Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

[Jo498]

Zizek is not even wrong.
His point is completely anachronistic and only possible to make as anachronism. Why should Beethoven think that the "straight" version of the Ode to Joy is "ideology" that he would then need to distort?

People don't ever seem to read the actual text but think that the mere fact that much later the tune was used as anthem and the symphony was used for festive occasions. The latter needs little explanation and neither does the former because most of the good hymn tunes already had a tradition as national or religious anthems so the Beethoven tune was comparably neutral but easy to remember and well known.
I'd be interested in pre WW 1 examples of "ideological" use (like ersatz national anthem), I doubt there are any significant ones.

It really bothers me that people prefer to mostly ignore that text but spew nonsense anyway.
 
Or worse, they don't ignore it but project some political agenda into it that simply is not there. One *could* claim (as Riezler did in his Beethoven book) that the text was secondary, the point was to include the human voice and in a sense the audience, like the congregation might have joined in the final chorale in a Bach cantata.
So what is celebrated in a wide sense is only a sense of joy and community.

Schiller's poem was originally more of a drinking song and is barely political.
It celebrates neither peace nor freedom. Strictly speaking it does not even celebrate the universal brotherhood of man because that sentence "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" has a conditional clause "wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt". In one reading this is an utopian brotherhood, fair enough (but without any clear political program how this should come about). But in a close and straight reading it only states the banal fact that men fraternize when they are happy, e.g. when their team won or when there is some other reason to celebrate. Sure, this includes some momentous and political events, like an end of war or the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
It is more a secularized Hymn of Praise/Thanksgiving than anything political.

As for that particular section, the Bflat major 6/8 "turkish music" and tenor solo, Zizek has of course some company in people irritated by it and trying to understand this ironically in some way.
I think they are wrong and Zizek is totally wrong when he sees this as deconstruction of the "straight" version because obviously the "straight" version returns and is apotheosized later on in the movement!

To me, the most plausible way is to understand this passage unironically.
One argument for this is the text. It is almost a biblical paraphrase combining a psalm (19) that compares the sun to a hero/athlete and (several, e.g. 1 Corinthians 9,24) passages by St. Paul comparing the faithful with athletes who forego pleasures and train to gain the laurels. Beethoven could be brutally ironic but I don't think he would have made fun of a text with such a background. As he is also straight in his reading of the first stanzas and the subsequent (the most spiritual) ones, there is no good reason to suspect irony for that single stanza.

I think for Beethoven the heroic text is enough to justify the Alla marcia music and while the beginning with the contrabasson and percussion might seem a bit gimmicky, it's a great contrast, serves also a as a bit of scherzando, and it turns serious soon; there is also nothing ironic about the great instrumental fugato section that follows and, as I said, we get a straight return of the main version of the Ode at its end.
There is another aspect that (esp. the late) Beethoven loves to include incongruent, "banal" music from dance halls etc. The Diabellis are the most comprehensive case of this but it's also in scherzi like op.110,ii or the danza tedesca in op.130.
Mozart did similar things in the Magic Flute when the 3 magical boys have strange winds only music etc.

[Todd]

So what is celebrated in a wide sense is only a sense of joy and community.

I find it close to impossible to believe that people see more than that in what Beethoven wrote.

As to Zizek, the dude formulated deep thoughts about toilets, so, um, yeah.

[Jo498]

I find it close to impossible to believe that people see more than that in what Beethoven wrote.

It seems impossible not to strongly project. I have heard/read people talking about the piece as if it was obviously full of political messages, including "nationalism" (German? Austrian?) of which is really nothing whatsoever in either text (that IIRC goes back to the 1780s) or music nor would the political situation in the 1820s lend itself to such a reading. If anything one could see the whole piece as resistance against a restaurative monarchy with a nasty secret police. But then it's dedicated to the Prussian monarch and I doubt that Beethoven had any illusions about him being any better than the Austrian (I guess he was cured of such after his infatuation with Napoleon Bonaparte).

