously attribute to material enumeration a power of illumination that is never kept."115 So what? The full Fifth would still remain, available to those who, instinctively or consciously, rejected its division into easily digestible parts. The problem, for Adorno, is that by the time we would know enough to reject such hearing, the damage is already done-and it has flipped Beethoven's philosophical content upside-down, reversed the music's dialectic. And it is in that dialectic that Beethoven's true importance lies. The material enumeration of Beethoven's symphonies, privileging themes over the whole, irresponsibly makes something out of what Adorno perceives as the core of Beethoven's music: nothing.

"IN BEETHOVEN everything can become anything, because it 'is' nothing," Adorno wrote.116 And the "nothing" Adorno is referring to is not just the silence Beethoven's music arises out of, but the themes themselves, their brevity, their circ.u.mscribed simplicity. Adorno talks of "the nothing of the first bars"117 of the Fifth, of how such themes are "formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own."118 The idea connects Beethoven directly to the German idealists. "Being is indeed nothing at all," Hegel said, but "within becoming, being is no longer simply being; and nothing, through its oneness with being, is no longer simply nothing."119 Beethoven's music acts out this genesis: the "nothing" of his themes is transformed into being by the way Beethoven uses the themes to build his musical forms. The theme of the Fifth is nothing by itself; the whole symphony-"not so much the production of forms, as their reproduction out of freedom"120-brings the theme into union with its being through the process of its becoming.

Freedom is, for Adorno, the key to Beethoven's music, a freedom both philosophically deep and elemental. Hegel, remember, treated such aspects of music as an a.n.a.logy to the mechanism of the intellect. For Adorno, it was something more. Musicologist Daniel P. K. Chua puts it this way: [I]t is precisely what Adorno calls the "nullity of the particular" that allows the symphonic will to determine the material in any way it chooses; the will is poised at the point of adequation, totally indifferent to the empty plenitude of the material; the elements merely form a vacuum for the frictionless activity of freedom.121 In the "empty plenitude" is endless possibility. Everything can become anything: absolute freedom.

Thus, in Beethoven's music, German idealism is taken back from Hegel's circ.u.mspect complexities to its revolutionary origins. Adorno's Beethoven, in fact, echoes one of Hegel's earliest writings, a fragmentary note, sometimes attributed to Friedrich Holderlin, the so-called "Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism"-probably a memorandum of student conversations with Holderlin and Schiller: "The first idea is, of course, the representation of myself as an absolutely free being. With this free, self-conscious being a whole world comes into existence-out of nothing-the only true and conceivable creation from nothing." The "Programme" goes on to advocate enlightened anarchy. "We must thus also progress beyond the state" to "absolute freedom of all spirits, who carry the intelligible world in themselves and may seek neither G.o.d nor immortality outside of themselves."122 This foreshadows the words of a fictional Adorno, the Devil in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, just before he transforms into a very Adorno-like manifestation: "Take Beethoven's notebooks. There is no thematic conception there as G.o.d gave it. He remoulds it and adds 'Meilleur' "123-("better"). (Adorno and Mann, fellow temporary Californians, had discussed music as the book was being written.) Where the fictional Adorno had Beethoven improving on G.o.d, the real Adorno had him improve on society-again, in terms that echo the "Oldest Programme": Let us reflect on Beethoven. If he is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer.... The central categories of artistic construction can be translated into social ones.... It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that [Beethoven's] movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world.124 Beethoven's music has progressed beyond the state-"its social tutelage"-and carries the intelligible world in itself.

But Beethoven's music is, nevertheless, in the world, the historical world, and that is where the freedom at its core becomes troublesome. "[T]he works themselves are not self-sufficient, are not indifferent toward the time," Adorno warned. "Only because they transform themselves historically, unfold and wither in time; because their own truth-content is historical and not a pure essence, are they so susceptible to that which is allegedly inflicted on them from outside."125 This is why Adorno so insistently harangued against their fragmentation. Hearing the Fifth as quotations from the Fifth was not just a trivializing annoyance but struck directly at the heart of Beethoven's power to resist appropriation. It a.s.serted something-ness for Beethoven's themes while denying them their Hegelian becoming. It turned the music's absolute freedom into a liability.

