The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Part 4

BEETHOVEN'S MUSIC became a repository for inchoate Victorian emotions in much the same way that Hoffmann et al., fueled by the anxieties of the Napoleonic era, had traced Romanticism onto the outline of the Fifth Symphony-and in much the same way that the products Victorian factories turned out acquired Romantic mysteries of their own, textiles and patent medicines taking on trappings previously reserved for symphonies. Even Karl Marx-whose exile, it should be remembered, made him a Victorian Londoner-couldn't help but revert to old Romantic ideas when confronted with the era's flood of saleable stuff. a.s.siduously collecting data, Marx could track how ever-cheaper manufacturing created a growing disparity between use value (what a thing was worth) and money-form (what it cost to produce), but quantifying the larger meaning was more difficult. The imbalance was an opportunity for capitalists-but a philosophical conundrum for Marx.

Romanticism abhors a vacuum, and, much as it colonized the uncharted areas of Enlightenment aesthetics, it filled in the no-man's-land between commodities' use value and their money-form. Marx's sketch of what he called the "Fetis.h.i.+sm" of commodities is filled with terminology reminiscent of Hoffmann and Hamann, familiar symbolism papering over a logical void. To make a table out of wood does not change its substance: "the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood," Marx writes. "But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent." A commodity has "mystical character," it is "enigmatical" and "mysterious," it is, "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." Commodities become the ether through which people relate, crowding out the reality of the human labor that produced them. Their power is so intangible that Marx tries all sorts of oblique strategies to describe it, finally appealing to a higher power, or at least its worldly illusion: "In order, therefore, to find an a.n.a.logy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands."49 Perhaps the quintessential Victorian commodity was Beecham's Pills, the near-ubiquitous patent medicine. Formulated by Thomas Beecham, a former livestock keeper who enjoyed experimenting with herbal veterinary treatments, the pills first appeared in the 1840s, part of a brand lineup that included tooth powders and something called "Female's Friend."50 But it was the pills that became the mainstay of Beecham's company. They worked as laxatives-and not much else-but that didn't stop the company from ascribing to them an almost universal applicability. "Beecham's Pills are admitted by thousands to be worth above a Guinea a Box," read one typical ad, for Bilious and Nervous Disorders, such as Wind and Pain in the Stomach, Sick Headache, Giddiness, Fulness and Swelling after Meals, Dizziness and Drowsiness, Cold Chills, Flus.h.i.+ngs of Heat, Loss of Appet.i.te, Shortness of Breath, Costiveness, Scurvy, Blotches on the Skin, Disturbed Sleep, Frightful Dreams, and all Nervous and Trembling Sensations, &c. The first dose will give relief in twenty minutes. This is no fiction, for they have done it in thousands of cases. Every sufferer is earnestly invited to try one box of these pills, and they will be acknowledged to be WORTH A GUINEA A BOX. For Females of all ages these Pills are invaluable, as a few doses of them carry off all humours, and bring about all that is required.

That last claim, at least, may have been a deliberately vague accuracy-there is some evidence that the pills, taken in sufficient quant.i.ties, could induce abortions.51 "These are 'facts' admitted by thousands, in all cla.s.ses of society," the pitch continued, "and one of the best guarantees to the Nervous and Debilitated is that Beecham's Pills have the Largest Sale of any Patent Medicine in the World." In other words, not only did the pills sell because they worked, they worked because they sold. Other advertis.e.m.e.nts for the pills were even more explicit in their commodity fetis.h.i.+sm. "Beecham's Pills have unfailingly carried the message of health and good cheer to the homes of the people"-and the evangelists were so good at proclaiming their gospel that they were self-sufficient. "Personal letters endorsing Beecham's Pills are received by the thousands," the ad goes on, "but it is never necessary to publish them. The pills recommend themselves."

The self-recommending pills were nevertheless the beneficiaries of a startling amount of marketing: appearing before a parliamentary committee in 1913, Sir Joseph Beecham, the founder's son, admitted that the company's spending on advertising had reached 100,000 a year.52 Among the advertising was a series of Beecham's Music Portfolios, cheap songbooks leavened with tunes extolling the benefits of Beecham's Pills. One of the most well known of these set new words to a Mendelssohnian Victorian favorite: Hark! the herald angels sing!

Beecham's Pills are just the thing, Two for a woman one for a child ...

Peace on Earth and mercy mild!

Authors.h.i.+p of the carol was claimed by Sir Joseph's son Thomas. "Look here, my lad," he recalled his father telling him, "I've been spendin' a lot o' bra.s.s on your musical education, and now Ah wants you to help me." Even late in life, Sir Thomas Beecham, the greatest British conductor of his time, who went through an estimated hundred-million-pound inheritance founding orchestras and opera companies, remained cheekily proud of his early effort. "These sentiments ... especially the ellipsis, seemed to me admirably to express the rapture which is occasioned by a good effortless release."53 Beecham's father, Sir Joseph, was a music lover himself, and something of an impresario-late in life, he bankrolled a "Grand Season of Russian Opera and Ballet" that included the British premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. In 1899, for his inauguration as mayor of the town of St. Helens (where he had built the enormous Beecham's factory), Sir Joseph hired the Halle Orchestra, under director Hans Richter, to play a special gala concert. "Almost at the eleventh hour," Thomas recalled, "the devastating intelligence arrived that Richter could not appear: my father was in despair, his magnificent entertainment seemed threatened with disaster." Sir Joseph asked his son what to do. "I made the suggestion," the son replied, "that I should take the absentee's place." Sir Joseph eventually came around to the idea of a twenty-year-old neophyte taking the podium in front of one of the country's most accomplished professional orchestras, and it was thus that Thomas Beecham made his professional debut, conducting Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. His father, the venerable pill seller, had spied a marketing opportunity-realizing, in his son's words, "being the astutest advertiser of his day, that what had looked like a possible reverse might be worked up to a definite advantage."54 The marketing extended to the music. Beecham's branding had so saturated Victorian life that a story went around of an English explorer, deep in uncharted Africa, coming across a tree painted with an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Beecham's Pills.55 The Fifth Symphony was similarly established in the Victorian imagination. In Robert Louis Stevenson's 1894 novel The Ebb-Tide (written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne), the poetically named Robert Herrick, bright and cultured, but "deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood," initially embodies his namesake's carpe diem reputation-"While Fates permit us, let's be merry; / Pa.s.se all we must the fatall Ferry."56 Herrick has abandoned a string of financial failures in England and America, fleeing to Tahiti; as the book opens, he is sick and homeless, sheltering in an abandoned jail. Struck by an acute sense of rootlessness and transition, Herrick decides to add a memorial of his own presence to the building's ma.s.s of graffiti: From his jarred nerves there came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could not say: change, he knew no more-change, with inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud voice of the symphony. "Destiny knocking at the door," he thought; drew a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth Symphony. "So," thought he, "they will know that I loved music and had cla.s.sical tastes."57 The symphony recommends itself.

