Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History

Rating:
Summary: Beauty Is Borrowed to Stand for Subjective "Truth"
Review: Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History is a rare book in considering both the sources of political myths and their expressions . . . from the perspective of one part of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that work of classic genius, The Ode to Joy.

Everyone has their own associations for Beethoven's Ninth. For most people, these associations are positive . . . such as remembering a wonderful concert. For others, the connections are more sinister . . . such as those who remember The Ode to Joy as Rhodesia's anthem, Hitler's use of the music for the Third Reich (including encouragement of playing the music in concentration camps), and the disturbing scene in "A Clockwork Orange."

Unless you know German, however, the music is mostly sound. What do those words say? Did you know that they are based on Schiller's poem in which the ideal is expressed that "All men will become brothers"? In that context, the work takes on a whole new dimension. Also, its use by tyrants and those who do not favor brotherhood becomes much more egregious as an inappropriate thing to do.

Basically, the work is so appealing to people that they want to use it . . . without necessarily honoring its meaning.

For many decades, many people have falsely claimed that Schiller meant the work to be an Ode to Freedom rather than Joy. Although there's no basis for that claim, the desire to turn this work to that theme caused Leonard Bernstein to change the wording in that way in his concerts to celebrate the demolition of the Berlin Wall. So even the nontyrants are tempted to misappropriate the message.

This book does more than recount those appropriations and misappropriations. You will also learn about the rise of national anthems in Europe, the building of Beethoven's myth, and how The Ode to Joy has become the anthem of the united Europe that is emerging today.

As a side note, I was pleased to see that the words for the national anthems were so carefully developed in the text and connected to the prevailing political themes. I found much improved understanding of these works by seeing their words in the same book in English.

If you are a fan of those who criticize pomposity and ignorance by quoting them at length, then you will have a lot of fun with this book by seeing how many people have made fatuous statements about Beethoven and The Ode to Joy.

How could the book have been better? I would have liked a little more about the music itself. It's a shame that there's not an audio version that could include snatches of the music. As it is, the book is filled with scores and lyrics, so if you can read music (and hum along) you can almost provide your own accompaniment.

After you finish this book, I encourage you to share The Ode to Joy (along with the words) with someone who does not know the music. And then explain what the music and the words mean to you. In that way, we can keep the true heritage of this remarkable music alive.

Rating:
Summary: The Trials and Tribulations of a Magnum Opus
Review: I verily believe poor old Beethoven would roll right over if he were to learn just to what extent his crowning achievement has been employed over the last few centuries. The premise of this book is as interesting as it sounds; I hardly need to parrot the synopsis provided above. I enjoyed this book quite a lot, especially since I have had, with profound gratitude, to study the piece. Its discussion of the Maestro's other works prompted me to buy the complete cycle of Symphonies by Gardiner.

Buch does an excellent job of establishing the historical context under which the Symphony was born, and even though it felt at times as if this preparation veered too far from the Ninth itself, the background learning is eminently helpful for better understanding the European traditions that held sway over the work itself.

Indeed, the book focuses almost entirely on the Ninth as a monument of European culture and limits discussion, for the most part, to the evolultion of its European reception and interpretation. Quite understandable, and rather thorough, at that; all the same, I would have liked at least a little bit about how the Ninth was "used" in other societies - I imagine that the trans-cultural exchange is a fascinating occasion to examine how non-European nations recieved a work so paradoxical: universal yet utterly European.

Additionally, I felt that the intensity of the book diminished the closer it was to finishing; but I suppose the nearer one is to history, the less one can judge too firmly.

In the main, Buch has written a manifestly interesting narrative and I cannot but recommend it; Miller's translation was superb and felt as though "Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History" fared a lot better in translation than did its namesake.

Rating:
Summary: A Troubled History
Review: Much of the theme of this book is illustrated by its cover, a garish portraint of a blue-faced Beethoven painted by Andy Warhol in 1987 to inform the viewer, according to the author of this study, Esteban Buch, (p. 7), that the "composer had more to do with Marilyn Monroe rather than John Cage. This illustrated the banalization of the Beethoven mythos..."

Buch's study of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has little to do with Beethoven's music. Rather it is a study giving some backround on the creation of the work and a study of the way it has been received, interpreted, and politicized by some over the years following Beethoven's death in 1827. There are two interrelated themes in the book: 1. The Ninth Symphony has been used by groups as diverse as socialists, communists, American democrats, pan-Europeanists, fascists, nazis, racists, and many others to support their ideologies and 2. With the passage of time and the dramatic changes that societies have underwent since the composition of the Ninth, Beethoven's music, and its sense of heroism and universality, become ever more difficult for the modern listener to understand and appreciate.

