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

symptom of modernity and its discontent; Sartre wrote of “that deep desire,
     that fear and anguish at the heart of all authenticity—which are apprehensions
before life
.… This fear is due to the fact that the situations envisaged are on the horizon,
     out of reach[.]” 74
    One is almost tempted to plot the fluctuations in the speed of performances of the
     Fifth as a kind of index of alienation over time, with instances of Beethoven’s perceptually
     out-of-reach 108 beats per minute indicating, paradoxically, the most insistent need
     for an authentic experience.
    S ARTRE ONCE LIKENED Beethoven’s music to a historical moment of unusual possibility:
    Rhetorical, moving, sometimes verbose, the art of Beethoven gives us, with some delay,
     the musical image of the Assemblies of the French Revolution. It is Barnave, Mirabeau,
     sometimes, alas, Lally-Tollendal. And I am notthinking here of the meanings he himself occasionally liked to give his works, but
     of their meaning which ultimately expressed his way of hurling himself into a chaotic
     and eloquent world. 75
    For Sartre, Beethoven’s exhortations were all too easily adaptable to revolution and
     reaction alike. (Hence the mention of Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, the Irish-born deputy
     to the Estates-General who defended Louis XVI and sought to preserve the ancien régime;
     whom the great French historian Jules Michelet described as “lachrymose Lally, who
     wrote only with tears, and lived with a handkerchief to his eyes.” 76 ) No stranger to the discord between the personal pursuit of intellectual freedom
     and the more restricted menu of political positions available in the public sphere,
     Sartre might have envied Beethoven’s comparatively frictionless revolutionary reputation:
     energetically radical but politically elusive, embodying the passions of revolution
     without ever firmly coming down on any one side.
    The French Revolution ended up being the great politico-intellectual winnowing of
     the subsequent century, as the boundaries of the European political and philosophical
     landscape were reconfigured around the poles of support for the Revolution’s rights-of-man
     intentions and horror at its reign-of-terror consequences. The young Beethoven’s sympathies
     with the ideals of the Revolution were sincere, as far as they went (“Liberty and
     fraternity—but not equality” is how Maynard Solomon aptly sums it up, 77 a formula that could be applied to the German Enlightenment as a whole), but his
     advertisement of them was selective.
    The most famous of Beethoven’s political statements would be his use of Friedrich
     von Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, premiered in 1824.
     But he was planning a setting as early as 1793. 78 That would have been just about the radical-chic zenith for Schiller, who had been
     arrested bythe Duke of Württemberg after the sensational 1781 premiere of his play
Die Räuber
, and whose tragedies of authoritarianism and snuffed-out flames of freedom were enough
     to warrant the author a grant of honorary French citizenship from the National Assembly
     in 1792. But Schiller had already begun to sour on the French Revolution, its violence
     and chaos. In 1793, he would begin writing his
On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters
, in which he postulated art as a more reliable source of freedom:
    The dynamic State can merely make society possible, by letting one nature be curbed
     by another; the ethical State can merely make it (morally) necessary, by subjecting
     the individual will to the general; the aesthetic State alone can make it real, because
     it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual. 79
    “[I]t is the aesthetic mode of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom,” Schiller
     concluded. 80 By the time news of his French citizenship reached him, in 1798, Schiller considered
     the honor a postcard “from the empire of the