THE MOST FAMOUS Victorian advertis.e.m.e.nt (in the word's original sense) of Beethoven's Fifth actually appeared nearly a decade after Victoria's reign ended. E. M. Forster's novel Howards End was published in 1910, the year Victoria's son and successor Edward VII died, taking with him, perhaps, the notion that royal bonhomie, strategic marriage, and n.o.blesse oblige could, on their own, hold civilization together. Howards End is Forster's tone poem of the era's fade-out, and the tone is telling: tragedy and farce, jostling for position. Forster-who lived until 1970-would have a chance to observe the twentieth century's harrowing pageant, but his point of view was forever attuned to Victorian shades. Humanist, leftist, and h.o.m.os.e.xual, Forster made his intellectual home in that English specialty, the curiously central margin-he was a member of the Bloomsbury group, the quintessential band of inside outsiders. "I belong to the f.a.g-end of Victorian liberalism," he noted.58 In the fifth chapter of Howards End, the middle-cla.s.s, intellectually inclined, late-Romantic Schlegels-Margaret, Helen, their brother, Tibby-attend a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Queen's Hall; even in that "dreariest music-room in London," as Forster judged it, the Fifth, "the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man," is "cheap at two s.h.i.+llings."59 (The room was, indeed, cheap: while the Crystal Palace offered season tickets for reserved stalls at two guineas, Queen's Hall undercut that price by half-there, at least, Beethoven was worth a guinea a box.) Forster tells the Fifth through the ears and imagination of Helen, the most volatile of the Schlegels-her precipitate, quickly abandoned engagement to Paul Wilc.o.x, the younger son of his upper-cla.s.s, business-minded clan, has already set the novel's events in motion. Helen envisions "heroes and s.h.i.+pwrecks" in the opening movement; the relative equanimity of the Andante doesn't much interest her, even as it engrosses Frieda, the Schlegels' German cousin, and Frieda's equally German companion.

But with the Scherzo, where the symphony's opening motive returns in clipped, deliberate translation-the "wonderful movement," Helen calls it-her poetic impressions combine Romantic fantasy and Victorian dread. "[T]he music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end," she imagines. "Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen." The goblins see through the fundamental facade of Victorian decorum: "They merely observed in pa.s.sing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world." What's left is, as Helen describes it in her favorite melodramatic phrase, "panic and emptiness." The return of the Scherzo in the middle of the triumphant Finale only confirms Helen's enthrallingly bleak impressions. "The goblins really had been there. They might return-and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over-and waste to steam and froth."60 Like Punch's Stupendous Amateur, Helen abandons the concert hall after the symphony: Helen pushed her way out during the applause. She desired to be alone. The music summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career.... The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning. She pushed right out of the building, and walked slowly down the outside staircase, breathing the autumnal air, and then she strolled home.61 Again, Helen's impulsiveness fuels the plot: she has absent-mindedly walked off with the umbrella of Leonard Bast, an anxious lower-cla.s.s dreamer. ("He was not in the abyss, but he could see it."62) The meeting completes the novel's tripart.i.te, low-to-high hierarchy of cla.s.s: Basts, Schlegels, Wilc.o.xes, soon to be knotted in dramatic tangles. The Wilc.o.x matriarch tries to leave the family's suburban cottage, Howards End, to Margaret Schlegel, but the Wilc.o.x family suppresses her will. The now-widowed Henry Wilc.o.x marries Margaret, and, through bad business advice, almost offhandedly ruins Leonard Bast. Bast has an affair with Helen, resulting in her pregnancy, before being killed at the hands of Charles, the Wilc.o.x scion. No wonder Helen leaves the concert early; if the Fifth indeed summed up all that could-and does-happen in Helen's career, one could well imagine that any further music would be a bit much.

Forster's pairing of feminine sensation and Beethoven's music drew on a long-standing Victorian commonplace; British and American novels of the nineteenth century teem with young women at the piano, playing their Beethoven. Surveying the throng of fictional female pianists, Mary Burgan summed up the varying rationales for their cultivation of the keyboard: "[P]iano expertise was a commodity in the marriage market, a form of necessary self-discipline, or an innocent entertainment in an otherwise vacuous existence."63 As part of the essential finis.h.i.+ng of a refined girl's education, Beethoven's music became inseparable from Victorian femininity. The progress of one Carrie Crookenden in Lucas Malet's The Wages of Sin was typical, if wryly observed: "Carrie had lessons every year when the family went up to London. She was working her way through Beethoven; each year she added, with much conscientious labour a sonata or two to her repertoire. She plunged now into the last learned. Her playing was ponderously correct, grandly dull. Meanwhile emotion picked up her trailing skirts and fled."64 (Lucas Malet was the pen name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, daughter of Charles Kingsley, who had worried so eloquently over the lack of religion among the smarter, younger, Victorians.) In John Lane Ford's 1872 novel Dower and Curse, wealthy Victor Herbston embarks on a Pygmalion-like scheme to prove his theory of "the immense power of education ... to modify, even to neutralize, the influence of blood," adopting the poor orphan Annie Scott. Annie is ostracized by the rest of the Herbstons, and takes comfort in familiar music: When the family were out she would steal down from her room with some of her favourite pieces in her hand, and sit down and play. She would flood the room with the deep strong Turneresque music of Beethoven....65 Annie's education has at least produced a quintessential Victorian woman.

In Mary Braddon's 1882 Mount Royal, another orphan provides another reminder of Beethoven's status as an ornament of the upper cla.s.s. Christabel Tregonell has married into wealth, but when her pianism is put to light-music service at a dinner party, her husband is disconcerted: "Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being indeed, as unmusical a soul as G.o.d ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque."66 But Beethoven could also gird fictional women against the dual disadvantages of cla.s.s and gender. In William Makepeace Thackeray's 1860 novella Lovel the Widower, Bessy, governess to the t.i.tle character's children, harbors a secret-she was once a music-hall dancer-that would horrify Lovel's priggish, upper-cla.s.s mother-in-law. Nevertheless, threatened with exposure, Bessy, a veteran of Victorian femininity's battles with the piano, maintains her equilibrium: Bessy was perfectly cool and dignified at tea. Danger or doubt did not seem to affect her. If she had been ordered for execution at the end of the evening she would have made the tea, played her Beethoven, answered questions in her usual voice, and glided about from one to another with her usual dignified calm, until the hour of decapitation came.67 Her past is revealed, but Lovel asks Bessy to marry him, foiling his mother-in-law, resulting in a happy ending. Well, almost-Thackeray's narrator was also among Bessy's suitors; having lost his immortal beloved, he rallies himself to an ersatz-Beethovenian resignation. "I am accustomed to disappointment," he sighs. "Other fellows get the prizes which I try for. I am used to run second in the dreary race of love. Second? Psha! Third, Fourth."68 (Or even Fifth.) Once in a while, a novelist would take on Beethoven himself. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, whose debut novel Charles Auchester-peopled with roman a clef versions of Victorian musical celebrities, including Mendelssohn-caught the admiration of both Disraeli and, across the Atlantic, Emerson (she had "the courage of genius," Emerson wrote69), went on to create a Beethoven bewitched by femininity in her 1858 novel Rumour. The book's Beethoven stand-in, an imperious German composer and organist named Rodomant, vies with Porphyro, a thinly disguised Louis-Napoleon (!), for the hand of one Princess Adelaida (!!). Serving at the court of Adelaida's father, Rodomant, at the novel's climax, defiantly violates the law against pulling all the stops on the organ in the royal chapel.

Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and, as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise ... her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves toward the measureless immensity of music at its source.70 In pursuit of symphonic perfection, a "fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning," Rodomant finally unleashes the full organ, and, as if in divine retribution, the familiar Beethoven is born: "I have lost my hearing, and it is for ever."71 Adelaida is crushed when Rodomant leaves the kingdom; but, just as Porphyro is about to propose marriage, the princess's beloved carrier dove-entrusted to Rodomant-returns (and drops dead, having "won its rest, and earned it"72), with an entreaty from the composer, mistakenly committed to a Prussian asylum. Adelaida abandons her throne to tend the irascible genius: "He adored her-but frequently tormented her-she loved him all the more."73 Ridiculous? No less than Sir George Grove himself speculated that the Fifth had a somewhat related origin. Grove subscribed to Thayer's (erroneous) hypothesis that Beethoven had, for four years, been secretly engaged to Countess Theresa Brunsvik, one of his piano students. Grove noted that the symphony was composed in the middle of what he supposed to be Beethoven's engagement, and related a story of how, some years prior, Beethoven slapped the girl hard on the hand during a lesson and stormed off in anger, and how Theresa, realizing he had left his hat and coat, ran out into the street after him. "Are not the two characters exactly expressed" by the opening two themes-the first four notes being Beethoven, the major-key second section being Theresa? "It surely would be impossible to convey them in music more perfectly," Grove insisted, "the fierce imperious composer, who knew how to 'put his foot down,' if the phrase may be allowed, and the womanly, yielding, devoted girl."74 * * *

But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

-E. M. FORSTER, Howards End FORSTER, a discerning music lover and fairly accomplished amateur pianist, could make smart use of such Victorian tropes-for Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of A Room with a View, to play Beethoven on the piano might be a contemporary novelistic commonplace, but for her to choose to play the tempestuous squall of the op. 111 piano sonata (in C minor, not coincidentally) is an acute characterization on Forster's part.75 Likewise, the performance of Beethoven's Fifth within Howards End provides an opportunity for deft characterizations of the Schlegel siblings: Margaret's real-world practicality, Helen's flights of fancy, Tibby's happy pedantry, following along with the score on his lap. The set-piece also insinuates the atmosphere of English-German rivalry: when Elgar's Pomp and Circ.u.mstance concludes the concert, Margaret's bl.u.s.tery, uber-English aunt happily taps her foot, while the Schlegels' German visitors discreetly slip out.76 And Howards End also mirrors the structure of the Fifth Symphony as a whole (an idea suggested by more than one scholar).77 One can read, perhaps, the first "movement" as the bringing together of the Schlegels and the Wilc.o.xes, and the introduction of Leonard Bast; the second, beginning with the funeral of the first Mrs. Wilc.o.x, unfolds, like Beethoven's Andante, as a double variation: the growing attraction of Henry Wilc.o.x to Margaret Schlegel, the growing obsession of Helen Schlegel with bettering Leonard Bast's lot. For a Scherzo, the goblins observe Helen's antiheroic efforts to sabotage both Margaret's engagement and Leonard's marriage. With a double consummation-Margaret and Henry's marriage, Helen and Leonard's affair-the Finale commences; Leonard's death, like Beethoven's revisit of his Scherzo subject, is an aggressive, desperate interlude encased by a major-key but vaguely hollow triumph.

What would be the unifying motive, the equivalent of the first four notes? Forster himself suggests one possibility at the novel's outset. "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister," he begins, and, of course, Helen's letters begin with their place of origin: "HOWARDS END."78 As the Victorian Era dovetailed into the Edwardian, prewar twentieth century, Forster looked back and saw how much of England's ident.i.ty had become bound up in struggles over real estate, both literal and intellectual: properties, colonies, cla.s.ses, and movements. Howards End becomes a blessed plot fought over along customary fronts: art and business, reform and tradition, propriety and expression, male and female. That it is the middle-cla.s.s Schlegels who finally take owners.h.i.+p of the place is a trenchant allegory-only a year after the novel's publication, the first Parliament Act was pa.s.sed, limiting the power of the House of Lords and decisively accelerating the decline of the British landed aristocracy.

Equally apt is the conclusion's ambiguous tone. Forster's ending has, in fact, long bothered critics; after Leonard's death, Charles's imprisonment, Helen's pregnancy, and the near scuttling of Margaret and Henry's marriage, Forster's abrupt string of reconciliations-Margaret reunited with Helen, Margaret preserving her marriage, Margaret joining the families and perpetuating them, in the form of Helen and Leonard's son, whom Margaret and Henry will raise, and who will ultimately inherit Howards End-has seemed, to many readers, unearned and false. Stephen Spender referred to "the curious unreality" of the last scene: "[S]o many social skeletons rattle in the cupboards of Howards End that the reader, surely, finds this conclusion almost irrelevant."79 A. S. Byatt recorded her own disillusionment with the novel: "One used to think: 'This is wonderful, here is a novelist who says we must connect the businessman with the world of the arts,' then you slowly realise that E. M. Forster actually can't do it."80 But that is to a.s.sume that a connection between business and art is something that Forster himself wants, and not just his characters.81 To take the ending at face value is to suppose that the reader is not supposed to hear its rattling skeletons. The novel's real truth-teller is Beethoven and the Fifth. Forster's ending is Beethoven's ending: nominally happy, but undermined by the violence and darkness that has preceded it, darkness that even explicitly returns to invade it. "Beethoven chose to make all right in the end," Forster writes, just as the f.a.g-end Victorians chose whatever myth offered the comfort of jubilee, be it England, Progress, Commerce, or even the notion that Beethoven and his music could express the ideals and aspirations of nineteenth-century Britain. Schlegels and Wilc.o.xes alike settle on the myth of Howards End, but Forster's language gives the game away-Howards End is ending; Helen's concluding announcement of "such a crop of hay as never" casts the whole place and story into the realm of fairy tale with its final word. The "red rust" is creeping across the meadows from London, and both the substance and the color are notable. The goblins are there.