Neither of these claims are particularly new or surprising. Of the two, Buch devotes most of his attention to the first, although I find the second rather broader and more interesting.

The first part of this book discusses the development of what Buch terms "modern political music". He discusses the reception of Handel in England, the use of "La Marsellaise" as an anthem for the French Revolution, Haydn's composition of an anthem for the German Emperor,Franz Joseph II, "God Save the Emperor" and other sources as predecessors to Beethoven. Most interestingly, Buch discusses well Beethoven's own efforts as a composer of overtly "political" music to celebrate the reactionary Congress of Vienna of 1814. Chief among these works is Beethoven's cantata "The Glorious Moment", opus 136. The discussion of Beethoven's own overtly political compositions is probably the most insightful and interesting part of this uneven book.

Buch offers a rather incomplete discussion of the Schiller's composition of "Ode to Joy", but his book includes little in the way of musical analysis of Beethoven's setting and still less of a discussion of the Ninth Symphony as a whole. This limits the book's value and its interest, I am afraid.

There are discussions about how groups tended to read their own meaning into Beethoven's music and Schiller's poem. In other words, there was a tendency to take Beethoven's majestic music and use it to call attention to the political causes of the day rather than to the music itself. This should surprise no one.

Buch develops his theme through a discussion of the 1845 ceremony in Bonn in which a statue was erected to Beethoven's memory (strangely, the book does not include a photo of this still-standing statue), followed by a discussion of the rise of nationalism, communism, democracy, Nazism and other causes, some good, some bad, some horrible. He points out, interestingly, that from the mid-19th Century there was an attempt to claim that when Schiller wrote his "Ode to Joy" (Freude) he meant "Freedom" (Freiheit). There is no historical evidence to support this claim but it has been used by many. Buch suggests that Beethoven's music has become platitudinous through exposure and through the uses to which it has been put.

There are some interesting points to be made here. In the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven did seem to be addressing humanity. He wanted to write a "public" work rather than a work of a deeply introspective character such as, say, the last string quartets or the opus 109 piano sonata. It is not necessarily a bad thing that people have used this work to reflect their own ideals, and Beethoven cannot be blamed for some of the dreadful causes that have looked to him as an alleged forbearer. That people have done so does not exhaust his music or its meaning. Buch's study could have used more musical analysis and could have considered other ways of thinking about the Ninth Symphony in addition to its uses in the service of various, contradictory forms of political propaganda. I am not sure if Buch really touches the Ninth Symphony as a work of art and as an ideal. He seems to want to deconstruct the Ninth as both, and he does not succeed.

I thought the writing in this book was verbose, jargon-ridden, and hard to follow. I am not sure whether this was due to the text, the translation, or to both, as I suspect. Sentences are long and stringy and run-on too much for English. There are some sections of interesting discussion, but they are combined with too much irrelevance and too much of a tendency to polemicize.

I came away thinking that this book did show me something of Beethoven as a political composer that was worth knowing (chiefly his composition of the "Glorious Moment" cantata,), but it did not appreciably increase my understanding of the Ninth Symphony. Also, I found the book of limited value for its understanding of the vagaries of modern politics. Thus on the whole I found this book disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Sadly Not Above Politics
Review: One of the world's most famous pieces of music, and arguably the finest work of all symphonies, is Beethoven's Ninth. The theme, the "Ode to Joy," is a tune everyone knows, consisting of only six tones spread over twenty-four bars; you can probably pick it out at the piano even if you don't know piano. If music is, as is often claimed, a universal language, then this is as universal as it gets. And so it is disturbing that no other musical work has been so used as a political tool. _Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History_ (University of Chicago Press) by Esteban Buch gives a history of the often contradictory appropriations of the work during two centuries of wildly differing political times. An intellectual, scholarly look at what people have done with an emotive composition, the book will make readers wonder about how music comes to convey anything to us, and whether there is a moral value to art.

