Posted on 06/05/2019 9:35:54 AM PDT by Borges
It is a rare piece of music — any kind of music — that can bolster good as well as evil intentions. One classical work in particular has an uncanny, seductive power to become exactly what its fans want it to be.
When the Canadian Opera Company opened the doors to its new opera house in 2006, the gala concert included “Ode to Joy,” the last movement from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
Music director Peter Oundjian has chosen the whole, 75-minute-long composition to cap and celebrate his 14 years with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on June 28, 29 and 30.
Adolf Hitler adored the Ninth Symphony. Musicians waiting for their deaths in Nazi concentration camps were ordered to play it, metaphorically twisting its closing call to universal brotherhood and joy into a terrifying, sneering parody of all that strives for light in a human soul.
More than four decades later, Leonard Bernstein conducted several performances to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, substituting the word “freedom” for “joy” in Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem to which Beethoven’s movement was set. And Emmanuel Macron chose this music as the backdrop for his victory speech after winning the French presidential election last year.
Western classical music usually thinks of itself as being apolitical. But the Ninth is political. Beethoven saw it as political when he wrote it in the early 1820s. And his fellow Germans, looking for a sense of identity, embraced it with fervour.
Beethoven’s Ninth became the musical flag of Germanness at a time when nationalism was a growing force in all of Europe. It also became a Romantic monument to the artist (Beethoven, in this case) as a special creature worthy of special treatment.
Franco-Argentine scholar Esteban Buch analyzed these intersections and the good-evil paradox in an insightful book, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History. Buch argued that the Ninth was the right piece of music at the right time — socially, politically and aesthetically.
But from today’s perspective we know that unilateral calls to world brotherhood in joy have a flip side, which is tyranny. We appreciate now more than ever that joy is accessible to everyone only if some people are taking antidepressants.
We live in a time no more peaceful than Beethoven’s. Our conflicts today pit the great traditions and ways of thinking of the 19th century against a (hopefully) freer, more spontaneous, more shared, more inclusive 21st century.
We have the 19th-century ideal of strength in unity — expressed in the “Ode to Joy” — scraping up uneasily against a 21st-century ideal of strength in diversity. The change in perspective makes some people afraid and angry. It makes others hopeful and optimistic.
Until we see whether we can achieve a paradigm shift or whether we fall back into something like the genocidal chaos of the mid-20th century, I think we should press pause on Beethoven’s Ninth.
I, personally, would be satisfied to never hear it again.
Am I saying we should destroy an icon? Of course not. We should treat it as any other piece of fine art — and take time to appreciate how difficult it actually is to parse.
Besides, shouldn’t we be encouraging — and showcasing — Canadian composers who might be able to galvanize us into attention with something homegrown?
Beethoven’s Ninth has three long movements before the “Ode to Joy” finale, each filled with contrasts and discontinuities. The Ode itself shouts its message at us unrelentingly, insistently, sometimes more as a taunt than an exhortation.
Don’t we have enough shouts and taunts in our world? Let’s stash Beethoven’s musical rant down back up in the pantheon of musical treasures and give other works some ear time instead.
“The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” - musicologist Susan McClary
No, let’s NOT give it a rest. Let’s give Teraud (whoever he thinks he is) a rest.
Enough of these posers and their virtue-signaling.
I bet Hitler liked sauerkraut too.
That means we cannot eat it, lest we become Nazis.
Well, I guess poor Schroeder is going to have to be exiled from the Peanuts comic now, isn’t he?
Eh, let’s not. As long as we’re not singing “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles” to the music, it’s fine.
Hmmmmm!
The spirits evoked by the Beethoven masterpiece are the exact opposite of the Socialist quest for a regimented humanity. Think about it!!
....the lovely Christmas music “O Tannenbaum” is also the tune for “The Red Flag”.
Such garbage. So many fallacies, so little space to squeeze them into.
Is there ANYTHING in Western Civilization that they don’t want us to scrap? Maybe we should all don loincloths, daub mud on our bodies, and jump around the campfire screaming blood curdling yells while pounding on hollow logs. Ummm...nope, no good, that would be appropriating another culture, too.
How awful to go through life perpetually aggrieved. Not one of these cretins has ever provided a blueprint of a society that they would deem worthy.
This would be the canuck’s sweet dream:
“In order to avoid Russian censorship, Finlandia had to be performed under alternative names at various musical concerts. Titles under which the piece masqueraded were numerous and often confusing —famous examples include Happy Feelings at the awakening of Finnish Spring, and A Scandinavian Choral March.”
—Wikipedia
Those cursed Finns struggling to maintain a national identity.
This fascist would probably applaud these bannings as well, all directed at national identity.
https://www.talkclassical.com/17881-music-banned.html
After 40-plus years as a classical buff, I have arrived at a point where I find the Ninth to be a bit overwhelming.
Particularly, I have never “gotten” the slow movement. This is odd because Beethoven knew very well how to write slow movements that never drag.
Take for instance the funeral march in the Eroica and the second movement of the Fifth, that calm and meditative break from the fireworks of DAH-DAH-DAH-DUM!!!!
But the slow movement of the Ninth drags so badly that I can hardly remember a single note.
As for Hitler liking the Ninth? I read that he was particularly fond of the Bruckner Seventh ... and if you can find me a composer less political than Anton Bruckner, please tell me. Bruckner was an organist and his symphonies all sound like he’s playing stings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion like some big pipe organ.
Upon googling the author “John Turauds” we learn he supposedly is a classical music scholar.
Upon a cursory reading of this opinion piece, we realize he contradicts, & essentially shoots down, his own argument.
Namely, that the lovely & triumphant Ode to Joy, along with the classically liberal ideas of tolerance and melting-pot diversity have been co-opted & subverted by tyrants, is an argument, not for tossing them all into the dustbin of history, but rather in favor of reclaiming these noble benchmarks & setting them aright.
I like Sousa marches the best.
I have the distinct feeling that that man should not be donating blood ...
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