That the characters don't notice is typical of the novel, which makes the overarching presence of Beethoven even more rueful. Beethoven was literally exceptional, in Forster's opinion, in being able to size up a larger conception of Fate in whole. "[T]his musician excited by immensities is unique in the annals of art," Forster once wrote. "No one has ever been so thrilled by things so huge, for the vast ma.s.ses of doom crush the rest of us before we can hope to measure them. Fate knocks at our door; but before the final tap can sound, the flimsy door flies into pieces, and we never learn the sublime rhythm of destruction."82 Beethoven is a double-edged sword, his singular glimpse of the infinite so celebrated that, coupled with the era's inclination to blithe confidence, it inspired lesser men to think they, too, could square the immeasurable circle of fate. In Howards End, the Schlegels' German-English father-a veteran of Sedan, disillusioned "when he saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey"-is introduced, in flashback, warning his native and adopted races: "No ... your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven."83 As if to drive home the inadequacy of mere mortals to comprehend Beethoven's vision, Forster seasons his narrative with dashes of the accrued nineteenth-century imagery surrounding the Fifth-dropped music-appreciation hints that the characters utterly fail to pick up on. Reunited at Howards End, Margaret and Helen fall into reminiscence, but Helen-always the transmitter for Romantic impulses-mixes present and past in the house's garden, via a familiar avian messenger: "Ah, that greengage tree," cried Helen, as if the garden was also part of their childhood. "Why do I connect it with the dumbbells? And there come the chickens. The gra.s.s wants cutting. I love yellow-hammers-"

Margaret interrupted her.84 And, at the novel's denouement, when Margaret finally comes into possession of Howards End, it is Paul Wilc.o.x-whose impetuous kiss of Helen Schlegel set the plot in motion, who has disappeared to Nigeria to make his fortune for the bulk of the story, and who appears again now, hostile to Margaret's presence, "manly and cynical" with the habitual intolerance of empire-it is Paul who provides the well-known signal, not with a knock, but a desultory kick: "Clumsy of movement-for he had spent all his life in the saddle-Paul drove his foot against the paint of the front door. Mrs. Wilc.o.x gave a little cry of annoyance. She did not like anything scratched."85 Writing on the eve of the Great War, Forster's little detail is prophetic: Fate as the uncoordinated by-product of imperial ambition. Margaret, again, misses its significance. But in her own way, Margaret has fulfilled the symphonic structure, in quintessentially Romantic terms. That Margaret has achieved the novel's final, forced connection within the walls of the novel's t.i.tular property is the ultimate mirror of the Fifth Symphony: the opening motive-Howards End itself-becomes the means for realizing organic unity. It just turns out not to be the cure-all everybody thought it would be.

Thus we a.s.sist at a show that would appear comic, if not for the tremendous tragedy it involves.

-HERMANN KEYSERLING,

"A Philosopher's View of the War"

THE ROMANTICISM that made Beethoven an honorary Victorian would be mercilessly exposed as a placebo by the war. In the introduction to his play Heartbreak House, George Bernard Shaw took both the Schlegels and the Wilc.o.xes of prewar society to task, scolding the latter as incompetent and the former as too polite to point it out. "Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud," Shaw looked back, "England showed no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness."86 It was a consequence of the unfavorable intellectual economics of politics: "Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis."87 Heartbreak House brings all the strains of prewar society together for a country weekend where, under Shaw's richly bleak administration, they show themselves incapable of managing their own fates. The industrial machinery of history has made the characters its servants. Mangan, the pompous businessman, is goaded into admitting that he only runs the factories he has pretended to own; Mazzini, the hapless intellectual, having expected revolution, finds that "nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all things considered." The roaring, doddering Captain Shotover casts his gimlet eye on fate. "Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence," he p.r.o.nounces. "But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks."

When the bombs start falling, the party's female poles, the overbearing Mrs. Hushabye and the dreamy Ellie Dunn, claim the drama as their familiar, feminine birthright: MRS. HUSHABYE ... Did you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it's splendid: it's like an orchestra: it's like Beethoven.

ELLIE By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.88 The women's admiration is topically accurate. (And Shavian-a not insignificant part of Shaw's literary output was music criticism.) Beethoven's prewar universality was such that, even in the midst of subsequent wartime anti-German indignation, the indignant could still occasionally forget where Beethoven was from-take Sir Arthur Markham, for instance. In 1915, Markham (a grandson of Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace) rose in the House of Commons to denounce Sir Edgar Speyer, Baronet, Privy Councillor, and a patron of music who had personally funded the Promenade Concerts at Queen's Hall for a number of years. Speyer had been born in America to German-Jewish immigrants, and was made a British subject in 1892; but he remained connected to Germany through his family's banking concern. Anti-German activism targeted Speyer early in the war, and after the Armistice, he would be stricken from the Privy Council-a rare occurrence-and lose his British citizens.h.i.+p. For now, though, Markham seized on Speyer's musical activities: I suppose it is because he is of German origin that we in this country are to be treated during the next few weeks by Sir Henry Wood to a series of concerts entirely composed of German music. I have the whole of the programmes here, from which it will be seen that some of the concerts are to be devoted entirely to Wagner's music.... I cannot understand how people can go to listen to German music, when every people in the world, except ourselves, would not tolerate during a time of war that they should be entertained by German music. But as the Queen's Hall belongs to him, I suppose we in this country are to be instilled with German virtues.

For Markham, however, there was German and then there was German. Markham's rebuke prompted an exchange: MR. R. MCNEILL: Is there no Beethoven in the programme?

SIR A. MARKHAM: No, the whole of the programme at some of these concerts contains no music except German.

