The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination by Matthew Guerrieri

Author:Matthew Guerrieri [Guerrieri, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307960924
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2012-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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