The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination by Matthew Guerrieri Page B
Authors: Matthew Guerrieri
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notions like this applied to Beethoven and
his symphonic style: one need look no further than the other Marx, Adolph Bernhard,
who even during Beethoven’s lifetime was already justifying a progressive view of
his hero’s music in terms similar to Eliot’s:
The preliminary works of philosophers of art are useful to us, and we find the way
paved that they first had to prepare laboriously. Above all, however, we make reference
to the fact that art first had to reach the stage of perfection where it provided
material for a higher point of view. 68
Of course, hanging that expectation on Beethoven’s symphonies practically ensured
that they would be continually reinterpreted to justify each newer “higher point of
view”—which is exactly what happened. The idea of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any other piece
of music—being “timeless” originates with this (largely successful) effort to portray
Beethoven as a figure in the vanguard of a progressive view of history.
In attempting to control that progression, the Soviet state ironically gradually came
to rely on Beethoven’s being a specifically historical figure. At the outset of the
Bolshevik regime, the Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of how “Beethoven … not
only expressed the complexities of his own personality, but reflected most forcefully
the storms of the Great Revolution.” 69 Lunacharsky was using Beethoven as a yardstick for demonstrating that the Russian
avant-gardists of the time—Scriabin, Prokofiev—were also expressing socialist ideals.
By the time of the 1927 Beethoven centennial, however, things had changed: Lenin was
dead, Stalin was tightening his grip on power, and socialist ideals were better expressed
byBeethoven’s music, Lunacharsky pronounced, than by any contemporary “futurists and
hooligan opponents of the classics.” 70
The straitjacket can be sensed in another momentous Fifth Symphony, that of Dmitri
Shostakovich. Written in 1937, it was the composer’s response to his own Stalinist
difficulties, the frightening shift in his official reputation after his opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
was judged to be contrary to the tenets of socialist realism. Shostakovich’s Fifth
shadows Beethoven’s both in its minor-to-major struggle-to-triumph trajectory, and
in its obsessive use and reuse of short motives. And, like Beethoven, Shostakovich
produced a work whose greatness is in no small part due to the ambiguity of its powerful
rhetoric, creating a template for enduring reinterpretation: “a richly coded utterance,”
as Richard Taruskin has put it, “but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed
or definitively paraphrased.” 71 Shostakovich’s Fifth mixed triumph and uneasiness enough for both Soviet officialdom
and its discontents to claim its narrative.
But the symphony’s opening theme hints at the increasingly suffocating presence of
the Beethovenian paragon. Shostakovich jump-starts with a series of angular, dotted-rhythm
leaps, up and down, but the vaults are herded into a mutter: by the fourth bar, the
bravado has been abraded into a single note, rapped three times, staccato. In Shostakovich’s
version, Beethoven’s repeated-note opening becomes a hesitant cessation: an ominous,
unanswered tapping, quashing the defiance of those impulsive leaps. It is as if Beethoven’s
Fifth were run backward and the finale’s dotted-rhythm outbursts subsumed back into
the opening’s grim announcement. (In Stalin’s Russia, after all, a knock on the door
could be all too literally fatal.)
The open-ended nature of the interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth complicated its status
in Communist regimes, even as the Party relied on Beethoven’s Fifth to fire up revolutionary
fervor. Functionaries of the
Freie Deutsche Jugend
, the official East Germansocialist youth group, noted the music’s usefulness to a journalist in
his symphonic style: one need look no further than the other Marx, Adolph Bernhard,
who even during Beethoven’s lifetime was already justifying a progressive view of
his hero’s music in terms similar to Eliot’s:
The preliminary works of philosophers of art are useful to us, and we find the way
paved that they first had to prepare laboriously. Above all, however, we make reference
to the fact that art first had to reach the stage of perfection where it provided
material for a higher point of view. 68
Of course, hanging that expectation on Beethoven’s symphonies practically ensured
that they would be continually reinterpreted to justify each newer “higher point of
view”—which is exactly what happened. The idea of Beethoven’s Fifth—or any other piece
of music—being “timeless” originates with this (largely successful) effort to portray
Beethoven as a figure in the vanguard of a progressive view of history.
In attempting to control that progression, the Soviet state ironically gradually came
to rely on Beethoven’s being a specifically historical figure. At the outset of the
Bolshevik regime, the Commissar for Culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of how “Beethoven … not
only expressed the complexities of his own personality, but reflected most forcefully
the storms of the Great Revolution.” 69 Lunacharsky was using Beethoven as a yardstick for demonstrating that the Russian
avant-gardists of the time—Scriabin, Prokofiev—were also expressing socialist ideals.
By the time of the 1927 Beethoven centennial, however, things had changed: Lenin was
dead, Stalin was tightening his grip on power, and socialist ideals were better expressed
byBeethoven’s music, Lunacharsky pronounced, than by any contemporary “futurists and
hooligan opponents of the classics.” 70
The straitjacket can be sensed in another momentous Fifth Symphony, that of Dmitri
Shostakovich. Written in 1937, it was the composer’s response to his own Stalinist
difficulties, the frightening shift in his official reputation after his opera
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
was judged to be contrary to the tenets of socialist realism. Shostakovich’s Fifth
shadows Beethoven’s both in its minor-to-major struggle-to-triumph trajectory, and
in its obsessive use and reuse of short motives. And, like Beethoven, Shostakovich
produced a work whose greatness is in no small part due to the ambiguity of its powerful
rhetoric, creating a template for enduring reinterpretation: “a richly coded utterance,”
as Richard Taruskin has put it, “but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed
or definitively paraphrased.” 71 Shostakovich’s Fifth mixed triumph and uneasiness enough for both Soviet officialdom
and its discontents to claim its narrative.
But the symphony’s opening theme hints at the increasingly suffocating presence of
the Beethovenian paragon. Shostakovich jump-starts with a series of angular, dotted-rhythm
leaps, up and down, but the vaults are herded into a mutter: by the fourth bar, the
bravado has been abraded into a single note, rapped three times, staccato. In Shostakovich’s
version, Beethoven’s repeated-note opening becomes a hesitant cessation: an ominous,
unanswered tapping, quashing the defiance of those impulsive leaps. It is as if Beethoven’s
Fifth were run backward and the finale’s dotted-rhythm outbursts subsumed back into
the opening’s grim announcement. (In Stalin’s Russia, after all, a knock on the door
could be all too literally fatal.)
The open-ended nature of the interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth complicated its status
in Communist regimes, even as the Party relied on Beethoven’s Fifth to fire up revolutionary
fervor. Functionaries of the
Freie Deutsche Jugend
, the official East Germansocialist youth group, noted the music’s usefulness to a journalist in
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