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

theorist Francesco
     Galeazzi, writing in 1796, called E-flat major “a heroic key, extremely majestic,
     grave and serious.” 28 Not so for C minor. In 1713, German composer and theorist Johann Mattheson wrote,
     “An extremely lovely, but also sad key. Because the first quality is too prevalent
     and one can easily get tired of too much sweetness, no harm is done when the attempt
     is made to enliven the key a little by a somewhat cheerful or regular tempo.” 29
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1749
Encyclopédie
opined that C minor “brings tenderness into the soul.” Writing in 1783, Johann J.
     H. Ribock, an accomplished amateur flutist, compared the key “to the colour of a pale
     rose and also to the aroma of the same.” 30 Late-eighteenth-century composers created a somewhat more Gothic atmosphere with
     C minor—as in Mozart’s K. 491 PianoConcerto, a brooding piece that Beethoven particularly admired. (“We shall never be
     able to do anything like that!” he once told a friend. 31 ) But for heroism, Mozart opted for E-flat major—in the opening scene of
Die Zauberflöte
, Prince Tamino finds himself set upon by a slithery C-minor monster that the Three
     Ladies vanquish with a timely modulation to E-flat: “Triumph!”
    In the concert hall, though, the sheer gravity of the Fifth’s opening makes the vague
     tonality moot. The major-minor uncertainty in the opening of the Fifth Symphony engendered
     next to no contemporary comment—only E. T. A. Hoffmann mentioned it, in his seminal
     1810 review of the symphony (“the listener surmises E-flat major,” he surmised 32 ), and he was working from the score, not from a performance. And, harmonically rooted
     or not, the
sound
of the Fifth’s opening was actually somewhat traditional for C minor: many C-minor
     works of Haydn and Mozart (K. 491 included) also start out with passages in bare unisons
     or octaves. 33 Beethoven adopted that stylistic tic; his largest C-minor essay prior to the Fifth,
     the Third Piano Concerto, opens in ominous octaves (and with a theme strongly foreshadowing
     the Fifth Symphony’s Finale), as does his Violin Sonata op. 30, no. 2.
    But those openings were all quiet in their foreboding. The Fifth imbues the C-minor
     dialect with rhetorical force. Beethoven’s orchestration of the opening is optimized
     toward weight: all the strings, in their lowest, heaviest registers, plus clarinets,
     which round and burnish the strings’ tone. In the original manuscript, Beethoven initially
     had the flutes doubling the opening line an octave higher, then thought better of
     it and scratched those notes out. No double reeds—oboes, bassoons—and no brass: any
     hint of instrumental brightness has been banished. In place of an all-for-one
tutti
opening, Beethoven opts for only those instruments that can combine power with overcast
     gloom. The feminine overtones of contemporary C-minor impressions are absent—Leonard
     Bernstein heard the orchestration as gender-specific: “Beethoven clearly wanted these
     notes to bea strong, masculine utterance, and he therefore orchestrated entirely with instruments
     that play normally in the register of the male singing voice.” 34 At the very least, Beethoven deliberately avoided Mattheson’s advice to leaven C
     minor with a bit of cheer.
    Beethoven’s appropriation of E-flat major’s dark majesty for his favored C minor was
     a success, to judge by a subsequent spate of revised key impressions. While some writings,
     still reliant on older traditions, continued the theme of gentle lament, an 1827 musical
     dictionary by J. A. Schrader assigned to C minor “rigid, numb grief,” “fear and horror,”
     “bitter lamenting,” and “despair.” In 1830, the German organist G. F. Ebhardt heard
     in C minor “extreme misery, sometimes raving nonsense.” 35 Part of the shift no doubt came from the Romantic era’s louder dramatic volume; descriptions
     of other keys also move toward more