[Skogwald]

Zizek is not even wrong.
His point is completely anachronistic and only possible to make as anachronism. Why should Beethoven think that the "straight" version of the Ode to Joy is "ideology" that he would then need to distort?

People don't ever seem to read the actual text but think that the mere fact that much later the tune was used as anthem and the symphony was used for festive occasions. The latter needs little explanation and neither does the former because most of the good hymn tunes already had a tradition as national or religious anthems so the Beethoven tune was comparably neutral but easy to remember and well known.
I'd be interested in pre WW 1 examples of "ideological" use (like ersatz national anthem), I doubt there are any significant ones.

It really bothers me that people prefer to mostly ignore that text but spew nonsense anyway.
 
Or worse, they don't ignore it but project some political agenda into it that simply is not there. One *could* claim (as Riezler did in his Beethoven book) that the text was secondary, the point was to include the human voice and in a sense the audience, like the congregation might have joined in the final chorale in a Bach cantata.
So what is celebrated in a wide sense is only a sense of joy and community.

Schiller's poem was originally more of a drinking song and is barely political.
It celebrates neither peace nor freedom. Strictly speaking it does not even celebrate the universal brotherhood of man because that sentence "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" has a conditional clause "wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt". In one reading this is an utopian brotherhood, fair enough (but without any clear political program how this should come about). But in a close and straight reading it only states the banal fact that men fraternize when they are happy, e.g. when their team won or when there is some other reason to celebrate. Sure, this includes some momentous and political events, like an end of war or the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
It is more a secularized Hymn of Praise/Thanksgiving than anything political.

As for that particular section, the Bflat major 6/8 "turkish music" and tenor solo, Zizek has of course some company in people irritated by it and trying to understand this ironically in some way.
I think they are wrong and Zizek is totally wrong when he sees this as deconstruction of the "straight" version because obviously the "straight" version returns and is apotheosized later on in the movement!

To me, the most plausible way is to understand this passage unironically.
One argument for this is the text. It is almost a biblical paraphrase combining a psalm (19) that compares the sun to a hero/athlete and (several, e.g. 1 Corinthians 9,24) passages by St. Paul comparing the faithful with athletes who forego pleasures and train to gain the laurels. Beethoven could be brutally ironic but I don't think he would have made fun of a text with such a background. As he is also straight in his reading of the first stanzas and the subsequent (the most spiritual) ones, there is no good reason to suspect irony for that single stanza.

I think for Beethoven the heroic text is enough to justify the Alla marcia music and while the beginning with the contrabasson and percussion might seem a bit gimmicky, it's a great contrast, serves also a as a bit of scherzando, and it turns serious soon; there is also nothing ironic about the great instrumental fugato section that follows and, as I said, we get a straight return of the main version of the Ode at its end.
There is another aspect that (esp. the late) Beethoven loves to include incongruent, "banal" music from dance halls etc. The Diabellis are the most comprehensive case of this but it's also in scherzi like op.110,ii or the danza tedesca in op.130.
Mozart did similar things in the Magic Flute when the 3 magical boys have strange winds only music etc.

Thank you for this insightful post!

[Mandryka]

Zizek is not even wrong.
His point is completely anachronistic and only possible to make as anachronism. Why should Beethoven think that the "straight" version of the Ode to Joy is "ideology" that he would then need to distort?

People don't ever seem to read the actual text but think that the mere fact that much later the tune was used as anthem and the symphony was used for festive occasions. The latter needs little explanation and neither does the former because most of the good hymn tunes already had a tradition as national or religious anthems so the Beethoven tune was comparably neutral but easy to remember and well known.
I'd be interested in pre WW 1 examples of "ideological" use (like ersatz national anthem), I doubt there are any significant ones.

It really bothers me that people prefer to mostly ignore that text but spew nonsense anyway.
 
Or worse, they don't ignore it but project some political agenda into it that simply is not there. One *could* claim (as Riezler did in his Beethoven book) that the text was secondary, the point was to include the human voice and in a sense the audience, like the congregation might have joined in the final chorale in a Bach cantata.
So what is celebrated in a wide sense is only a sense of joy and community.

