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

dead,” 81 as he told his now-friend, the conservative Goethe. In 1802, ten years after the
     Assembly offered him symbolic fraternity, he accepted the nobiliary particle, becoming
     Friedrich von Schiller. (True, he accepted it from the comparatively liberal Charles
     Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, but still.)
    The young Beethoven was enough of a Schiller fan that he and his friends could trade
     quotes from
Don Carlos
in their autograph books. But soon after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna, Louis XVI
     was guillotined in Paris, Schiller’s plays were banned by the Hapsburg monarchy, and
     Beethoven’s revolutionary enthusiasms became more circumspect. He continued to work
     on a setting of
“An die Freude”
—perhaps even finishing it—but ultimately decided to keep it under wraps. 82 By the time Beethovenreturned to the “Ode” in the Ninth Symphony, some three decades later, both the delay
     and Schiller’s post-“Ode” moderation had somewhat dulled the connection with the Revolution.
    Beethoven’s politics are tricky to unravel, not just because of the novel political
     landscape he inhabited, but because his personal intersection with politics, fame,
     and necessary livelihood was largely unprecedented. One oft-repeated story of Beethoven
     and politics concerns the Third Symphony, the
Eroica
, which Beethoven originally planned to dedicate to—and name after—Napoléon. As Ferdinand
     Ries told it:
    I was the first to tell him the news that Bonaparte had declared himself Emperor,
     whereupon he flew into a rage and shouted: “So he too is nothing more than an ordinary
     man! mortal! Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander
     to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!”
     Beethoven went to the table, took hold of the title page at the top, ripped it all
     the way through, and flung it to the floor. 83
    Beethoven scratched Bonaparte’s name off the title page of the original manuscript
     with such vehemence that he wore a hole in the paper, and ensured his future reputation
     as a champion of individual freedom. Except that, as late as 1810, some six years
     later, Beethoven was considering dedicating another work to the former First Consul. 84 Napoléon had abandoned democratic ideals, occupied Vienna—twice—and yet Beethoven
     kept circling back. While working on the Fifth, he received a job offer from Jérôme
     Bonaparte, Napoléon’s youngest brother, recently made King of Westphalia, a Napoleonic
     attempt at German unification; only an intervention of Viennese patronage kept Beethoven
     from leaving. Several years later, in 1815, Beethoven entertained dignitaries gathered
     to dispose of theNapoleonic Era at the Congress of Vienna. In the wake of Waterloo, he must have felt
     as if his career had dodged a bullet—and yet, after Napoléon left the stage, Beethoven
     largely abandoned his heroic style, the style that had made him famous, the style
     of the Fifth. 85
    For all his paper-mutilating rage, Beethoven surely sensed that he and Napoléon were
     more alike than not: both coming up from modest backgrounds, both disdainful of the
     limitations of traditional class structure and privilege while leveraging tradition
     to their own ends. Napoléon paved the way for Beethoven, setting a pattern of innovative
     fame—one based as much on a cultivated force of personality as on achievement—that
     Beethoven exploited to the hilt. Leo Braudy, preeminent critic of fame, described
     the Emperor in terms that could easily apply to Beethoven: “He was at once the man
     of destiny—melancholic, brooding, striving alone—and the man of classic order, ensuring
     the survival of all those institutions … at whose center he stood.” 86 Every anecdote of Beethoven’s disheveled dress, his oblivious demeanor, his contempt
     of social ceremony, his reverence for the classics (literary
and
musical: toward the end of his life,