"The primal cells in Beethoven are nothing in themselves, mere concentrates of the tonal idiom to which only the symphony lends voice," Adorno warned. "Torn from their context, their artful irrelevance becomes the commonplace which, as the initial motif of the Fifth, was to be exploited up to the hilt by international patriotism."126 The war conveniently acted out a negative dialectic on this point: in his notes for his Beethoven book, Adorno saved a newspaper cutting, an a.s.sociated Press report, dateline Bonn, March 10, 1945: The birthplace of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, the opening notes of whose Fifth Symphony have been used by the Allies as a symbol for victory, was virtually destroyed in the fight for this old university city.127 SINCE HIS DEATH, in 1969, Adorno's reputation has waxed and waned-mostly the latter. The complexity of his writing was a persistent barrier. His a.n.a.lysis of the way societies leveraged enjoyment to maintain control was all too easily read as an indictment of enjoyment itself. His German Idealist lineage did not endear him to the rising post-modernist school. His Marxism, however idiosyncratic, eroded his prestige as international Communism collapsed under the weight of its own corruption.

Nevertheless, there is at least one aspect of Adorno that deserves a continuing place in human thought: his optimism. It is odd to think of Adorno, the virtuoso of the negative dialectic, the scold who insisted on the objectivity of suffering, as an optimist, but he was. There is a transcript of a conversation between Adorno and Horkheimer in which Adorno defends himself from a criticism that his ideas are naive: ADORNO: ... Is not this criticism already an admission that one no longer believes in happiness? Is not [my] naivete a higher form of knowledge than the unnaive knowledge of a.n.a.lysis?

HORKHEIMER: I have not given up the claim to happiness, but I do not believe in happiness. Whoever really believes in happiness is in the worst sense naive.

ADORNO: We must be at once more naive and much less naive.128 It was this optimism that led Adorno back to Beethoven again and again: he heard in the music a way past the modern world-his modern world-of war and exile and totalitarianism. Beethoven achieved in music what the world forever tries and fails to achieve: the better society. "[T]his is imprinted in Beethoven's music, the sublime music, as a trait of esthetic untruth: by its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure."129 And: "That Beethoven never goes out of date is connected, perhaps, to the fact that reality has not yet caught up with his music."130 That is itself an optimistic statement-one might just as plausibly say that reality has caught up with the Fifth all too well, forever smudging it with two centuries of interpretive fingerprints. The list of those who have tried to claim it-revolutionaries and reactionaries, Hegelians both Right and Left, radical Transcendentalists and proper Victorians, the n.a.z.is and the Allies-is forbiddingly long and frequently contradictory. But, if we believe Adorno, it is in contradiction that reality can again break into the mind. Adorno's dialectic puts the lie to any single reading of the Fifth by allowing the measure of all of them-the sheer number of attempted appropriations is a testament to the persistent power of Beethoven's reality.

Can that reality break through again? "The first bars of the Fifth Symphony, properly performed," Adorno insisted, "must be rendered with the character of a thesis, as if they were a free act over which no material has precedence."131 Even after all the intrusions of poetics, programs, sentiment, and technology, he thought it could still be done. To know what the Fifth has been burdened with is to know what to clear away. You have to start somewhere.

Epilogue.

THE PREMIERE, incidentally, was something of a disaster. The most famous account of the concert comes from Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a composer and writer who lived a virtual summation of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century European history. As a teenager, he was encouraged to study philosophy by Immanuel Kant; as a composer, he set texts and libretti by Goethe, and was also friends with Herder and Schiller. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Bettina von Arnim's husband and brother, respectively) dedicated their famous collection of German folk poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, to Reichardt (although Brentano later soured on Reichardt, on account of his incessant social climbing and gossiping).1 He supported the French Revolution (for which he was fired) before turning against Napoleon (for which he was exiled).

Toward the end of his life, Reichardt was trying to make a career in Vienna; on December 22, 1808, he found himself sitting in the box of Prince Lobkowitz, Beethoven's patron, at the Theater-an-der-Wien. "There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten," he recalled, "and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing-and still more of a loud."2 The concert included: the Sixth Symphony; the concert aria "Ah! Perfido"; the "Gloria" from the Ma.s.s in C Major, op. 86; the Fourth Piano Concerto, with composer at the keyboard; the Fifth Symphony; the "Sanctus" from the Ma.s.s in C Major; a piano improvisation; and, finally, the Choral Fantasy for piano, orchestra, and chorus, op. 80.

