The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination Read Free Page A

delighted with his compositions, it was all silence to him.”
     Hugh said nothing. 24
    Even today, one can still find the myth perpetuated here and there. 25
    As an up-and-coming composer and performer, Beethoven probably feared that common
     knowledge of his encroaching deafness would have hindered his career prospects. The
     opposite occurred, as it turned out: within his own lifetime, Beethoven’s deafness
     became a celebrated element in the reputations of both the composer and his music.
     A snippet of that celebrity is preserved in the conversation books, the trove of one-sided
     table talk from Beethoven’s later years, when guestswould jot down their share of the discussion on paper. During one chat, Beethoven’s
     nephew Karl informs his uncle of popular perception: “Precisely because of [your deafness]
     you are famous. Everyone is astonished, not just that you can compose so well, but
     particularly that you can do it in spite of this affliction. If you ask me, I believe
     that it even contributes to the originality of your compositions.” 26
    On this occasion, Beethoven seems to have taken his nephew slightly to task for overdetermining
     the nature of his genius, but there is some evidence that it was Beethoven himself
     who planted the seed of that astonishment and fame. By the time of the Fifth’s premiere,
     Beethoven had come to terms with his deafness enough to stop concealing it and to
     start even subtly advertising it, writing a note to himself in one of his sketchbooks
     to “let your deafness no longer be a secret—even in art.” The musicologist Owen Jander
     went so far as to reinterpret the Fifth Symphony in light of this self-admonition,
     making it not just a metaphorical struggle with infirmity, but, at least in the slow
     march that permeates the third and part of the fourth movements—a march built out
     of the symphony’s opening motive—a musical re-creation of the experience of deafness.
     The third movement’s translation of its theme into a desaturated skeleton of pizzicato
     strings, Jander suggested, was meant to simulate the composer’s increasingly hazy
     sense of hearing. 27
    If the Fifth Symphony is about Beethoven’s deafness, then what could we read into
     its opening rest? A brief jolt of the experience of deafness, perhaps—a deployment
     of great energy that remains bereft of sound. Or maybe a remembrance and a reminder:
     a moment of silence for Beethoven’s hearing.
    THE PITCHES of the opening phrase produce their own ambiguity, albeit one that, given the symphony’s
     familiarity, is, again, well-nigh impossible to recapture. The Fifth is in C minor,
     a keyforever associated with Beethoven in his most heaven-storming moods. But, strictly
     speaking, C minor is not actually
established
until the seventh measure of the first movement. Beethoven exploits a quirk of music
     theory concerning the triad, one of the basic building blocks of Western music: a
     stack of three notes, the first, third, and fifth notes of the major or minor scale.
     If you take away one of the notes of a triad, it starts to, in effect, gesture in
     two directions at once. So the first two pitches of the Fifth Symphony, G and E-flat,
     might be two-thirds of a C-minor triad, or they might be two-thirds of an E-flat major
     triad. The
second
pair of pitches, F and D, could be part of a dominant-seventh chord built on G (the
     most basic harmonic antecedent of C minor), or part of one built on B-flat (the most
     basic harmonic antecedent of E-flat major). From a music theory standpoint, the opening
     passage is playing fast and loose with the symphony’s key: until the cellos and bassoons
     anchor the motive with a sustained middle C in the seventh bar, there’s no way to
     tell whether the piece is in a major or minor key.
    Modern ears might reflexively assign more dramatic weight to minor keys than to major,
     but that wasn’t necessarily the case in Beethoven’s time. Italian