SIR F. BANBURY: Beethoven was a German.89 Edward Goldbeck was less inclined to neutralize Beethoven's Germanic soul. A Berlin native and a German Army veteran, Goldbeck emigrated to the United States, where he wrote theater criticism and cultural commentary. In the shadow of war, Goldbeck took seriously Beethoven's boast that, had he a military rather than musical mind, he could have defeated Napoleon; the music hovered pointedly between imperious and imperial. The Fifth's opening portrayed a Fate to be overcome through a superior musical offensive: "It is one of his most beautiful and impressive ideas that the 'motive of Fate,' thundering at first, grows more and more m.u.f.fled, until we hear it only far off and drowned by the trumpets of triumph." No wonder Germany so proudly claimed him as its own. "I doubt very much, however ... that Beethoven would be a pacifist today.... Beethoven had the temperament of a warrior, and music is nothing but architectural and dynamic 'organization' "-the stereotypical wellspring of Prussian military prowess. "The Germany of today is not separated by an abyss from the Germany of the cla.s.sics," Goldbeck concluded, "the spirit is the same, only the material on which it works is different: it was imagination once, now it is reality."90 It was in America that anti-German sentiment would most translate into cultural chauvinism, as German music, operas, and theater-not to mention German names, words, and accents-were cleansed from American life. One of those leading the charge against German repertoire was the New York socialite Mrs. William Jay. (Her husband, a great-grandson of the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was a lawyer and the founder of the New York Coaching Club, which, according to his 1915 obituary, "gave a great impetus to the breeding of harness horses in this country, and kept alive a sport which even the automobile has not yet succeeded in killing."91) Mrs. Jay, a member of the New York Philharmonic's Board of Directors, headed a wartime group called the Intimate Committee for the Severance of All Social and Professional Relations with Enemy Sympathizers, which advocated the elimination of German repertoire from concert halls and opera houses, "part of a movement directed toward the complete extinction of German influence in this country."92 The Metropolitan Opera did eliminate German-language repertoire during the war, having decided that productions "might enable Germany, by garbling and patching, to print 'news' dispatches for home consumption which would tend to put heart in the German people."93 Even in Boston, the American port of entry for German Romanticism and the birthplace of the American Beethoven cult, German repertoire would nearly vanish during the war. German and Austrian composers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's programming in the 191617 season; in the 191819 season, the proportion was less than half that.94 Along the way, Mrs. Jay and her ilk claimed a particularly valuable scalp: Karl Muck, the orchestra's conductor.

Henry Lee Higginson, still running the orchestra as his personal fiefdom, had first hired Muck, a veteran of Bayreuth and the Royal Opera in Berlin, to lead the group in 1906; Muck opened his tenure with a "brilliant and effective" rendition of Beethoven's Fifth.95 Higginson convinced him to return for a second tenure in 1912. Muck conducted with an almost stereotypically Prussian demeanor, sober and disinclined to interpretive fantasy, but his authority and discipline raised the Boston Symphony to the pinnacle of American orchestras. Hearing Muck conduct Beethoven's Fifth at Carnegie Hall, critic Frederic Dean p.r.o.nounced him "the Wendell Phillips of the orchestra-willing to sacrifice sonority to sentiment.... He weighs the meaning of a musical phrase as he chooses the exact word for his sentence."96 But after the opening concert of the BSO's 191718 season-once again featuring the Fifth Symphony-Higginson and the orchestra came under criticism after the American flag was inadvertently left off the Symphony Hall stage. "Until lately my loyalty has never been questioned," Higginson grumbled.97 The incident may have exacerbated his intransigence when, prior to an October 1917 performance in Providence, Rhode Island, a coterie of local women's and musical clubs sent a telegram to BSO management insisting that the group preface its concert with "The Star-Spangled Banner." Higginson-not about to let anybody tell him how to run his concern-ignored the demand; but the press painted Karl Muck as the villain, a German interloper arrogantly insulting American pride, and the story blossomed into a full-blown scandal. As the orchestra's publicity manager remembered, "The fat was in the fire and blazing high."98 In March of 1918, Muck was arrested under the terms of a presidential proclamation regulating enemy aliens. With an unwitting sense of symbolic martyrology, the officials made their move on the eve of Muck's long-awaited performance of Bach's St. Matthew Pa.s.sion; having seized Muck's score of the piece in a raid on his house (apparently without warrant), the police pored over the music, sure that the conductor's markings were coded espionage.99 (Recall Mrs. Jay's alleged " 'news' dispatches.") A series of indiscreet love letters to a twenty-year-old aspiring singer were also found, and, fanned by Boston Post reports fulminating against Muck's supposed corruption of American womanhood, resulted in an indictment for violation of postal laws. Faced with prison, Muck opted for internment and eventual deportation.

Muck was transported to a military base in northern Georgia that became as unapologetic an enclave of German culture as ever existed. For the duration of the war, Fort Oglethorpe (built on the Chickamauga battlefield) was home to every German-born businessman, intellectual, artist, or musician in America deemed dangerous enough-that is, German enough-to be interned. A combination of detained cruise s.h.i.+p musicians and military band members provided the camp with performances of Beethoven and the rest of the canon.100 But the orchestra could only coax a single performance out of Muck; on December 12, 1918, he led the group in works of Brahms and Beethoven. Muck chose not to conduct the Fifth; the accepted narrative of individual struggle and triumph was, perhaps, too much of an irony. Instead, he opted for the anti-Napoleonic Eroica-a better outlet for a man whose brief relations.h.i.+p with a powerful republic had turned sour. Muck and his wife were put on a boat in August of 1919; he never again conducted in America. In 1939, a year before he died, Muck appeared in public one last time, accepting the Order of the Golden Eagle from Adolf Hitler.

The same summer Karl Muck sailed back to Europe, Mrs. William Jay announced a cease-fire. "Germany is on her knees before outraged but forgiving humanity," she wrote. There was no need for further protest, "for I know that henceforth materialism will weigh too heavily against a pro-German att.i.tude, and I pray that the former friends of German Kultur will uphold the principles of freedom, honesty, and justice, which they now see triumphant and everlasting."101 Her ultimately unwarranted optimism was hardly uncommon. (Mrs. Jay, incidentally, was the former Lucy Oelrichs. Her father was a German immigrant, the New York agent for the Norddeutscher Lloyd line of steams.h.i.+ps.) For a time, Henry Lee Higginson had stuck by his Prussian conductor out of pride and stubbornness, but was scandalized by the revelations of possible moral misconduct. In the last year of Higginson's life, the Boston Symphony would decisively pivot away from Germany and toward French and Russian influence. Muck's replacement was Henri Rabaud, a Parisian. When asked whether he would program German composers in Boston, Rabaud was nonplussed. "Such questions are never asked in Paris," he remarked. "Why should we not play beautiful music like Beethoven's C minor Symphony?"102 BEETHOVEN'S MUSIC would soon enough retake its place at the center of the canon. But the war-an upheaval to bookend the Industrial Revolution-meant that a catholic narrative of the Fifth could no longer be taken for granted; the supposedly universal truths had proven hazardously malleable.

Or maybe a different, unpalatable truth had been there all along. At the height of Victoria's reign, a Manchester journalist, Henry Franks, recalled sitting next to a blind man at a performance of the Fifth. "That blind man, with the fine instincts of culture, listened to Beethoven's symphony in C minor with an upturned face, upon which the emotions played as visibly as the ripples play upon a lake," Franks reported. "I begged him to tell me what he conceived to be the meaning of the theme which recurs so often. After much hesitation, he said that it meant a warning which has come too late."103 Distracted by the spectacle, most everybody else had only heard what they wanted to hear.

