Matthew Guerrieri’s highly original book opens by asserting that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony “might not be the greatest piece of music ever written...but it must be the greatest ‘great piece’ ever written.” Beethoven himself preferred his Third Symphony, the Eroica; yet as this book assiduously demonstrates, the Fifth has accrued such diverse and continuing commentary—“successive mantles of greatness,” as Guerrieri puts it—that it has no rival. Guerrieri calls his book “history viewed through the forced perspective of one piece of music,” and its chapters furnish remarkable instances of various perspectives on the piece. The First Four Notes is not a work of musicology and doesn’t attempt to take us through the symphony in its four-movement entirety. In fact, the only part of the symphony Guerrieri focuses on is its “iconic” opening, three eighth-notes followed by a single half-note marked with a fermata: dot-dot-dot-dash, in Morse code. But those first four notes are preceded by an eighth-note rest, slipped in before the first note; in other words, the downbeat is a silent one. This presents a tough job for conductors, one of whom called beginning the Fifth “one of the most feared conducting challenges in the whole classical repertoire.”

The key of C minor was for Beethoven an especially portentous one; he also set his third piano concerto and his final sonata, Op. 111, in what Guerrieri calls the composer’s “stormiest” key. Such storminess was very much in accord with the reputation he was achieving for temperamental outbursts—the most notorious of them occurring when Beethoven, hearing that Napoleon had assumed the title of emperor, furiously scratched his dedication off the Eroica’s title page. Guerrieri argues that the “disorienting opening” to the Fifth Symphony “echoes the upheavals of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftershocks.” He notes that the pianist, composer, and Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny attributed the opening notes to the song of a forest-bird, the yellowhammer, which Beethoven heard in a Vienna park; but in time this reduction to such a homely source was dismissed, as the Fifth gathered all sorts of more heroic, indeed tragic, associations.

The most influential review of the symphony was made in 1810 by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who found in it an “unnamable, foreboding longing.” Continuing in this vein, other Romantics viewed the symphony as “a representation of a limitless beyond,” in contrast with the classical harmony of Mozart. The combination of the first four notes as a “knocking on the door,” whether by Fate or some comparable agency, reached its pinnacle of freighted meaning with Richard Wagner. Using Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, Wagner found Beethoven to be “the epitome of German-ness.” For Guerrieri, Wagner “completes the full turn of the wheel from the Enlightenment to the Romantic,”

from controlled logic to subconscious fantasy, from a conviction that reason and rationality can explain the human condition, to the aesthetic ideal represented in the purposefully incomprehensible musical strivings of a deaf composer.

Wagner was ready to deify deafness, even though Beethoven was not yet deaf when he composed the symphony.

The First Four Notes is chock full of Fifth Symphony–related curiosities and trivia. Guerrieri’s breezy inclusiveness (his diction contains phrases such as “mission creep,” “boy toy,” and the execrable “get-go”) doesn’t flinch at combining potted summaries of aesthetics in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche with outré comparisons, as when he finds Beethoven’s heroic music “a lot like Steve McQueen’s acting,” since in both the performing energies are “directed outward, at the listener, not inward, drawing the listener.” After reviewing my memory of Steve McQueen in Bullitt, I decided the parallel is not worth pushing very far, if at all. In a chapter titled “Associations,” Guerrieri moves to the American handling of the Fifth, beginning with John Sullivan Dwight, one of the first serious music critics in this country. Dwight was a Transcendentalist, a pillar of the Brook Farm community, for whom the symphony’s opening “fills the mind with a strange uncertainty, as it does the ear.” He would lead parties of companions into Boston to hear Beethoven’s music, then, exhilarated, walk back at night the seven miles to Brook Farm.

The major American composer who took the symphony seriously was Charles Ives, who in his Concord Sonata collected different uses to which the four notes had been put. One of the more bizarre American events related to the Fifth was the arrest of Karl Muck, a German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra during World War I. His markings on the score of the symphony were scanned by the authorities for evidence of coded espionage; soon Muck was fired, then transported to a military base in northern Georgia to be interned for more than a year. Eventually he made his way back to the fatherland and never again conducted in America—though he lived to receive an accolade from that old music-lover Adolf Hitler.

My favorite literary use of the symphony occurs in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, whose fifth chapter opens by declaring Beethoven’s Fifth “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” Forster’s delightful anatomy of the different ways his characters respond to the symphony can’t be bettered, though Guerrieri also adduces the closing scene of Shaw’s Heartbreak House (written during World War I), in which, as planes drop explosives nearby, Hesione Hushabye declares, “It’s like an orchestra: it’s like Beethoven”—to which the impressionable Ellie Dunn replies, “By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.” During World War II the four notes were famously used as the V for Victory signal, and dot-dot-dot-dash became an on-the-air announcement for the BBC. On Armistice Day 1943, Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic played the victory theme, followed by a minute of silence and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” successfully conscripting Beethoven into the war effort. And though I myself first encountered the Fifth through one of Arturo Toscanini’s recordings, I was unaware that, when Mussolini fell, Toscanini gave a concert titled “Victory Symphony, Act I,” which included the symphony’s first movement—with the rest promised when Germany was defeated. That performance occurred on V-E Day in May 1945, and was conducted at a whirlwind pace—“as if Toscanini was annexing Beethoven back from the Nazis,” Guerrieri remarks, “with a blitzkrieg of his own.”

At times later in this book, I felt somewhat overwhelmed by so much assiduous cataloguing of uses of the Fifth. Do I need to know about its relevance to disco and hip-hop, as in the film Saturday Night Fever? Or its current function as a ringtone for cellphones? I was, however, pleased to note that—unbelievably—there exists at least one cultural use of the piece Guerrieri seems to have overlooked. This is the poet Richard Wilbur’s “C Minor,” one of his wittiest, most affecting poems. “C Minor” opens with the question of how much heroic sound one is prepared to take in as the day begins:

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul,

Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out

(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal-bowl)

      Over despair and doubt?

“You are right to switch it off and let the day / Begin at hazard,” the speaker tells his breakfast partner, then proceeds to imagine some of the things, fortunate or unfortunate, which may occur in the day ahead. Whatever happens, Wilbur concludes, we don’t need an early morning wake-up call to it, since

There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.

Let us have music again when the light dies

(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it

Something to organize.