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

mortality.
                                                 And this is
            Life. Toil! and wherefore should I toil? Because
            My father could not keep his place in Eden?
            What had
I
done in this? I was unborn;
            I sought not to be born; nor love the state
            To which that birth has brought me. 28
    Cain’s fate is to survive, after an angel marks “upon thy brow / Exemption from such
     deeds as thou hast done” 29 —history’s first murderer, cursed with the knowledge of his act and cast into the
     wilderness.
    Bülow’s change of title might indicate a change of heart about the nature and acceptance
     of one’s fate. Had the Byronic context survived, Bülow’s use of the Fate motive would
     have seemed more fatalistic: humans as actors in immutable, divinely ordered plays
     of which they can only perceive dim outlines. But under the title of
Nirwana
, the same quotation becomes, maybe, an individual fate that enlightenment reveals
     to be merely transient. And Bülow’s individual fate during the gestation of
Nirwana
was sufficiently scandalous that he may well have wished to regard it as fleeting.
    Bülow had already written the piece in 1854, to judge from a letter from Wagner in
     which he discusses it. 30 By the time
Nirwana
was published, in 1866, Bülow’s wife Cosima had become Wagner’s mistress, and had
     already given birth to one of Wagner’s children. Even after an eventual divorce, Bülow’s
     admiration for Wagner’s music persisted, but one can imagine how anabandonment of the world and a peaceful indifference to its ups and downs of pride
     and fall, need and frustration, must have interested him. Ironically, the same 1854
     letter in which Wagner talks of the then-untitled
Nirwana
also finds Wagner enthusiastically recommending to Bülow the works of the philosopher
     Arthur Schopenhauer. It was from Schopenhauer that Bülow learned the Buddhist concepts
     of Samsara and Nirvana: the cycle of birth and death and the understanding that allows
     one to escape its oppression. (As we shall see, Schopenhauer’s philosophy would also
     shade Wagner’s own relationship to Beethoven.)
    Bülow would liken Beethoven’s op. 111 Piano Sonata, another C-minor work that begins
     in struggle and ends in transcendence, to the Samsara-Nirvana dialectic. But Bülow’s
     own
Nirwana
is hardly triumphant, forcefully recapitulating the same gloomy B minor in which
     it starts. Bülow admitted it was a conclusion “which optimism might regard as a so-called
     tragical one, but the last sigh of the vanishing ‘Nirvána’ is not intended by the
     author in this sense.” 31 Bülow, like so many after him, was expanding Schindler’s poetic morsel into a larger
     web of meaning: emerging from its stew of Cain and Buddha and Beethoven and Bülow
     himself,
Nirwana
’s quotation of the Fifth leaves one wondering just whose fate it is doing the knocking.
    EVEN AS Bülow was writing
Nirwana
, the European conception of Fate was metastasizing from something individual to something
     more external and cosmic. The process finds its origin in a single sentence in the
Philosophy of Right
by that most formidable of nineteenth-century German thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
     Hegel:
    What is rational is real;
    And what is real is rational. 32
    Hegel wrote this in 1820, but he had been espousing variations of the idea for a while.
     Hegel’s correspondence between the actual and the rational—an unusually direct formulation
     for him—would actually muddy the interpretive waters around another of his ideas,
     that of historical progress. Hegel believed that history learned from its mistakes,
     continually evolving toward more freedom, fairness, and philosophical soundness.
    Hegel insisted on regarding anything in existence as not just
being
, but constantly
becoming
, evolving, changing. Hegel’s favorite