6.

Earthquakes

The failing foothold as the s.h.i.+ning goal Appears, and truth so long, so fondly sought Is blurred and dimmed. Again and yet again The exulting march resounds. We must win now!

-CHRISTOPHER PEa.r.s.e CRANCH,

"Sonnet XXIII: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony" (1878)

IF LUCY HONEYCHURCH'S predilection for Beethoven made for awkward parlor atmosphere in A Room with a View, the outbreak of World War I only increased the consternation. In 1958, E. M. Forster revisited the novel's characters in a little sequel called "A View Without a Room"; Lucy and George, we learn, were both conscientious objectors during the war, exacerbating suspicion over Lucy's musical taste: "Hun music! She was overheard and reported, and the police called." But also woven into his fictional reminiscence was an actual experience of Forster's, somewhat closer to the front: an encounter with Beethoven in Egypt, where Forster had spent the bulk of the war working for the Red Cross.

A quiet little party was held on the outskirts of [Alexandria], and someone wanted a little Beethoven. The hostess demurred. Hun music might compromise us. But a young officer spoke up. "No, it's all right," he said, "a chap who knows about those things from the inside told me Beethoven's definitely Belgian."1 Forster playfully attributed the propaganda to Cecil Vyse, A Room with a View's self-absorbed, amused aesthete. But tweaking German superiority with Beethoven's Flemish heritage was hardly new: the French had already jumped on that bandwagon, insisting that Beethoven exemplified not German genius, but the "genie flamand," as the poet and critic Raymond Bouyer wrote in his 1905 examination, Le secret de Beethoven.2 Bouyer's selective genealogy was only a particularly flagrant example of French efforts to pry Beethoven's image from the clutches of his German ident.i.ty. It worked: as Europe stumbled into a second, more destructive reckoning, in the face of the ne plus ultra of German nationalism, Beethoven's Fifth would be brazenly enlisted on the side of the Allies-appropriately, by way of Belgium.

WHEN FRANCE finally got around to revering Beethoven, it did so with zeal, but on French terms. The story was that, at the French premiere of the Fifth Symphony, an old veteran of Napoleon's army was moved to stand up and cry out, "C'est l'Empereur! vive l'Empereur!"3 Beethoven might have appreciated the sentiment-he had, after all, bragged of his ability to meet Napoleon in battle-but casting Beethoven as a new Napoleon was also a way to bring him into the French fold.

The history of Beethoven in France is that of a hesitant courts.h.i.+p followed by a torrid affair. According to Schindler (and with the requisite accompanying grain of salt), the ice was broken via a blind date with the Fifth. Schindler tells of Louis Sina, a French-born violinist who, as part of Ignaz Schuppanzigh's string quartet, had performed at the Viennese apartments of Beethoven's patron, Prince Lichnowsky. In 1820, Sina returned to Paris, then largely bereft of Beethoven's music (the conductor of the Conservatoire orchestra, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, had, in Schindler's telling, introduced the Eroica at a rehearsal, only to be met with laughter from the players). Sina sent an anonymous letter to Habeneck extolling enough virtues of the C-minor symphony to fire the conductor's curiosity. Schindler: "After considerable hesitation, the symphony was rehea.r.s.ed. Its reception was favorable! ... Without losing any time, other symphonies that had likewise remained unknown were tried, and lo! to everyone's surprise they were as well received as the C minor!"4 Sina's matchmaking aside, there were inst.i.tutional reasons for Beethoven's neglect as well. French concertgoers would have had little to no opportunity to hear Beethoven until 1828, the year after Beethoven died: that was when the administration of Charles X (the last of the Bourbon kings of France, whose reign was the high-water mark of post-Revolution French ultraroyalism) subsidized a new concert series at the Paris Conservatoire. Ardor for Beethoven erupted almost overnight. For the second program of the Societe des Concerts, Habeneck programmed the Eroica; the third program opened with the Fifth.5 Driven by a "Jeune France" claque of young, pa.s.sionately zealous artistic types, audiences reportedly reacted with such fervor that overwhelming, transporting enthusiasm became almost a fad. (The Fifth became a perennial favorite at the Societe des Concerts, programmed forty times between 1828 and 1848-more than any other symphony.)6 Running with the Jeune-France crowd was Hector Berlioz, the composer who dragged his teacher Le Sueur to hear Beethoven's Fifth, and who considered it the most famous of all his symphonies, [and] also the one in which I think Beethoven first gave free rein to his vast imagination, without recourse to any idea but his own to guide him.... It is his intimate thoughts that he means to develop, his secret sorrows, his pent-up anger, his dreams full of dejection, his nocturnal visions, and his outbursts of enthusiasm. Melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation take forms as individual and original as they are n.o.ble and powerful.7 Berlioz's description is Hoffmannesque,8 but he is on a different mission. Hoffmann pointed toward a transcendent clarity; Berlioz remains focused on vagueness. Hoffmann was promoting Romanticism; Berlioz is leveraging it.

Some hint at what Berlioz is up to comes in his comparison of the Fifth with the Eroica. Beethoven's Third, Berlioz proposes, was inspired by the composer's readings of Homer: "[M]emories of the Iliad evidently play a beautiful role." (This was both canny publicity-Leo Schrade, author of the pioneering study Beethoven in France, noted that a connection with antiquity "has always been in France the best letter of recommendation"9-and, no doubt, a projection of Berlioz's own obsession with the ancient epics.) The Fifth, by contrast, "seems to spring solely and directly from Beethoven's own genius." Except when it doesn't: The first movement depicts the chaotic feelings that overwhelm a great soul when prey to despair. It is not the calm, concentrated despair that shows the outward appearance of resignation, nor is it Romeo's dark and mute grief on learning of Juliet's death, but Oth.e.l.lo's terrible rage on hearing of Desdemona's guilt from Iago's poisonous lies.... Listen to the gasps in the orchestra, to the chords in the dialogue between winds and strings that come and go, sounding ever weaker, like the painful breaths of a dying man.10 The German Romantics had revered Beethoven for expressing what was beyond language, but Berlioz, with his explicitly literary programmatic reading of the Fifth (the first four notes as the ominous flutter of Desdemona's handkerchief, maybe?), is expanding the idea of language to encompa.s.s Beethoven. Schrade points out how often Berlioz describes the symphonies as "poetic" and the composer as a "poet," epithets Berlioz used "to denote the supreme degree that cannot be surpa.s.sed, and in point of language a superlative which cannot be further compared."11 France was a country where literary elegance and power sat at the summit of cultural achievement. To insist that Beethoven was not just a composer, but a poet, was to make him a little more French.

