The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Part 11

56. Robert Herrick, "To Enjoy the Time," in The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, F. W. Moorman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.

57. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), pp. 7, 46. Herrick punctuates his Beethoven with a quotation from Virgil: terque quaterque beati Queis ante ora patrum-"three and four times blessed were those fated to die before their parents' eyes." British homesickness could easily colonize Germany and Rome.

58. E. M. Forster, "The Challenge of Our Time," in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1951), p. 56.

59. E. M. Forster, Howards End (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 21. The sentiment may be echoing Goldsworthy Lowes d.i.c.kinson's remedy for easing the tension of reconciling "the Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in eternity": "When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a 'sacred edifice.' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better." d.i.c.kinson, a Cambridge historian and philosopher, was a longtime friend of Forster, and his companion on his first trip to India (eventually yielding Forster's final novel, A Pa.s.sage to India); d.i.c.kinson's family was reportedly the inspiration for the Schlegel sisters and their London house in Howards End. Forster speculated that d.i.c.kinson, a lifelong pacifist, may have been the one to coin the term "League of Nations." But toward the end of his life, d.i.c.kinson would admit that the prospects for the League were dim, writing to an Indian correspondent in 1931: "When one enters into politics one enters the region of pa.s.sion, interest, prejudice, and at last, fighting, which, however it begins, always ends in the destruction of all that was best and most generous in those who perhaps inaugurated it." (For the Beethoven quote, see Goldsworthy Lowes d.i.c.kinson, Appearances [New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915], pp. 134, 135; for the connection with Howards End, see Paul Cadmus's letter to The New York Times, April 12, 1992; for the League of Nations and d.i.c.kinson's disillusion, see E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes d.i.c.kinson [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962], pp. 163 and 22930.) 60. Forster, Howards End, pp. 2223.

61. Ibid., p. 23.

62. Ibid., p. 31. Forster's fellow Bloomsburyan Leonard Woolf had a friend, B. F. Dutton, who reminded him of Leonard Bast: "He spent his evenings writing poetry about elves and fairies, and playing, endlessly, an arrangement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the C Minor, on his out-of-tune piano.... The fascination of Dutton for Leonard was that Dutton was a terrifyingly degraded version of himself." See Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 77.

63. Mary Burgan, "Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction," Victorian Studies 30, no, 1 (1986): 61.

64. Lucas Malet, The Wages of Sin, vol. 3 (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1891), pp. 3132.

65. John Lane Ford, Dower and Curse, vol. 1 (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), pp. 6, 167.

66. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mount Royal (London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1883), p. 282.

67. William Makepeace Thackeray, Denis Duval: Lovel the Widower: and Other Stories (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), p. 237.

68. Ibid., p. 256.

69. Linda Allardt et al., eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 255.

70. Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Rumour, vol. 3 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), p. 219. "Adelaida" combines aspects of Louis-Napoleon's empress, the Spanish-born Eugenie de Montijo, with a name borrowed from both the Beethoven song and Queen Victoria's niece, Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, to whom Louis-Napoleon had unsuccessfully proposed marriage.

71. Ibid., p. 227.

72. Ibid., p. 312.

73. Ibid., p. 347.

74. Grove, Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, pp. 15556.

75. See Mich.e.l.le Fillion, "Edwardian Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Music in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View," 19th-Century Music 25, no. 2/3 (Autumn 2001Spring, 2002): 26695.

76. See the "Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts," in Alistair M. Duckworth, Howards End: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 16.

77. See, for instance, Anna Foata, "The Knocking at the Door. A Fantasy on Fate, Forster, and Beethoven's Fifth," Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens 44 (1996): 13545, or Andrea K. Weatherhead, "Howards End: Beethoven's Fifth," Twentieth Century Literature 31, no. 2/3 (E. M. Forster Issue) (Summer-Autumn 1985): 247264. Weatherhead's use of musical terminology is highly dubious; a tangle such as "Beethoven's first themes in A flat and C major are 'relative minors.' They have completely different scales but may be combined to produce a series of chords in minor thirds" (p. 256)-is, at the very least, misunderstanding both relative key relationships and mistaking a major third for a minor. But her overall thesis, that the novel roughly tracks the symphony's structure, is plausible. (My own mapping of symphony to novel varies from both Foata and Weatherhead; for instance, Foata matches the Andante to the relationship between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilc.o.x, and Weatherhead proposes Helen's repeated cries of "panic and emptiness" as a unifying motive.) 78. Forster, Howards End, p. 1.