At one point, Beethoven had considered ending the concert with the Fifth, but, in the words of Alexander Thayer, "to defer that work until the close was to incur the risk of endangering its effect by presenting it to an audience too weary for the close attention needful on first hearing to its fair comprehension and appreciation."3 Beethoven's response to that dilemma was to make the concert longer: the Choral Fantasy was a last-minute addition, written for the concert.

Reichardt enjoyed the Fourth Piano Concerto, especially the slow movement; Beethoven "sang on his instrument with deep melancholy feeling." But as for the Fifth: A large, very elaborate, too long symphony. A gentleman next to us a.s.sured us that, at the rehearsal, he had seen that the violoncello part, which was very busy, alone covered thirty or forty pages.4 Reichardt nevertheless allowed that music copyists were doubtless as skilled as their legal counterparts in stretching out their work and boosting their per-page fees. And even after four hours of difficult music in a freezing hall, Reichardt was sympathetic: "Poor Beethoven, who from this, his own concert, was having the first and only scant profit that he could find in a whole year, had found in the rehearsals and performance a lot of opposition and almost no support."5 The concert, advertised as a "musical Akademie," was organized by Beethoven himself. The evening had been at least two years in the making: in order to reserve the s.p.a.ce, Beethoven needed the permission of Joseph Hartl, the Viennese Court Councillor in charge of the city's theaters. Hartl also was in charge of Vienna's public charities, and used access to the theaters as bait in order to lure performers for benefit concerts. Beethoven hated him. In one letter, he complained of having to repeatedly wait on Hartl in order to press his request for an Akademie: "I am so annoyed that all I desire is to be a bear so that as often as I were to lift my paw I could knock down some so-called great ---a.s.s."6 Beethoven nonetheless lent his talents and compositions to three charity concerts between 1807 and 1808, the last coming on November 15 of that year. (November 15 is the feast-day of Leopold, the patron saint of Vienna.) During rehearsals for this concert, Beethoven somehow enraged the players; according to Joseph Rockel (father of August, who plotted revolution in Dresden with Richard Wagner), the breaking point was a rehearsal where Beethoven pounded with such ferocity that he knocked the candles from the piano. Whatever the cause, the players refused to continue unless Beethoven was banished from the hall; notes were relayed back and forth from rehearsals to composer via the concertmasters.

Such was the atmosphere in which November's concert proceeded, and it hardly bode well for Beethoven's own concert a month later, which would necessitate drawing on the same pool of musicians. To make matters worse, another benefit concert, this one benefiting the Widows and Orphans Fund, was also scheduled for December 22. In a letter to the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, Beethoven sensed a conspiracy, led by his onetime teacher: The promoters of the concert for the widows, out of hatred for me, Herr Salieri being my most active opponent, played me a horrible trick. They threatened to expel any musician belonging to their company who would play for my benefit-7 If the accusation was not mere paranoia, it would give Salieri the distinction of having intrigued against both Mozart and Beethoven.

Beethoven was writing to Breitkopf and Hartel because he had sold them the Fifth Symphony. It was the second time he had sold it. The symphony had originally been commissioned by Franz von Oppersdorff, a Silesian count wealthy enough to maintain his own private orchestra. For 500 florins, Count Oppersdorff had received the Fourth Symphony-the score along with exclusive rights to it for six months-and liked it so much that he commissioned another, for another 500 florins. However, after collecting 350 of those florins, Beethoven wrote to the Count, "You will look at me in a false light, but necessity compelled me to sell to someone else the symphony which was written for you and another as well"-the Fifth and the Sixth, for which Beethoven had already been negotiating with Breitkopf and Hartel for some months.8 It was a good thing Beethoven had gotten 350 florins out of the Count, as he came out on the short end of the negotiations with Breitkopf and Hartel. After initially proposing a price of 900 florins for "two symphonies, a Ma.s.s [in C major], and a sonata for pianoforte and violoncello [op. 69]," Beethoven eventually settled for 600 florins, in return for "two symphonies, a sonata with violoncello obbligato, two trios for pianoforte, violin and violoncello (since such trios are now rather scarce), or, instead of these last two trios, a symphony"-plus the Ma.s.s for free. ("I pay attention not only to what is profitable but also to what brings honour and glory," Beethoven explained, though he may also have felt the need to repair his ego over the Ma.s.s, which its dedicatee, Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy II, had criticized.)9 So Beethoven went into his Akademie with too much music, surly musicians, and the pressure to turn a profit. The result was about as one would expect. The audience grew restless. The singers were noticeably s.h.i.+vering in the winter cold. The Choral Fantasy ran off the rails in performance, and Beethoven was forced to stop the orchestra and start over.

