Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: the darker side?

Jonathan Allin

This article was inspired by a Radio 3 talk by Tom Service, “Beethoven's 9th symphony”, which can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b08g4c36. I’ve also taken material from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_(Beethoven) and from Singing the Ode "To Joy" in Auschwitz: A Ten-Year-Old's Story (https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-1538767891/singing-the-odeto-joy-in-auschwitz-a-ten-year-old-s)

By Ludwig van Beethoven The website of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlinhttp://beethoven.staat sbibliothekberlin.de/de/sinfonien/9/1/2 7.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=289 0252

Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one of the best known, if not the best known, classical symphony. It’s structured into the usual four movements, though the scherzo, the second movement, comes before the andante, the third movement. It’s also unusual because of its length: at over 70 minutes it’s easily the longest of his symphonies, and of course because of the chorale finale.

The last movement wasn’t universally liked. Beethoven’s contemporary and friend, Louis Spore, declared the last movement monstrous. Fanny Mendelssohn also hated it. Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange) thought Ode to Joy was a poor melody, though interesting rhythmically.

Is the finale the most dangerous piece of music written? Ostensibly it’s an ode to hope, to the Elysium, to the brotherhood of man. But there is a darker side.

We shouldn’t forget the first three movements. They too broke the mould, they too are dangerous. The first movement opens with the vastness of nothing, starting without a tune then quickly migrates into a tectonic, non-human melody. The finale starts with even more desolation than the first movement, undermining everything that the beautiful and tender third movement constructed, as well as the progressions of the first and second movement. It presages a new start, for which a simple orchestra is insufficient.

Beethoven wrote the opening sentence: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, Und freudenvollere. Freude! Freude! Oh friends, not these sounds! Let us instead strike up more pleasing and more joyful ones! Joy! Joy!

This is sung by the bass, encouraging the choir into song, to Friedrich Schiller’s words: Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, Daughter from Elysium

The end is a tyranny of joy, sung by a drunk tenor with an opening contra bass. It gives a vision of the cosmos beyond the stars, where the Godhead must live:

Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt? Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muß er wohnen. Do you bow down before Him, you millions? Do you sense your Creator, O world? Seek Him above the canopy of stars! He must dwell beyond the stars.

All men have become brothers and sisters, but it is this that exposes the danger. What is the Elysium? That all people become brothers, or that non-brothers should be exterminated?

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy has been used, and abused, countless times. It was appropriated by the Third Reich and many other despotic regimes. How did it become such social kryptonite? For good, for evil, and everything in between. Paul Robeson stole the tune and put it to his own words, in English. It’s the EU national anthem, prompting Nigel Farage to say that he’ll be very glad to see the back of it. And of course Stanley Kubrick famously used a synthesised rendition in his film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, where Alex (the anti-hero) hears the music as he is shown film of Nazi death camps. Beethoven’s 9th was a favourite of Goebbels and Hitler. In April 1942 Wilhelm Furtwängler was persuaded (perhaps coerced) into conducting a performance in Berlin, with the Berlin Philharmonic, for Hitler's birthday. At the performance’s end, Goebbels came to the front of the stage to shake Furtwängler's hand. At least the final minutes of the performance were filmed and can be seen on YouTube. It was an intense and fast performance, and perhaps the bombastic nature of the 9th is a reflection of Hitler’s warmongering. In 1944 the choral component of the 9th was performed at AuschwitzBirkenau by a choir of Jewish children who had arrived from Theresienstadt, and conducted by a Jew, Imre. They performed a few hundred meters from the crematoria and the gas chambers, facing the railway ramp where Selection took place. The text was sung in Czech, not German.

Otto Dov Kulka, in his short book Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, asks why Imre taught his charges Ode to Joy. One possibility is that Imre (himself gassed on 8 March 1944) hoped that some of the children might survive, that some might start to rebuild civilisation, and that to do so they needed the noblest from European civilisation: Beethoven, Schiller and Dostoyevsky. Kulka suggests a second possibility: that it might also be "an act of extreme sarcasm, to the

outermost possible limit, of self-amusement, of a person in control of naive beings and implanting in them naive values, sublime and wonderful values, all the while knowing that there is no point or purpose and no meaning to those values". So, an expression of hope, or of ultimate sarcasm and scorn: a satanic gesture to mass murder. According to Tom Service, the grownups sang Ode to Joy in the latrines. As Estebán Buch said in his Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History, "from lowest to highest, motives of those who played it or listened to it ran the gamut". In 1989 in Berlin, 47 years after Furtwängler’s Berlin performance at Hitler’s birthday, Leonard Bernstein conducted the 9th, close to the rubble of the Berlin wall. He changed the words so that it became an ode to freedom. The two words are sufficiently similar in German: freiheit and freude. Can we come back from the brink? Can the 9th be performed meaningfully after Auschwitz? Thomas Mann thinks not: in his wartime novel Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkuhn demands that Beethoven's Ninth be reclaimed from the Nazis. Michael Tippet's 3rd symphony quotes the opening to the 9th’s fourth movement, but then goes into a soprano singing the blues. Tippet’s and Mann’s responses would have us reject Beethoven's Elysium. This we must not do. It’s a most requested and most popular piece, regularly sung by mass choirs. For all Nigel Farage's efforts, it's still the universal song. Bernstein is right: Beethoven’s Ninth is an ode to joy and an ode to freedom.

We need Beethoven’s Ninth more than ever because it is so dangerous, because it compels us to confront tyranny and repression.