79. Stephen Spender, The Creative Element (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 90.

80. Quoted in "Bah, humbug! The cla.s.sics we secretly loathe," The Times (London), December 23, 2009, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/article6964184.ece.

81. One should not even trust the seeming voice of the author. It is one of Forster's more elegant confidence games that one should end up a.s.suming that the intrusive, judgmental, and frequently deflating narrator of Howards End is both omniscient and a stand-in for Forster himself. Like the tantalizingly palpable but elusive composer-stand-in protagonist of the Fifth Symphony, Forster's narrator only seems straightforward. Francis Gillen has suggested that the narrator is a kind of devil's-advocate Socratic teacher ("I'll fool you sometimes, suggest, as a good teacher, a false or oversimplified conclusion, then show you your mistakes in accepting it," as he characterizes him); Paul Armstrong makes him a deliberately subversive figure, a.s.serting conventional authority in order to reveal conventional authority's fragile arbitrariness (a notion often linked to Forster's h.o.m.os.e.xuality); Elizabeth Langland questions whether the narrator is even a he at all. See Gillen, "Howards End and the Neglected Narrator," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 140; Armstrong, Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 11126; Langland, "Gesturing Toward an Open s.p.a.ce: Gender, Form and Language in E. M. Forster's Howards End," in Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds., Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism (University of Ma.s.sachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 25267.

82. E. M. Forster, "The C Minor of That Life," in Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 125.

83. Forster, Howards End, p. 20.

84. Ibid., pp. 21314.

85. Ibid., p. 244.

86. Shaw, "Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall," in Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 1, p. 471.

87. Ibid., p. 453.

88. George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, in Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1962), p. 595.

89. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th series, vol. 73 (1915), column 2326 (debate of July 28, 1915).

90. Edward Goldbeck, "Beethoven," Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 2, 1916, p. 5. Goldbeck's wife was the actress, singer, and later theatrical producer Lina Abarbanell; his son-in-law was the composer Marc Blitzstein.

91. "Col. William Jay Expires Suddenly," The New York Times, March 29, 1915, p. 9.

92. "No Power to Bar Papers: Court Enjoins Mount Vernon from Banning Hearst by Law," The New York Times, June 5, 1918, p. 22. This article is a brief roundup of anti-German sentiment. Other items: The city of Mount Vernon, New York, tried to ban German-language newspapers; a school commissioner in Summit, New Jersey, unsuccessfully sought to end German-language instruction in the town. Another resolution by the same commissioner, "to have all books ent.i.tled 'Im Vaterland' collected and reserved until July 4, when they will be turned over to the Fourth of July celebration committee, with instructions to use them for a bonfire and to use other German propaganda papers to kindle the blaze, took the same course."

93. "German Opera Cut from List at Metropolitan," New York Tribune, Nov. 2, 1917, p.1.

94. Barbara L. Tischler, "One Hundred Percent Americanism and Music in Boston during World War I," American Music 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 172.

95. "The Boston Orchestra Under Dr. Karl Muck," The New York Times, Oct. 13, 1906, p. 9.

96. Frederic Dean, "Some Conductors and Their Batons," The Bookman 46, no. 5 (Jan. 1918): 58990.

97. Janet Baker-Carr, Evening at Symphony: A Portrait of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), p. 56.

98. William E. Walter, "Culled From the Mail Pouch: Miss Farrar Remembers Karl Muck's War Problem," The New York Times, March 10, 1940, p. 159.

99. Edmund A. Bowles, "Karl Muck and His Compatriots: German Conductors in America During World War I (And How They Coped)," American Music 25, no. 4 (Winter, 2007): n. 41: 43334.

100. The nucleus of the ensemble was a naval band formerly posted to the German protectorate of Tsing-Tao, China; after the capture of Tsing-Tao by j.a.panese and British troops in 1914, the band-noncombatants under the terms of the Geneva Convention-had made its way to the United States, where its members were detained once America entered the war. Previously, the Tsing-Tao Band had performed at a 1916 Carnegie Hall memorial for German war dead. Among the speakers at the concert was the Rev. Dr. G. C. Berkemeier, one of the leading Lutheran ministers in America. "Dr. Berkemeier said that the war had united Germany, and that the spirit which prompted her in the war would win. He was applauded loudly when he said that England was prompted by love of Mammon, France, by love of Vengeance, and Russia-'well, Russia, there are all the devils of h.e.l.l.' " (See "Germans Honor War Dead: Hear Opera Singers and Orators at Carnegie Hall Meeting," The New York Times, May 30, 1916, p. 7.) The band gave the Camp Oglethorpe group its name: the Tsingtauer Orchester. See Bowles, "Karl Muck and His Compatriots."