Still, Beethoven convinced himself that the concert had gone over well-"the public nevertheless applauded the whole performance with enthusiasm"-though he expected the worst from the critics. "[S]cribblers in Vienna will certainly not fail to send again to the Musikalische Zeitung some wretched stuff directed against me," he predicted.10 The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, however, perhaps having caught some glimpse of the Fifth Symphony's future all-purpose ubiquity, opted for discretion.

[This] new, grand symphony by Beethoven ... in its fas.h.i.+on, in accordance both with the ideas and with their treatment, once again stands so much apart from all others that even the trained listener must hear it several times before he can make it his own and arrive at a definite opinion.11

APPENDIX: Eight Interesting Recordings

BERLIN PHILHARMONIC.

Arthur Nikisch, conductor (HMV 040784/91, recorded 1913) Originally released on eight single-side 78 rpm discs (and now available on multiple CD transfers), Nikisch's complete Fifth is a remarkable glimpse of Romantic extravagance, alternating between intemperate languor and impetuosity. Phrases ebb and flow; Nikisch repeatedly draws out the tempo to an organ-like sustain and then slams on the gas. More indulgence than modern ears might be accustomed to, but more flair, too.

BERLIN PHILHARMONIC.

Wilhelm Furtw.a.n.gler, conductor (recorded June 30, 1943) Furtw.a.n.gler's live, wartime recording of the Fifth (available on at least six different labels) is heightened on so many levels that even Furtw.a.n.gler's other recordings of the symphony don't quite match its overwhelming impact. The fervency of the interpretation, the brilliance of the playing, and the ominous shadow of the Third Reich troubling every note: the struggle between Beethoven's music and the darkest impulses of humanity is palpable. (Arturo Toscanini's VE-day performance with the NBC Philharmonic is also available, on Music & Arts 753: disciplined and astonis.h.i.+ngly, relentlessly fast-the Toscanini style at its most zealous.) GLENN GOULD.

piano (Columbia MS 7095, 1968) Gould revived Franz Liszt's piano solo transcription of the Fifth as, maybe, a wry play on of his reputation as a hermit, but the result is thrilling and surprising. The first movement has hammered force, Gould reveling in the heavy crush of the piano's ba.s.s, while his eccentric exaltation comes to the fore in the Andante: he takes a tempo far slower than any orchestra could ever hope to sustain, and both he and we get wondrously lost in it. Worth seeking out on LP for Gould's hilarious parody-review liner notes.

THE NEW PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA.

Pierre Boulez, conductor (Columbia M 30085, 1970) To hear Boulez's infamous reading of the Fifth requires a bit of searching; it was left out of Sony Cla.s.sical's "Pierre Boulez Edition" of reissues (although a CD reissue was released in j.a.pan). Often criticized as temperamentally slow and dryly unidiomatic, Boulez's long march through the Fifth nonetheless uncovers new shadings, a modern reading full of modern bleakness, a giant machine both inexorable and imprisoning.

VIENNA PHILHARMONIC.

Carlos Kleiber, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon 2530-518, 1975) For many years, this was considered the gold standard of the Fifth on record, and it's not hard to hear why: the playing is gorgeously plush, the reading is full of charging momentum. If Beethoven's Fifth were the golden age of luxury jet travel, this is what it would sound like, hurtling forth in grand style.

ORCHESTRE ReVOLUTIONNAIRE ET ROMANTIQUE.

John Eliot Gardiner, conductor (Archiv 447062, 1995) Gardiner founded this group to explore the musical echoes of the French Revolution on period instruments; their Fifth is one of the best of the historically informed performances, being dedicated to speed, elan, and the pursuit of unabashed rabble-rousing. As a description of the Fifth, "revolutionary" has become a bland commonplace, but Gardiner and his cadres make you want to go out and guillotine an aristocrat.

ENSEMBLE MODERN.

Peter Eotvos, conductor (BMC Records CD 063, 2001) A recording that ropes the microphone into its conspiracy; Eotvos and the chamber-sized Ensemble Modern, new-music specialists, amplify every instrument in close-up, then remix and balance the sound into a coordinated a.s.sault. The rock-style sonic punch is matched by the interpretation, lean and solidly muscular.