Schiller's poem was originally more of a drinking song and is barely political.
It celebrates neither peace nor freedom. Strictly speaking it does not even celebrate the universal brotherhood of man because that sentence "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" has a conditional clause "wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt". In one reading this is an utopian brotherhood, fair enough (but without any clear political program how this should come about). But in a close and straight reading it only states the banal fact that men fraternize when they are happy, e.g. when their team won or when there is some other reason to celebrate. Sure, this includes some momentous and political events, like an end of war or the fall of the Berlin Wall etc.
It is more a secularized Hymn of Praise/Thanksgiving than anything political.

As for that particular section, the Bflat major 6/8 "turkish music" and tenor solo, Zizek has of course some company in people irritated by it and trying to understand this ironically in some way.
I think they are wrong and Zizek is totally wrong when he sees this as deconstruction of the "straight" version because obviously the "straight" version returns and is apotheosized later on in the movement!

To me, the most plausible way is to understand this passage unironically.
One argument for this is the text. It is almost a biblical paraphrase combining a psalm (19) that compares the sun to a hero/athlete and (several, e.g. 1 Corinthians 9,24) passages by St. Paul comparing the faithful with athletes who forego pleasures and train to gain the laurels. Beethoven could be brutally ironic but I don't think he would have made fun of a text with such a background. As he is also straight in his reading of the first stanzas and the subsequent (the most spiritual) ones, there is no good reason to suspect irony for that single stanza.

I think for Beethoven the heroic text is enough to justify the Alla marcia music and while the beginning with the contrabasson and percussion might seem a bit gimmicky, it's a great contrast, serves also a as a bit of scherzando, and it turns serious soon; there is also nothing ironic about the great instrumental fugato section that follows and, as I said, we get a straight return of the main version of the Ode at its end.
There is another aspect that (esp. the late) Beethoven loves to include incongruent, "banal" music from dance halls etc. The Diabellis are the most comprehensive case of this but it's also in scherzi like op.110,ii or the danza tedesca in op.130.
Mozart did similar things in the Magic Flute when the 3 magical boys have strange winds only music etc.

He's not interested in the poem at all, Jo. He's only interested in the music. He even talks about a case where the lyrics were changed.

And he could well have been wrong to suggest that Beethoven had  a moral or political message behind the music  -- I just don't know.  But I don't think it's central to where he's trying to go. He's not an historian, he's a psychologist.

First he points to the diversity of ways the big tune was used in the 20th century -- by the Communists in the USSR and China, by the extreme right in Rhodesia, to celebrate winning an Olympic medal by Germans before unification, by the European union as an anthem. These people were using Beethoven's melody as ideology.

That's paradoxical because the ideologies were incompatible, sometimes sworn enemies. Zizek's asks how that's possible.

He thinks it works so well because Beethoven's tune triggers a very general feeling of profound togetherness in those who hear it  -- the music, that is - don't forget that he has zero to say about Schiller's poem. And so it can be applied as a musical prop for diverse and incompatible range of social and political purposes. 

Then he asserts that in every ideology there are people who, for one reason or another, can't accept the ideological hegemony or who are rejected by the ideological orthodoxy. Outsiders and misfits. And he claims that there is a way of reading the second part of the music as pointing to that truth.

I think he means to say that Beethoven's genius in that movement as a whole is that he created music which can be read as a metaphor for way that ideologies both include and exclude.

[Todd]

Then he asserts that in every ideology there are people who, for one reason or another, can't accept the ideological hegemony or who are rejected by the ideological orthodoxy.

He has also stated that toilets reflect ideology. 

[Mandryka]

He has also stated that toilets reflect ideology.

I've not seen that, but it's sounds like it's in the tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques.   Roland Barthes's Mythologies

(Senior moment)

[Florestan]

One can read anything as/into anything, especially when one has an agenda to push or a much too vivid imagination, or both. Mozart's PC21 has been read as evidence for his repressed homosexuality, compared to which reading Beethoven's Ninth as a critique of ideology almost makes sense. 