In The Arcades Project, his unfinished a.n.a.lysis of nineteenth-century Paris, critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin devoted an entire section to the flaneur, the perpetually strolling observer so typical of the city-"Paris created the type of the flaneur," Benjamin noted.12 The rapport the French had established with Beethoven was paralleled in the flaneur's mindset, at least as Benjamin imagined it: "That anamnestic intoxication in which the flaneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge-indeed, of dead facts-as something experienced and lived through."13 The French experienced the abstract knowledge of Beethoven's symphonies and thus adopted him into the French cultural pantheon. Benjamin jotted down a quote from Pierre Larousse's 1872 Grand dictionnaire universel, which, in defining the flaneur, opted for a foreign exemplar: In the first years of this century, a man was seen walking each and every day-regardless of the weather, be it suns.h.i.+ne or snow-around the ramparts of the city of Vienna. This man was Beethoven, who, in the midst of his wanderings, would work out his magnificent symphonies in his head before putting them down on paper.14 Adolphe Boschot, a critic who also wrote a biography of Berlioz, noted in 1908 how the image of Beethoven had become a standard trope in French art: "In every salon [painters] exhibit for us several canvases showing the author of the nine symphonies. For this has now become the fas.h.i.+on. Once upon a time they manufactured Bonapartes or the 'Temptations of St. Anthony,' now they manufacture Beethovens."15 The identification with Beethoven would reach an apotheosis with French sculptor emile-Antoine Bourdelle, who, as a teenager, perceived a strong resemblance between his own features and an engraving of the composer: "He thought he was seeing himself," Bourdelle's widow surmised, "and it was perhaps this fact, in the first instance, that attracted him."16 Bourdelle would produce nearly eighty portraits of Beethoven-sketches, finished drawings, sculptures-returning to the subject at periodic intervals between the late 1880s and his death, in 1929. At the very least, Bourdelle's obsession with Beethoven as a subject was indicative of a congruence of artistic intent ("It is my task," Bourdelle wrote, "to construct my own silent orchestra in which the sounds are expressed in terms of planes and of light"17); but the progression of his images-Beethoven's head increasingly distorted, craggy, expressionistic-hints at something deeper, what one critic called "a kind of involuntary confession."18 One of Bourdelle's last essays on the subject, produced shortly before he died, shows Beethoven, his face set in a stoic scowl, leaning against a ma.s.sive cross.

THE IMAGE of Beethoven as a poet was, nonetheless, also adopted by German writers-and, depending on who was doing the writing, could be read as either sustaining or undermining the crescendo of German nationalism kick-started by the 1870 defeat of France. One notorious poeticization came at the hands of musicologist Arnold Schering. In 1920, on the occasion of Beethoven's 150th birthday, Schering sought to rally post-Armistice Germany, now, in comparison with the glory days of 1870, "a small broken people ... once again about to celebrate Beethoven." To be great again, Schering advocated a dose of Beethoven's heroism, as inspired by poets: The heroic in the highest sense drew him to the heroes of Homer and Plutarch, to Coriolan, to Egmont, to Fidelio, where even a woman embodies male heroism. He felt in his own blood something of this heroism. When the furor teutonicus came over him, sparks sprayed his imagination and shook the boundaries of what was then possible: in the C-minor Symphony, the Eroica, in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, which in the weak race of 1850 had inspired secret horror.19 Homer, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe: Schering would go on to make those literary sparks profoundly literal. Starting with his 1934 book Beethoven in neuer Deutung (Beethoven in a New Interpretation), Schering set out to demonstrate that Beethoven had actually patterned specific works of music after specific works of literature. The Eroica drew on the Iliad. The Seventh Symphony followed Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The Appa.s.sionata Sonata was, in reality, scenes from Macbeth. The C-sharp minor Piano Sonata, already saddled with the sobriquet Moonlight, now became the mirror of act 4 of King Lear. In the words of one reviewer, Schering's speculative hermeneutics stood "in the same relation to true musical research as modern astrology stands to physical astronomy."20 Berlin critic Paul Bekker also characterized Beethoven as a kind of tone poet, a "Tondichter," in his popular book on Beethoven, first published in 1911. At first glance, Bekker's description of the Fifth seems to be the standard programmatic boilerplate: The work deals with the awful powers of Fate and ends with a triumph song of the human will. Underlying the whole is Beethoven's great idea of the freedom of man.... The struggle is to be to the death, involving not the fate of one ideal hero (as in the Eroica) but of all humanity. In the first movement of the Eroica the hero wrestles with the limitations and crippling emotionalism of his own being in order that his powers may have full scope, but in the fifth symphony humanity wrestles with all these hindrances expressed in the mysterious idea of Fate.21 The difference is that Bekker distills that contrast between the Eroica's individual hero and the Fifth's collective protagonist out of the music itself. In the Eroica, for instance, Beethoven included extra horns, their more prominent tone symbolic of the hero's presence. In the Fifth's opening, however, "where there is no question of a personal hero, he is content with the traditional complement of instruments." In the Finale, Beethoven reinforces the sound with trombones, "which (in his system) symbolize majestic greatness." Bekker concludes: "It will thus be seen that again in the C-minor symphony the orchestra was recreated in accordance with the underlying 'poetic idea' of the work."22 Again, Bekker's a.n.a.lysis might not seem much more than a particularly clever justification of the usual claims of universality made on the Fifth's behalf. But it was the cleverness that so irritated the advocates of German greatness. To reduce Beethoven's works to poetic programs was bad enough, but to a.n.a.lyze such poetry not as something Beethoven musically ill.u.s.trated, but rather as part and parcel of the musical materials themselves, was to deny music's unique aesthetic status-and, by extension, to deny the supposedly unique German privilege toward all things musical. As conductor and scholar Leon Botstein put it: Bekker and his allies were concealing the absence of the requisite predisposition-the spontaneous, aesthetic gift and their lack of true talent for music-behind rational arguments. It was a travesty to think that the greatest of all composers, and certainly of all German composers of instrumental music, had been inspired and guided by ordinary thinking and musings easily described in language.23 The idea that Beethoven's secrets could be so democratically available, without the intercession of elite, specifically German insight into music's mysteries, bore all the hallmarks of pernicious cosmopolitan (i.e., Jewish) thinking. Thus the question of the extent of poetic inspiration in Beethoven's music became a political wedge. Indeed, at the same time Arnold Schering was working his literary way through Beethoven's catalog, he also characterized "the vague sense of per aspera ad astra in the Fifth Symphony" as the "fight for existence waged by a Volk that looks for its Fuhrer and finally finds it."24 At the outset of the First World War, the "Culture Pope," German critic Alfred Kerr, had mused on the uneasy place of art during wartime. "The theaters also want to live," he wrote. "The question is what can be played." His solution idealistically combined Germany's greatest cultural hero with a naive optimism that Germans could avoid discussing him: Play, henceforth, the best that we have. Play that which reminds us of our proudest pride [stolzesten Stolz].