THE PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA.

on The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Cla.s.sics (Columbia KC 33049, 1973) Formed by students at England's Portsmouth School of Art in 1970, spearheaded by the experimental composer Gavin Bryars, the Sinfonia eschewed technical skill: members were either non-musicians or musicians playing unfamiliar instruments. Their recording of the Fifth-a medley of all four movements, in 1-4-2-3 order-is a glorious mess of wrong notes, fudged rhythms, and untrammeled enthusiasm. That it is still recognizably the Fifth is part of the cheeky point.

Acknowledgments.

The book was Marty Asher's idea, and he shepherded it through with enthusiasm and editorial focus. Andrew Carlson and Jeff Alexander conscientiously and thoughtfully brought the ma.n.u.script through the final stages of publication. Alex Ross vouched for the author, and vouchsafed the author by generously reviewing drafts of the book, as did Jeremy Eichler, Marti Epstein, Katie Hamill, Phyllis Hoffman, Robert Hoffman, Rebecca Hunt, Ethan Iverson, Mark Meyer, and Jack Miller; any remaining errors-factual, interpretive, or stylistic-are mine alone. Moe distracted the author into crucial, enforced, procrastinatory reflection.

Lucy Kim made the entire book possible, just as she has made possible every other even remotely worthwhile thing I have ever done. To journey with someone of such beauty, discernment, and resilience is a joy that the word "love" can only begin to encompa.s.s.

FRAMINGHAM, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS.

MARCH 4, 2012.

Notes.

PREFACE.

1. Jeph Jacques, "Number 1336: Canathesia," Questionable Content, http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1336.

2. Robert Haven Schauffler, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (New York: Tudor Publis.h.i.+ng Co., 1944), p. 217.

3. According to the poet Christoph Kuffner. See Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Thayer's Life of Beethoven, Elliot Forbes, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 674. (Hereafter "Thayer-Forbes.") 4. James F. Green, "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: A Forgotten Anecdote Discovered," The Beethoven Journal, 25, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 3637. Upon the death of Albert, King of Saxony, in 1902, a correspondent to The Spectator recalled the ruler telling a similar story: "Beethoven, said the King, was once asked by a profound thinker the 'meaning' of the mysterious opening notes of the C Minor Symphony. The composer replied in a drastic German phrase (which has its equivalent in other languages) whose four monosyllables fitted the four quavers, and, at the same time, were a suitable reply to an asinine question." ("X.Y.Z.," "The King of Saxony. [To the editor of the 'Spectator.']" The Spectator [London], no. 3861 [June 28, 1902]: 10056.)

CHAPTER 1. Revolutions.

1. David Cairns, Berlioz: Volume One: The Making of an Artist 18031832 (University of California Press, 2000), p. 268.

2. Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 205.

3. Austin Clarkson, "Lecture on Dada by Stefan Wolpe," The Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1986): 21314.

4. See, most notably, Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), pp. 1131.

5. See, for example, Nicky Lossoff, "Silent Music and the Eternal Silence," in Silence, Music, Silent Music, Nicky Lossoff and Jenny Doctor, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 20522.

6. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, Geoffrey Bennington and Ian Macleod, trans. (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 61. See also Robin Marriner, "Derrida and the Parergon," in Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, eds., A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 34959. For another musical view, see Richard C. Littlefield, "The Silence of the Frames," Music Theory Online 2.1 (1996), http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.96.2.1/mto.96.2.1.littlefield.html. Critic Winthrop Sargeant told this story: "A friend of mine took a Buddhist monk to hear the Boston Symphony perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. His comment was 'Not enough silence!' " Sargeant, "Musical Events," The New Yorker 47, no. 52 [February 12, 1972]: 73.

7. Wesley Wehr, The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, & the Wicked Witch of the West (University of Was.h.i.+ngton Press, 2000), p. 236.

8. See Eric Johnson, "A Composer's Vision: Photographs by Ernest Bloch," Aperture 16, no. 3 (Nov. 1972).

9. Richard Wagner, On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren), Edward Dannreuther, trans. (London: William Reeves, 1887), p. 30.

10. Felix Weingartner, On the Performance of Beethoven's Symphonies, Jessie Crosland, trans. (London: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1907), p. 61.

11. Norman Del Mar, Conducting Beethoven. Volume I: The Symphonies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 71.

12. Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 119.