101. "Mrs. Jay Quits: Announces She Will Lead No More Uprisings Against German Art," The New York Times, July 3, 1919, p. 11.

102. "German Music? Maybe; Muck's Successor Undecided on Symphony Policy," New York Tribune, Oct. 30, 1918, p. 9.

103. Henry Franks, "Geist," in Papers of the Manchester Literary Club (London: Abel Heywood and Sons, 1878), vol. 4, pp. 95106.

CHAPTER 6. Earthquakes.

1. E. M. Forster, "A View Without a Room: Old Friends Fifty Years Later," The New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1958, p. 4.

2. Quoted in Leo Schrade, Beethoven in France (Yale University Press, 1942), p. 187.

3. As reported in Alexandre Oublicheff, Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Paris: Jules Gavelot, 1857), in such a way that hinted at the story's already-wide currency.

4. Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, Donald W. MacArdle, trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1996; orig. 1860), p. 502.

5. James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1995), p. 258.

6. Beate Angelika Kraus, Beethoven-Rezeption in Frankreich (Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus, 2001), p. 111.

7. Hector Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays, Elizabeth Csicery-Ronay, trans. (Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 19.

8. Berlioz even adopts Hoffmann's epic style of alternating emotional impressions with unusually specific musical descriptions: "There is a striking example in [the first] movement of the effect produced in some contexts by the excessive doubling of parts, and also of the untamed quality of the six-four chord above the supertonic, otherwise known as the second inversion of the dominant chord," and so forth. Ibid., p. 20.

9. Schrade, Beethoven in France p. 29.

10. Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays, p. 19.

11. Schrade, Beethoven in France, p. 52.

12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. (Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 417.

13. Ibid., p. 417.

14. Quoted in ibid., p. 454.

15. Quoted in Schrade, Beethoven in France, p. 177.

16. Quoted in Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Modern Painting, Drawing & Sculpture Collected by Emily and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., vol. 4 (Harvard University Art Museums, 1988), p. 587.

17. Ibid., p. 588.

18. Emile-Francois Julia, Antoine Bourdelle: Maitre d'uvre (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930), p. 110 ("une sorte de confession involontaire").

19. Arnold Schering, Beethoven und der deutsche Idealismus: rede gehalten beim Festakt zur feier der 150 (Leipzig: Verlag von C. F. Kahnt, 1921), pp. 34, 20. ("[E]in niedergebrochenes Volk, stehen wir abermals im Begriff, Beethoven zu feiern"; "Das Heroische in diesem hochsten Sinne zog ihn du den Helden Homers und Plutarchs, zu Coriolan, zu Egmont, zu 'Fidelio', wo gar ein Weib mannliches Heldentum verkorpert. Er selbst spurte im eigenen Blute etwas von Heroentum. Wenn der furor teutonicus uber ihn kam, so spruhte seine Phantasie Funken und ruttelte an den Schranken des damals praktisch Moglichen: in der C-Moll-Symphonie, der Eroica, im ersten Satze der neunten Symphonie, die einem so schwachen Geschlecht wie dem um 1850 geheimes Grauen einfloste.") 20. "A.E.," "Beethoven und die Dichtung" (review), Music & Letters 18, no. 2 (April 1937): 208.

21. Paul Bekker, Beethoven, M. M. Bozman, trans. (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1932), p. 170.

22. Ibid., p. 171.

23. Leon Botstein, "The Search for Meaning in Beethoven: Popularity, Intimacy, and Politics in Historical Perspective," in Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg, eds., Beethoven and His World (Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 355.

24. Quoted in David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 18701989 (Yale University Press, 1996), p. 151.

25. Alfred Kerr, Eintagsfliegen, oder Die Macht der Kritik, Die Welt im Drama IV (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1917), pp. 163, 165 ("Die Theater wollen auch leben. Fragt sich, was gespielt werden kann.... Spielt kunftig das Beste, das wir haben. Spielt, was an unsren stolzesten Stolz erinnert. Und wenn ihr keine Stucke wit, so nehmt euch funfzig Musiker. Und sprecht kein Wort. Und spielt an jedem Abend Beethoven. Beethoven. Beethoven.").

