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

birds, and are endued with everything …)
    While there is no hard evidence Beethoven ever read the Koran (either in Boysen’s
     translation or the less-popular but favored-by-Goethe 1772 translation by David Friedrich
     Megerlin), there is more than enough evidence to say that it would not be at all surprising
     if he had. When he first came to Vienna, for instance, Beethoven made the acquaintance
     of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an Austrian diplomat who would become a prolific Orientalist,
     translator of numerous Arabic and Persian texts, and author of a five-act “historical
     drama” called
Mohammed, or the Conquest of Mecca
(1823).
    German-speaking intellectual life during Beethoven’s time was permeated with a fashion
     for all things Eastern, near and far. European scholarship on the subject had been
     primed by imperialism—the British in India, France in the Middle East—but the German
     vogue carried with it the prospect of self-invention: against a backdrop of political
     division and French occupation, a lot of German writing about ancient India or Persia
     can read like a subtle pep talk, a dropped hint that the scattered states of the former
     Holy Roman Empire could be a cradle of civilization, too. August Wilhelm von Schlegel
     put it plainly: “If the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany
     must be considered the Orient of Europe.” 20
    In his later years, Beethoven kept a framed quotation on his desk, the inscription
     that Plutarch recorded as having been on the statue of Isis at the Egyptian city of
     Sais: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet
     uncovered.” Beethoven had read the quotation in Schiller’s essay
“Die Sendung Moses”
(“The Mission of Moses”), an analysis of that prophet’s unique qualifications for
     engineering the renaissance of a race. The Israelites—like Schiller’s fellow Germans,
     perhaps—were too downtrodden to muster the energy to free themselves; what was needed
     was an injection of new intellectual blood:
    A native Egyptian was not inspired by the national sympathy necessary to become the
     saviour of the Hebrews. A mere Hebrew was deficient in power and mind for this purpose.
     What expedient did destiny [
Schicksals
] resort to? It snatched a Hebrew at an early age from the bosom of his brutalized
     nation, and placed him in possession of Egyptian wisdom; thus it was that a Hebrew,
     reared by Egyptians, became the instrument, by means of which his nation was freed
     from bondage. 21
    Beethoven remained fascinated by Eastern thought, and his
Tagebuch
contains numerous quotations taken from Eastern sources, Hindu scriptures and Sanskrit
     Vedas in particular. (Such proclivities might even have inspired a rueful jest from
     his onetime teacher Haydn; once he had outlived his usefulness to Beethoven’s career,
     Beethoven largely ceased visiting the elder master, and Haydn took to asking mutual
     acquaintances: “How goes it with our Great Mogul?” 22 )
    Beethoven also, throughout his life, maintained close connections with Freemasonry,
     a milieu saturated with Eastern images and ideas. The composer apparently never joined
     a lodge, but so many of his friends and acquaintances were Masons—Beethoven’s composition
     teacher, Christoph Gottlieb Neefe; friend-of-the-family Franz Anton Ries (Ferdinand’s
     father); Franz Wegeler, in whom Beethoven confided regarding his advancing deafness—that
     one wonders why Beethoven never took the step himself. (Politics, probably—Beethoven
     arrived in Vienna just as the Hapsburg emperor was outlawing the societies, an authoritarian
     prophylactic in the wake of the French Revolution.) Maynard Solomon has speculated
     that the
Tagebuch
was actually a sort of self-study journal in preparation for initiation. 23
    In making the case for Beethoven’s Masonic leanings, it isalmost too tempting to hear in the Fifth’s opening—or at least its