Ode to ideology
By ROBERT
EVERETT‑GREEN
The Globe and
Mail
Saturday, June
21, 2003 ‑ Page R8
Your Beethoven
is not my Beethoven, especially if you are the anonymous bidder who paid $3.47‑million
last month for an autograph copy of the Symphony No. 9. Even if you aren't,
your Beethoven may be more democratic, despotic or even more German than mine,
because the central fact about Beethoven's current role in Western culture is
that he is not one figure, but a multitude.
Politically, he
has had more incarnations than Vishnu. Almost every European political
movement, conservative or revolutionary, has made him a posthumous party
member. Depending on who you might have talked to over the past two centuries,
Beethoven was a Marxist, a Nazi, a parliamentary democrat and a monarchist. He
celebrated kings, gave hope to the proletariat, and vigorously supported all
sides during the Second World War.
No other
composer ‑‑ probably no other artist of any kind ‑‑ has
reflected so many conflicting views. You might say, echoing Jean‑Paul
Sartre, that because there was a Beethoven, we have to go on reinventing him.
Any kind of mythification leaves a trail, and this one is so long and
varied that several historians have written book‑length travelogues. The
latest is Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History, by Esteban Buch (
In it, one can
read about the many ironies of Beethoven appropriation, as reflected in endless
partisan uses of a single piece of music. How could so many conflicting
ideologues draw from the same well, and somehow leave the water clear for the
next in line?
Part of the
answer has to do with Beethoven's own muddled politics. His stature as a
political symbol has always depended heavily on his biography, the facts of
which offer something to support almost every conception of the body politic.
"He was a
petit‑bourgeois who lived off the nobility and who scolded the
bourgeoisie and the aristocracy equally with his big mouth," wrote Der
Spiegel, in the midst of the Beethoven bicentenary in 1970. "He is reputed
to have been a revolutionary, but not a very convincing one." This
unusually tart summary, from a West German publication, was intended to deflate
East German claims that Beethoven was a socialist. But it sums up the willful
ambivalence of Beethoven's documented feelings about power and social change.
As a political
composer, he was not prolific. He wrote a number of minor works to celebrate
battles and royal birthdays, but propagandists customarily brush past these to
get at what might be called the Big Five: the Symphonies No. 3, 5 and 9, the
opera Fidelio, and the Overture to Egmont.
Music on its
own has a notoriously loose connection to ideas about the world, so it may not
be surprising that Nazis could hear the heroic Third symphony as a prescient
yearning for Hitler, or that the Allies could convert the opening motto of the
Fifth into a symbol of Hitler's impending defeat. It's more remarkable that
text‑bearing works such as Fidelio and the Ninth could have been embraced
equally by fascists and democrats.
The Third Reich
was obliged to enlist Beethoven, and even clean up his suspect racial
background, because he was already the most conspicuous symbol of Germanic
culture. Fidelio was a favourite of Beethoven's
socialist exegetes, so the piece had to be Nazified, if only to deny the enemy
a refuge.
Practically
everyone has had to mythologize the man to take control of the music. Wagner,
perhaps the most influential architect of the Beethoven myth, posited both a
revolutionary seer of international scope, and a "blood and iron"
figure of specifically German cast. As David B. Dennis points out in his 1996
book, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870‑1989, Germans have been fighting
over Beethoven in the same terms ever since.
Even the
Freemasons, in their covert way, have laid claim to Beethoven, and their case
looks even stronger with the publication of Maynard Solomon's Late Beethoven:
Music, Thought, Imagination. In two central chapters,
Solomon sifts through Beethoven's Masonic contacts and innumerable references
to Masonic imagery, concluding that the man was a Mason in all but lodge
membership.
The Ode to Joy
has since had a career separate from the Ninth, as a hit pop song, as a
national anthem for
Excerpting the
tune at all has offended some Beethoven buffs, who point out that its musical
merit lies in what Beethoven does with it in the symphony. On its own, it's a
fairly banal ditty, but so are most anthems. It remains the all‑time hit
single of classical music, though Buch concludes that "recognition of the
Ode to Joy as a symbol of
Buch's study is at its best when he describes the Eurocrats' uneasy relations with Beethoven, least appealing
in the turgid opening chapters about the various monuments raised to the
composer since his death. It's not as clear a read as Dennis's account, and
takes no notice of the Ninth's fortunes in the New World (surprisingly, since
Buch is Argentinian) or in Asia, where performances
of Daiku ("The Big Nine") are a year‑end ritual in Japan.
Neither book
covers the domestication of Beethoven's image in recent times. Pop‑culture
cameos in Charles Schulz's Peanuts cartoons and Classical Kids' Beethoven Lives
Upstairs have made the composer seem less oppressively Olympian than he did to
Schubert and Schumann.
Buch notes the
shadow of Beethoven as it crosses Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange,
but misses the accuracy with which Burgess, a composer who wrote three
symphonies and several concertos, put his finger on the violence in Beethoven's
music. All of the "political" pieces have it, which may explain part
of their appeal to those who have wanted to fire up multitudes to change the
world or beat back the enemy. In the words of Burgess's street‑punk hero,
who rapes two girls to a recording of the Ninth, the music "sort of
sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like old Bog himself, ready to
make with the old donner and blitzen."
Going a step
further, we arrive at the newest and most contentious image of the political
Beethoven, as described by feminist musicologist Susan McClary.
In her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality, McClary
hears a very male psychosis at work in the Ninth, in which "explosive
rage" is the only valid response to the composer's fear that his
"thrusting desire" may not be musically sustainable. She quotes with
approval poet Adrienne Rich's description of the symphony as the "beating
of a bloody fist upon a splintered table."
Is this your
Beethoven? It's not mine, though a current of forceful sexuality does seem to
run through the work, along with a benign lyricism that could, in some
instances, seem like a musical expression of universal sisterhood. Perhaps the
most difficult aspect of Beethoven's many political lives is that almost all
have some plausibility. He's all that they say he is, and a lot more besides.
DD