All things to all brothers
Philip Hensher
BEETHOVEN'S NINTH: A POLITICAL HISTORY by Esteban Bach, translated by Richard Miller University of Chicago Press, £19.50, pp. 327, ISBN 0226078124 What does Beethoven's ninth symphony mean? You can answer the question in a purely musical sense. The forms and methods of the symphony can, with some ingenuity, be explained in classical terms: even the alarming finale can be described as a set of double variations with an extended fantasy introduction, culminating in a double fugue. But the musical significance of the work becomes fully apparent only when you look at the uses subsequent generations made of its most daring devices. Bruckner is haunted by the opening of the symphony, the way it gathers together fragments over a motionless vibration. Wagner is obsessed by the scherzo — the end of the first act of Siegfried! — and neither he nor Tchaikovsky can think of a grander way to conclude than quiet fanfares over a descending bass. The end of GOtterdatnmerung and the Symphonic Pathetique derive directly from the great coda of Beethoven's first movement. Berlioz's finales, in The Trojans, are, almost despite themselves, in debt to the strange sequence of the ninth symphony's last movement. The work preoccupied the 19th century, and that is because it seems endlessly suggestive, to raise musical possibilities which even it could not entirely fulfil. There is, however, another way to answer the question 'what does the ninth symphony mean?'; a way not possible when thinking, say, about the Jupiter symphony. The finale, with its stupendous setting of Schiller's 'Ode to Joy', seems to be making points outside the purely musical. What those points are has never been entirely clear. Beethoven's undoubted political commitment, however, allied to the vague idealism of Schiller's poem on the subject of universal brotherhood, has always made the finale peculiarly susceptible to exploitation by people with no interest in music. There is no truth in the idea that the Ode had originally been an ode, not to joy, but to freedom until the censors of Schiller's day got their hands on it; the only basis for the idea is a vague resemblance between it and a famous passage about political freedom in Don Carlos. Nevertheless, it is a very old idea, and licensed politicians of all shades to annex the work for their own dubious causes. It has been claimed by nationalists, fascists, communists, European federalists, peaceniks and warmongers. Though this is not a satisfactory book, and, despite its title, is not about the ninth symphony's
reputation but that of the 'Ode to Joy' setting alone, it has an interesting subject.
The symphony was commissioned by a London orchestra, but its first political proponents were those Germans who, by the middle of the century, were trying to construct a national pantheon of masterworks to prop up the nascent nation state. If nationalist sentiment went on being a powerful motive in pushing the ninth symphony, the ideology seemingly contained in Schiller's ode supported more abstract arguments. The lines about 'Alle Menschen werden Briider' were, naturally, a gift to left-wing ideologues in the 20th century, but somehow those sentiments, and Beethoven's own undeniably swarthy appearance did not prevent it from being appropriated by the Nazis. Simultaneously. Soviet apparatchiks were claiming it as a triumph of the state that Beethoven's works were now available for the appreciation of the simplest peasant.
Even odder appropriations of the celebrated main theme of the choral variations were to follow. It was the national anthem of the Republic of Rhodesia, although, naturally, Schiller's sentiments seemed inappropriate and the original words were replaced by some cheerful verses by a Mrs Mary Bloom:
Rise, 0 voices of Rhodesia, God, may we thy bounty share,
Give us strength to face all danger and where challenge is to dare.
When the Council of Europe was looking for a supra-national anthem, despite some naive calls for a distinguished European composer to write a new one — I keep imagining one by Boulez or Birtwistle — they settled for the 'Ode to Joy' in, what one thought hardly necessary, a new orchestral arrangement by Herbert von Karajan, who had no doubt sung it in his own Hitler Youth past. By now, basically, it means anything you want it to. There might have been some point in playing the symphony, as Leonard Bernstein did, at the fall of the Berlin Wall with the inauthentic substitution of Freiheit' for `Freude. When the idiotic controllers of the BBC Proms stuck it at the end of the Last Night which followed so closely after the atrocities of 11 September, one could only conclude that they hadn't troubled to read the words, and its Enlightenment sentiments, and particularly the line about all men becoming brothers, had never sounded so insulting, implausible and shallow. It was about as thoughtful a use of it as that in, cineastes will recall, Sister Act 2. The Missa Solernnis, with its distant noises of approaching war at the end, would have been a much better choice for those circumstances. But by now, the 'Ode to Joy' is what you automatically play in any political cause, however dubious.
Despite its turning up of some interesting material, this book cannot be recommended, owing to its constant hail of errors, unsupported and fantastic contentions and its incomplete and unbalanced survey. Some of the errors are the translator's, or the publisher's — 'continuum' for 'continuo', vagueness about 'principal' and 'principle', and so on. Many, however, must be the author's. He seems rather unclear what key the ninth symphony is in, and on one page we are told both that the original idea was for a symphony in D, rather than D minor, and that the final work is in C minor. Some of the mistakes are quite extraordinary: the Columbia Phonograph Company was not an 'English firm', Cologne Cathedral was not 'built' in 1842, if George III had celebrated his 'golden jubilee' it would not have been in 1809, Queen Anne was not 'the last descendant of William of Orange', Prince Albert was not 'a member of the Prussian Royal House', and on and on. There are bigger misunderstandings throughout: Schiller, in the 'Ode to Joy' text, labels some stanzas 'Chorus', but it is idiotic to compare this Pindaric gesture with Beethoven's recourse to the full chorus in the final setting. A good deal of Buch's argument rests on an inadequate knowledge of current research: it ought to seem incredible that 'there is no documentation to show that he had any direct knowledge of revolutionary anthems', and a Beethoven scholar ought to be aware of research which suggests direct allusions to French revolutionary songs in the finale of the fifth symphony. Entirely fantastic speculations abound: it is grossly unfair to draw such large conclusions about Schumann from the fact that he changed the dedication of the great Fantasy. And throughout much more thorough references are needed: I simply don't believe in the existence of some of his evidence. In the very first sentence, for instance:
One of the early critics of the Ode to Joy remarked that for Beethoven. deaf and nearing the end of his life, the act of composition had become like dreaming.
Who? Which early critic? It just doesn't sound like a contemporary of Beethoven: it sounds like Romain Rolland. But with no footnote you have to take his word for it.
The whole approach of the book, too, is seriously unbalanced. There is an incredible amount about the ninth symphony's reputation in France, which is probably the least interesting part of Europe from which to tell the story, and the reader will have no difficulty in thinking of episodes, such as the Proms performance, which have passed Buch by. As everyone knows, nobody writes worse than musicologists when they really try, but I must admit I hadn't been prepared for the degree to which a French musicologist could take the art of sheer unreadable gibberish to unheard-of heights:
Aesthetic experience has been replaced by a memorative sign which, not content to broadcast in the public sphere a political discourse at odds with the work's original message, also invades the private sphere through its unconscious and uncontrollable logic of 'association'.
Meaning: If you put new words to a familiar song, you make it difficult for the public to listen to the original as they did before. One has grown used to people who write so incredibly badly, but I must say, I think we can expect a publisher purporting to be a university press not to issue books which are not just unreadable, but stuffed with the most absurdly elementary errors. After blotting out an interesting subject with a terrible book, the University of Chicago Press ought to be ashamed of itself.
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