26. Heinrich Schenker, Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, William Drabkin, trans., vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3.

27. Ibid., pp. 45.

28. Ibid., p. 12.

29. Ibid., p. 20.

30. h.e.l.lmut Federhofer, Heinrich Schenker: Nach Tagebuchern und Briefen in der Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1985), p. 37n. (Emphasis added.) 31. Quoted in Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 208.

32. Allen Forte, "Heinrich Schenker," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, ed., vol. 16 (London: Macmillan, 1980): 62728.

33. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 112.

34. Ibid., p. 187. For a fascinating exploration of the implications and interpretations of this pa.s.sage, see Lydia Goehr, "Three Blind Mice: Goodman, McLuhan, and Adorno on the Art of Music and Listening in the Age of Global Transmission," New German Critique 104, vol. 35, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 131.

35. Schenker, Der Tonwille, vol. 1, p. 21.

36. Cook, The Schenker Project, p. 203.

37. Even stories of Georg Jellinek's lighter side are Teutonically heavy: "Some of [Jellinek's] students will recall the perplexed Dienstmann who once appeared at the door of his cla.s.sroom and stood there as though nailed to the spot. Upon hearing the stern command 'Heraus mit dir' (out with you) of the apparently enraged professor, the bewilderment of the man-servant changed to sudden fright, followed by a hasty retreat. For a moment the cla.s.s believed the professor's anger genuine, but it soon dawned upon us that it was a mere outburst of German humor, and all joined in a hearty laugh over the poor fellow's discomfiture." ("George Jellinek," The American Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 [July 1911]: 71718.) 38. See Wayne Alpern, "Music Theory as a Mode of Law: The Case of Heinrich Schenker, Esq.," Cardozo Law Review 20 (19981999): 146874.

39. Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, Max Farrand, trans. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901), p. 97.

40. Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Der freie Satz): Volume III of New Musical Theories and Fantasies, Ernst Oster, trans. (New York: Longman, 1979), p. 3.

41. Alpern, "Music Theory as a Mode of Law," pp. 147475.

42. See, for instance, this pa.s.sage from Schenker's Harmony: "The relationships of the tone are established in its systems.... A tone dominates the others if it subjects them to its superior vital force, within the relationship fixed in the various systems. In this sense, a system resembles, in anthropomorphic terms, a const.i.tution, regulation, statute, or whatever other name we use to grasp conceptually the manifold relationships we enter." (Heinrich Schenker, Harmony, Oswald Jonas, ed.; Elisabeth Mann Borgese, trans. [University of Chicago Press, 1954], p. 84.) 43. Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre (Berlin: Verlag von O. Haring, 1905), p. 49. (Emphasis added.) ("Die Staatsrechtslehre ist ... eine Normwissenschaft. Ihre Normen sind von den Aussagen uber das Sein des Staates als sozialer Erscheinung scharf zu trennen.") 44. Georg Jellinek, Introduction a la Doctrine de L'etat, Georges Fardis, ed., trans. (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1904), pp. 8485. ("Veut-on se placer dans le domaine de l'esthetique? Le point de vue devient tout autre.... Il existe ainsi, dans le monde des sensations d'art, une verite qui n'a rien de commun avec celle du monde des connaissances naturelles. La symphonie en ut mineur de Beethoven est, au point de vue du sentiment et de la perception musicale, la realite la plus profonde, la plus indiscutablement vraie, la plus puissante: toute la science naturelle ne peut rien contre la conscience de cette realite.... Les choses se comportent d'une maniere a.n.a.logue eu matiere de droit.... Le monde juridique est un monde d'idees, il se comporte vis-a-vis du monde tangible comme le monde de l'art vis-a-vis du monde des sciences naturelles.") 45. Cook, The Schenker Project, p. 212.

46. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 99100.

47. Heinrich Schenker, Der Tonwille, vol. 1, p. 27.

48. Ibid., pp. 2729.

49. Ibid., p. 29.

50. Ibid., p. 187.

51. Ibid., p. 187.

52. Ibid., p. 196.

53. Ibid., p. 30.

54. Henrich Schenker, Counterpoint, John Rothgeb and Jurgen Thym, trans., Book 1 (New York: Schirmer Books, 1987), p. xviii.

55. Ibid., Book 2, pp. xiii.