[Todd]

I've not seen that, but it's sounds like it's in the tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques.

It's on YouTube.  It's gibberish.  Of course, he appears to be coked out, so maybe it made sense to him at the time. 

[Mandryka]

It's on YouTube.  It's gibberish.  Of course, he appears to be coked out, so maybe it made sense to him at the time.

Just changed it -- my bad -- Roland Barthes's Mythologies


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7leLkUVb44&ab_channel=Film%26MediaStudies

[Jo498]

He's not interested in the poem at all, Jo. He's only interested in the music. He even talks about a case where the lyrics were changed.

And he could well have been wrong to suggest that Beethoven had  a moral or political message behind the music  -- I just don't know.  But I don't think it's central to where he's trying to go. He's not an historian, he's a psychologist.

First he points to the diversity of ways the big tune was used in the 20th century -- by the Communists in the USSR and China, by the extreme right in Rhodesia, to celebrate winning an Olympic medal by Germans before unification, by the European union as an anthem. These people were using Beethoven's melody as ideology.

That's paradoxical because the ideologies were incompatible, sometimes sworn enemies. Zizek's asks how that's possible.

He thinks it works so well because Beethoven's tune triggers a very general feeling of profound togetherness in those who hear it  -- the music, that is - don't forget that he has zero to say about Schiller's poem. And so it can be applied as a musical prop for diverse and incompatible range of social and political purposes. 

Then he asserts that in every ideology there are people who, for one reason or another, can't accept the ideological hegemony or who are rejected by the ideological orthodoxy. Outsiders and misfits. And he claims that there is a way of reading the second part of the music as pointing to that truth.

I think he means to say that Beethoven's genius in that movement as a whole is that he created music which can be read as a metaphor for way that ideologies both include and exclude.

I saw the video, I commented after listening to all of it. Obviously, the observation that the tune has been used for different purposes by different ideologies is true. But it's also trite and very little follows from that.
The simplest explanation would be that it is so "neutral" that it can be used for these different purposes.
Another fairly simple one with which I could also agree is that Beethoven expresses that "togetherness" so well that it can be used for any boosting of morale of a collective. That's still not deep enough that I'd need to consult a professor to get it...

I should have been more precise in the points of disagreement. As I said I agree that "joyful community" can be said to be expressed by the Ode of Joy (and this agrees also with the text).
But someone like Zizek sees this expression of joy in community already as ideology because some are *excluded* and again, one can even find this in the text that has the line after the enumeration of causes for joy (friendship, marriage...) "und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle, weinend sich aus diesem Bund", i.e. who is not even joined to one other soul in friendship should go aways in tears. That's not very nice, in fact rather cruel unless one supposes that such a person must necessarily be so antisocial (by their own fault?) that the only solution is to exclude (not exterminate them). Again, Schiller's Ode was closer to a fraternity drinking song, so it's not a theory of morality.

So to "save" Beethoven from the charge of ideology Zizek claims that the "turkish music" section ridicules the ideology that would at least tend to flow from the "straight" version of the Ode. And here I think he is wrong in several ways, Beethoven would not have had such a fear of ideologization and need for deconstruction. Beethoven was himself a social misfit, even before his deafness and he enjoyed some kinds of musical deconstruction (e.g. in the Diabellis) but this is not such a case, as I tried to explain above. The alla marcia is not for the misfits (it would have helped not to disregard the text...) The deconstruction would in any case be overwhelmed by the clearly affirmative recap of the straight version of the Ode after the instrumental fugato and the rest of the movement with all kinds of affirmation/jubilation.

Beethoven and contemporaries were not stupid. They had witnessed the great ideological catastrophe, the French Revolution and the Terreur, the following wars, and many, like Schiller or Beethoven, had tempered their progressive attitudes (without abolishing the hope for enlightenment and more participative forms of government).

[Cato]

Sooo much silliness from professors, proving that a Ph.D. "ain't what it used to be"!