And if you know no pieces, then take fifty musicians.

And speak no word.

And every evening play Beethoven. Beethoven. Beethoven.25 INDY: Everybody's lost but me.

-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade IN 1921, Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker began to publish a series of pamphlets collectively called Der Tonwille, "The Will of Tones," subt.i.tled "Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music." Schenker, who had trained as a lawyer before casting his lot with music, had already written manuals of harmony and counterpoint. Having thus set down music's statutory law, as it were, Der Tonwille continued as an exercise in case law: detailed a.n.a.lyses of musical works, demonstrating their adherence to Schenker's criteria of musical excellence.

The inaugural study of Der Tonwille was the first installment of a multipart examination of Beethoven's Fifth. But before that, Schenker had some things to get off his chest, in a prefatory essay called "The Mission of German Genius," such as it stood in "these grave times, in these most grievous of times.... Once the artist, in such times, sees how the political parties vying with one another for power sin against art in general, and against his own art in particular, through ignorance and inept.i.tude, then he must be inflamed."26 And Schenker is off on a fevered, incantatory tear, a detailed indictment of the degeneration of German culture. "Shameless betrayal has been perpetrated during the World War on the genius of Germanity": by capitalists ("a spiritually and morally venal fringe group"); by communists ("that trouble-making megalomaniac wage-church of Karl Marx"); by "certain so-called pacifists and professors, their mouths rank with filth"; by commentators who "snored their way loudly" through previous wars "but who, when the Germans had to defend themselves against an invasion long premeditated by nations whose virulent envy of it exceeded their incompetence, suddenly woke up to discover, oh-so-smugly, the spiritual and moral truth that peace was more humane than war";27 and, most of all, by the siren song of democracy: [I]f democracy is really what was exemplified by those Western nations before, during, and after Versailles, then let the German democrat simply take a good look at democracy and do exactly what he sees Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians, Poles, Czechs, etc. doing. Let him break promises, violate treaties, infringe international law, steal private property, falsify maps, deface monuments, desecrate war-graves, lie, and commit murder as they do, and use words most pleasing unto man and G.o.d in the process, just as they do.28 And so on, page after page-until Schenker circles back around to his underlying point: "The task of these pamphlets will thus be to show what const.i.tutes German genius in music."29 Few people embodied the tensions running through early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa as thoroughly as Schenker. From his Viennese vantage, Schenker saw the rise of fin-de-siecle modernism, cosmopolitan sophistication, and democratic ferment-and hated it all. He created a style of music theory specifically designed to prove the superiority of the cla.s.sic Austro-Germanic repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. And yet the theory's mechanism-a.n.a.lytical, legalistic, pointedly devoid of poetic imagery-seemed to breathe a coolly scientific air in curious counterpoint to its creator's Kantian notions of genius and his extremely Right-Hegelian conservatism. One senses he realized the rift, hoping to compensate with a fiercely argumentative style gleaned from his legal studies: a two-p.r.o.nged attack, evidential logic b.u.t.tressed by emotional appeals to the jury.

No biblical prophet was more convinced of his righteousness. In a codicil to his will, Schenker provided his own epitaph: "Here lies the body of one who perceived the soul of music and communicated its laws, as the great musicians understood them, and as no one before him had done."30 He once wrote to a student about the fate of his "monotheistic music-teaching": "[A]fter 2,000 years the successors to the Germanic people may disavow Schenker as they disavow Rabbi Jesus, but all along the teaching has made its effect and achieved propagation in the world."31 Schenkerian a.n.a.lysis did propagate-particularly in America, where his techniques became a standard part of academic music training-but it did so in the absence of his heated rhetoric: belligerent sections of his treatises were left untranslated, and missionaries of his ideas focused on the a.n.a.lysis, not the oratory. (Allen Forte's article on Schenker for the 1980 edition of Grove's Dictionary, for example, avoids any hint of Schenker's combative prose, and doesn't even mention his legal background.32) Smoothing over Schenker's sharp edges makes him more palatably modern and universal, taking him out of the tumult of his own era. But it was the era that drove him, the chaos he sensed descending on civilization prompting both the escalating rationality of his theory and the emotional fury with which he shouted it into the whirlwind.

IN HIS CLa.s.sIC TEXT of a.n.a.lytic aesthetics, Languages of Art, American philosopher Nelson Goodman considered "the rather curious fact that in music, unlike painting, there is no such thing as a forgery of a known work."33 This is because in music (unlike painting) there is a score. We consider a performance authentic if it follows the score, and it has to follow the score to be authentic: "If we allow the least deviation, all a.s.surance of work-preservation and score-preservation is lost; for by a series of one-note errors of omission, addition, and modification, we can go all the way from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to Three Blind Mice."34 For Schenker, though, being able to get from Beethoven's Fifth to "Three Blind Mice," step by a.n.a.lytical step, was the sign of true musical understanding. Having commenced Der Tonwille with livid indignation, Schenker abruptly s.h.i.+fted into theoretical discourse: a short essay to introduce the Urlinie, the "fundamental line." This was the concept that increasingly occupied Schenker's thought for the rest of his life: a simple descending scale, sometimes eight notes, sometimes five, but in its most basic form, only three notes (i.e., the opening phrase of "Three Blind Mice"), ending on the tonic, the pole star and goal of any piece of tonal music. When a three-note Urlinie is combined with a do-sol-do ba.s.s line, the result is an Ursatz, a fundamental structure, the simple architecture at the core of all Schenker-approved great music.

"The Urlinie bears in itself the seeds of all the forces that shape tonal life"; the Urlinie supersedes all other musical creation stories. Schenker's goal is to demonstrate a work's Austro-Germanic fitness by reverse-engineering its presented musical surface all the way back to the Urlinie. "With the cooperation of the harmonic degrees," Schenker goes on, "the Urlinie indicates the paths to all elaboration and so also to the composition of the outer voices, in whose intervals the marriage of strict and free composition is so wonderfully and mysteriously consummated."35 Beginning with the fundamental line and structure, great composers elaborate that structure, layer by layer, into musical monuments, every transition from simpler to more complex governed by the strict rules of counterpoint and voice-leading that Schenker, thorough as he was, had already codified in his harmony and counterpoint guides. Background pattern to middle-ground expansion to foreground surface: the evolution of true music, that is, Austro-Ge