The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination by Matthew Guerrieri
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Was Beethoven Jewish?

I have spent a day with this book and I can’t go on. Not because it is horrid but because it is wonderful. Every page is not only informative, it’s inspiring. The consequence is that it’s got me off pursuing obscure possibilities, that lead to further conjectures, to more research, to more possibilities, potentially ad infinitum. So I’m calling it a day until I can recover some equilibrium.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Guerrieri starts with the hidden (except to musicians) eighth rest that begins the Fifth Symphony. Who knew! This magnificent work begins in silence. Then it occurs to me in a flash that this rest serves exactly the same function as the silent consonant Aleph in Hebrew. Although it has no sound in itself, Aleph indicates a sort of preparation for the speech to follow, equivalent to the conductor’s baton stroke. The kabbalists consider the Aleph therefore to be the silent origin of all words, indeed of the entire universe, from the mouth of God. The parallel with the creative mind of Beethoven is irresistible, particularly in light of the fact that he was almost certainly entirely deaf when he wrote the symphony. From nothingness to existence and yet an existence that is of a fundamentally different kind to its creator.

Meditation on the eighth rest/Aleph then leads to further thought. The rest creates an odd musical stress, as Guerrieri discusses in detail. Although the piece is in 2/4 time, there is only one beat, and that is on the last note of the bar: dah dah dah DUM. This too is the general rule in Hebrew in which the stress moves toward the final syllable (the mil-ra). This is very unlike most European languages in which the emphasis tends to move toward the initial syllables with a consequent historical loss of final sounds. It’s why English has few distinct noun-cases; German has a few more but these are indicated by the form of the definite or indefinite article not in the noun itself. So Beethoven’s dramatic emphasis on the last note is in a sense unnatural for a German-speaker.

In my fevered state, speculation on this unusual stress then becomes frantic. Treating the bar as a phrase rather than a word, The poetic meter of the first four notes is something called quartus paeon, a poetic foot consisting of four syllables, any one of which is accented or stressed. In the Fifth Symphony, it is of course the last musical word in the phrase. Hebrew poetry, at least its biblical form, has no clear metrical structure. However, it does make a distinction between open syllables, which end on a vowel, and closed syllables, which end on a consonant. In the former, vowels are long; in the latter preceding vowels are shortened, given extra punch if you will to the final consonant. This I think is the Hebrew poetic equivalent to the structure of Beethoven’s first bar, giving even more strength to that final musical word, DUM, while shortening or softening the previous notes in a sort of closed poetic form.

On a roll now, I can see the afternoon lost in the arcane subtleties of Hebrew grammar. One of the peculiarities of Hebrew is that it doesn’t express verb tenses - past, present, future, and so forth - with separate forms as in English and other European languages. Most often the tense of a verb has to be picked up from context (something that makes biblical translation a real art form little understood by evangelical literalists). Interestingly, the first four notes of the Fifth, G and E-flat, are, as Guerrieri points out, ambiguous as to their key. They could develop in several tonal directions. It is not until the seventh bar that the key is ‘established’ as Beethoven’s favoured C minor. This is eerily like a typical Hebrew sentence whose tense can’t be determined until sufficient context has been established.

At this point I have become too overheated to continue. Clearly, as the economist pointed out, if any of this were credible, someone would already have picked up the ten pound note off this particular musical floor. The human imagination is indeed a strange critter. Someone stop me.

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