In fact, depending on the subject area *, and the amount of plagiarism both in the past and today, a doctorate might not be proof of any honest accomplishment.


The discussion reminded me of a professor named E. Michael Jones and his very wrong-headed book Dionysos Rising, which I have mentioned earlier.

The topic reminded me of the following...

About 25 years ago, I came across a lunatic book by a certain E. Michael Jones called Dionysos Rising, which attempted to link the Tristan chord (which can be found in works composed well before Wagner was born) and chromatic harmony in general, to the spread of immorality throughout Western Civilization.

The author also claimed that the adultery of Schoenberg's wife caused the composer to emancipate dissonance, i.e. to emancipate evil (or at least what he considered to be evil-sounding music) and that this led to the immorality inherent (I am NOT making this up) in rock-and-roll, as evinced by Mick Jagger. 

Exactly how those processes worked...unclear.  You must accept that connections exist among them because the author says so.  Ultimately the author is repeating the ancient Greek (Platonic) belief that Music could affect and perhaps even cause certain behaviors in people, and therefore certain kinds of music had to be avoided or even banned.

Laughable AND appalling at the same time!

A similar discussion going back even earlier can be found here:

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,11561.msg675929.html#quickreply_anchor

*e.g. It would be difficult to fake facility in a foreign language, or the ability to play a musical instrument.

[Cato]

Zizek is not even wrong.


It really bothers me that people prefer to mostly ignore that text but spew nonsense anyway.
 
Or worse, they don't ignore it but project some political agenda into it that simply is not there. One *could* claim (as Riezler did in his Beethoven book) that the text was secondary, the point was to include the human voice and in a sense the audience, like the congregation might have joined in the final chorale in a Bach cantata.

So what is celebrated in a wide sense is only a sense of joy and community.

Schiller's poem was originally more of a drinking song and is barely political.

Thanks for the reference to Wolfgang Pauli!


I have often thought that a Biergartengeruch pervades the Ode to Joy tune, which is quite fine, given the purpose.

[Florestan]

Actually, the main melody is so neutral and non-committal that it was used note for note by Mozart in his Misericordias Domini KV 222. 

[Mandryka]

Actually, the main melody is so neutral and non-committal that it was used note for note by Mozart in his Misericordias Domini KV 222. 

That's more grist to Zizek's mill. The text of that piece is affirming the ideology of the universality of Christian ideas, and their truth. 

https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Misericordias_Domini.

[LKB]

Wow!

How long did you stretch out 'O freunde'? 

Probably not very. I only ever performed this solo once, and was nervous. Never got any negative feedback so hopefully it wasn't rushed. 

[LKB]

All very cool. And at thirteen!

Is is as difficult to sing — whether solo or chorus — as it sounds? Despite the ease and frequency with which the piece is programmed, the vocal parts don't sound all that gratefully written as [insert other piece here].

And I don't think I've heard that Reiner version. If you have listened to it recently, does it still hold up, or do you prefer others?

-Bruce

Beethoven's vocal writing in the Ninth is challenging for all concerned, chorister and soloist alike. The challenges vary. For the chorus, endurance in the slow G-Major " Seid umschlungen " section and rhythmic accuracy in the coda are probably the biggies. On the other hand, the fugue is an absolute blast! 

For the baritone soloist, breathing intelligently and pacing the vocal energy are paramount. It's not that technically difficult to sing properly in and of itself, but doing so and managing LvB's priorities with the text take preparation.

I had been familiar with the solo for about twenty years before I had to sing it, and so had ample time to consider how I might approach it, which undoubtedly was a great help. ( In contrast, when the time came for my solos in Bach's St. Matthew Passion I wasn't nearly as familiar with the music and didn't sing as well. My first entrance was VERY nervous, to the point where the tenor Evangelist gave me a sidelong " WTF are you doing? " glance. I recovered and was " OK " for the rest of my singing, but the lesson was most definitely in my mind afterward: Nothing beats absolute familiarity with whatever you're singing. )

As for the Reiner recording, I have to say that it isn't ( imho ) among the best. Once I had von Karajan's '63 on DG, I never went back to Reiner's.