The words of the more agreeable song consist of very rich appeals such as that all men will be brothers under the wing of joy, and that the millions should embrace in a kiss for all the world. (I cannot help feeling that the joy conveyed in the music is more likely to be received by those who don't know German.) At least the lyrics are not a simple manifesto; because of this, though, and because of the universality of the appeal to joy and of the tune itself, the Ninth has become distinctly political music. The German nationalists adopted it in the nineteenth century at the same time the French detected that it was the soul of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Communists hear a call to classless brotherhood. Catholics have found the literally divine in it. Hitler liked to have it played on his birthdays. It was played in his concentration camps. The BBC played it as an anti-Nazi symbol. Cleared of the stain of Nazism, the tune in 1985 became the official anthem of Europe. The tune, that is, under the re-written form by Herbert von Karajan, former Nazi party member. The European anthem is wordless. The tune became the Rhodesian national anthem in 1974, an anthem to apartheid. It was played in celebration of the Berlin wall coming down. (Bernstein conducted, and "freedom" was substituted for the word "joy.") The Ninth has affected our technology; when the CD was unveiled, the duration of the music on one CD was selected to allow all the Ninth Symphony to go on one disc. The clearest artistic demonstration of the ambiguity of this multi-significant music was in Kubrick's _A Clockwork Orange_, where, with all the freedom he can handle, droog Alex responds to the Ninth with visions of lovely ultraviolence. The film uses an electronically synthesized version, a Ninth as queer as a clockwork orange.

It would be nice to think that a paean whose main line is "All men will be brothers" would somehow rise above politics. Buch not only shows that this did not happen, he has set out all the contradictory claims on the music that started shortly after it premiered and have continued to our time. He rightly shows there is no "correct" interpretation if one is looking for political meaning. This is far from saying that the music can mean anything anyone wants. After this detailed look at the work's misappropriations, readers will be eager to sit down and just listen. It's the most glorious music, and it engenders goodwill towards others just in the listening. It may be facile (and untrue) to state that the Ninth is above politics, but although politics have sadly trivialized and tarnished it, it remains humanity's anthem.

Rating:
Summary: Sadly Not Above Politics
Review: One of the world's most famous pieces of music, and arguably the finest work of all symphonies, is Beethoven's Ninth. The theme, the "Ode to Joy," is a tune everyone knows, consisting of only six tones spread over twenty-four bars; you can probably pick it out at the piano even if you don't know piano. If music is, as is often claimed, a universal language, then this is as universal as it gets. And so it is disturbing that no other musical work has been so used as a political tool. _Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History_ (University of Chicago Press) by Esteban Buch gives a history of the often contradictory appropriations of the work during two centuries of wildly differing political times. An intellectual, scholarly look at what people have done with an emotive composition, the book will make readers wonder about how music comes to convey anything to us, and whether there is a moral value to art.

The words of the more agreeable song consist of very rich appeals such as that all men will be brothers under the wing of joy, and that the millions should embrace in a kiss for all the world. (I cannot help feeling that the joy conveyed in the music is more likely to be received by those who don't know German.) At least the lyrics are not a simple manifesto; because of this, though, and because of the universality of the appeal to joy and of the tune itself, the Ninth has become distinctly political music. The German nationalists adopted it in the nineteenth century at the same time the French detected that it was the soul of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Communists hear a call to classless brotherhood. Catholics have found the literally divine in it. Hitler liked to have it played on his birthdays. It was played in his concentration camps. The BBC played it as an anti-Nazi symbol. Cleared of the stain of Nazism, the tune in 1985 became the official anthem of Europe. The tune, that is, under the re-written form by Herbert von Karajan, former Nazi party member. The European anthem is wordless. The tune became the Rhodesian national anthem in 1974, an anthem to apartheid. It was played in celebration of the Berlin wall coming down. (Bernstein conducted, and "freedom" was substituted for the word "joy.") The Ninth has affected our technology; when the CD was unveiled, the duration of the music on one CD was selected to allow all the Ninth Symphony to go on one disc. The clearest artistic demonstration of the ambiguity of this multi-significant music was in Kubrick's _A Clockwork Orange_, where, with all the freedom he can handle, droog Alex responds to the Ninth with visions of lovely ultraviolence. The film uses an electronically synthesized version, a Ninth as queer as a clockwork orange.

It would be nice to think that a paean whose main line is "All men will be brothers" would somehow rise above politics. Buch not only shows that this did not happen, he has set out all the contradictory claims on the music that started shortly after it premiered and have continued to our time. He rightly shows there is no "correct" interpretation if one is looking for political meaning. This is far from saying that the music can mean anything anyone wants. After this detailed look at the work's misappropriations, readers will be eager to sit down and just listen. It's the most glorious music, and it engenders goodwill towards others just in the listening. It may be facile (and untrue) to state that the Ninth is above politics, but although politics have sadly trivialized and tarnished it, it remains humanity's anthem.