[Mandryka]

I saw the video, I commented after listening to all of it. Obviously, the observation that the tune has been used for different purposes by different ideologies is true. But it's also trite and very little follows from that.
The simplest explanation would be that it is so "neutral" that it can be used for these different purposes.
Another fairly simple one with which I could also agree is that Beethoven expresses that "togetherness" so well that it can be used for any boosting of morale of a collective. That's still not deep enough that I'd need to consult a professor to get it...

I should have been more precise in the points of disagreement. As I said I agree that "joyful community" can be said to be expressed by the Ode of Joy (and this agrees also with the text).
But someone like Zizek sees this expression of joy in community already as ideology because some are *excluded* and again, one can even find this in the text that has the line after the enumeration of causes for joy (friendship, marriage...) "und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle, weinend sich aus diesem Bund", i.e. who is not even joined to one other soul in friendship should go aways in tears. That's not very nice, in fact rather cruel unless one supposes that such a person must necessarily be so antisocial (by their own fault?) that the only solution is to exclude (not exterminate them). Again, Schiller's Ode was closer to a fraternity drinking song, so it's not a theory of morality.

So to "save" Beethoven from the charge of ideology Zizek claims that the "turkish music" section ridicules the ideology that would at least tend to flow from the "straight" version of the Ode. And here I think he is wrong in several ways, Beethoven would not have had such a fear of ideologization and need for deconstruction. Beethoven was himself a social misfit, even before his deafness and he enjoyed some kinds of musical deconstruction (e.g. in the Diabellis) but this is not such a case, as I tried to explain above. The alla marcia is not for the misfits (it would have helped not to disregard the text...) The deconstruction would in any case be overwhelmed by the clearly affirmative recap of the straight version of the Ode after the instrumental fugato and the rest of the movement with all kinds of affirmation/jubilation.

Beethoven and contemporaries were not stupid. They had witnessed the great ideological catastrophe, the French Revolution and the Terreur, the following wars, and many, like Schiller or Beethoven, had tempered their progressive attitudes (without abolishing the hope for enlightenment and more participative forms of government).

I think that even a drinking song can embody first order moral ideas actually.  Not moral theory, not meta-ethics. (Is this first order/second order ethics distinction familiar to you ? I don't know if it comes up in German universities.)

As I said I think he was wrong to make an historical claim --So to suggest he wants to save the historical Beethoven from the charge of ideology or whatever. Rather he's engaged in some sort of popular semiotics -- just providing a reading of the movement which may well be attractive and explanatory from our standpoint. (Explain how the music has been used for so many different purposes)

By the way, I'll mention to amuse you that I once went to one of his lectures where he argued that Wotan is the most Jewish figure in the Ring -- the Wondering Jew.  I got interested in Zizek because I wanted at one point to understand Lacan a bit better -- it's very difficult stuff!

[Florestan]

Has anyone actually read the whole An die Freude?

https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/transl/schiller_poem/ode_to_joy.pdf

It's long, bombastic and tedious*, part drinking-song, part theological speculation bordering on the Universalist heresy** . It is significant that later in life Schiller, while not exactly disavowing it altogether, came to regard it as a failure, "detached from reality" and of no importance "for the world" or "for the art of poetry". If you ask me, he was right, the poem is mediocre and had it not been for Beethoven, it would have lingered in obscurity forever.

* as the Ninth itself, actually...  (running for cover)

** Allen Suendern soll vergeben,
Und die Hoelle nicht mehr sein.

[prémont]

It's long, bombastic and tedious*, part drinking-song, part theological speculation bordering on the Universalist heresy**

Yes, a drinking song - I always associate to "eau de feu" when I hear the word "feuertrunken". "Let us not sing these tones but rather more pleasant tones". Now we have to party and to be happy friends.

And the theological level of the ode doesn't feel higher than a gathering of drunkards might come up with.