Re: The God Solution
On Oct 26, 2006, at 9:51 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
Speaking of the 9th, what about that weird Turkish march that
interrupts the Ode to Joy? Zizek claims it’s an ironic self- deconstruction of the text’s hymn to universal brotherhood.God, that’s so wrong it makes me wonder if he’s even listening.
The whole plot of the Ode to Joy is looking for and then finally a
melody that is adequate to express this enormous joy, this feeling
of all men being brothers. The march appears only a minute or two
after this search has culminated in us finding it. With that, the
instruments are transformed into voices. The cello becomes the
baritone, the first voice we hear, and his first act is to reject
the horror music and say Yes, This — This is IT! (Really, he says
this literally).And then we get the Turkish march, which is exactly this tune, the
Ode to Joy tune, set to a march rhythm. There’s nothing ironic
about it at all. It couldn’t be more triumphal.
But it’s a military march, amidst an ode to universal brotherhood.
Here’s the excerpt (from Critical Inquiry, Spring 2006):
The unofficial anthem of the European Union, heard at numerous
political, cultural, and sporting events, is the “Ode to Joy” melody
from the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, a true empty
signifier that can stand for anything. In France, it was elevated by
Romain Rolland into a humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people
(”the Marseillaise of humanity”); in 1938, it was performed as the
highpoint of Reichsmusiktage and also for Hitler’s birthday; during
the Cultural Revolution in China, in the atmosphere of rejecting
European classics, it was redeemed as a piece of progressive class
struggle; and in today’s Japan it has achieved cult status, being
woven into the very social fabric with its alleged message of joy
through suffering. Until the 1970s, or during the time when both West
and East German Olympic teams had to perform together as one German
team, “Ode to Joy” was played during the presentation of Germany’s
gold medal, and, simultaneously, the Rhodesian white supremacist
regime of Ian Smith, which proclaimed independence in the late 1960s
in order to maintain apartheid, also proclaimed the same song its
national anthem. Even Abimael Guzman, the (now imprisoned) leader of
the Sendero Luminoso, when asked what music he loved, mentioned the
fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. So we can easily imagine a
fictional performance at which all sworn enemies, from Hitler to
Stalin, from Bush to Saddam, for a moment forget their adversities
and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic brotherhood.15
However, before we dismiss the fourth movement as a piece
destroyed through social usage, let us note some peculiarities of its
structure. In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main
melody in three orchestral and three vocal variations, at this first
climax, something unexpected happens which has bothered critics since
its first performance 180 years ago: at bar 331, the tone changes
totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same
“Joy” theme is repeated in the Turkish march (marcia Turca) style,
borrowed from the military music for wind and percussion instruments
that eighteenth-century European armies adopted from the Turkish
Janissaries. The mode is here that of a carnivalesque popular parade,
a mocking spectacle,16 and, after this point, everything goes wrong.
The simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never
recovered. After this “Turkish” part and in a clear countermovement
to it, in a kind of retreat into the innermost religiosity, the
choral-like music (dismissed by some critics as a Gregorian fossil)
tries to render the ethereal image of millions of people who kneel
down embraced, contemplating in awe the distant sky and searching for
the loving paternal God who must dwell above the canopy of stars
(”überm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen”) (B, p. 108);
however, the music as it were gets stuck when the word muss, first
rendered by the basses, is repeated by the tenors and altos and
finally by the sopranos, as if this repeated conjuring presents a
desperate attempt to convince us (and itself) of what it knows is not
true, making the line “there must dwell a loving Father” (B, p. 109)
into a desperate act of beseeching and thus attesting to the fact
that there is nothing beyond the canopy of stars, no loving father to
protect us and to guarantee our brotherhood. After this, a return to
a more celebratory mood is attempted in the guise of the double fugue
that cannot but sound false in its excessively artificial brilliance,
a fake synthesis if there ever was one, a desperate attempt to cover
up the void of the absent God revealed in the previous section. But
the final cadenza is the strangest of them all, sounding not at all
like Beethoven but more a puffed up version of the finale of Mozart’s
Abduction from the Seraglio, combining “Turkish” elements with the
fast rococo spectacle. (And let us not forget the lesson of Mozart’s
opera: the figure of the oriental despot is presented as a true
enlightened Master.) The finale is thus a weird mixture of
Orientalism and regression into late eighteenth-century classicism, a
double retreat from the historical present, a silent admission of the
purely fantasmatic character of the joy of all-encompassing
brotherhood. If there ever was a music that literally deconstructs
itself, this is it. The contrast between the highly ordered linear
progression of the first part of the movement and the precipitous,
heterogeneous, and inconsistent character of the second cannot be
stronger. No wonder that already in 1826, two years after its first
performance, some reviewers described the finale as “a festival of
hatred towards all that can be called human joy. With gigantic
strength the perilous hoard emerges, tearing hearts asunder and
darkening the divine spark of gods with noisy, monstrous mocking” (B,
p. 93). (Of course, these lines are not meant as a criticism of
Beethoven; quite the contrary, in an Adornian mode, one should
discern in this failure of the fourth movement Beethoven’s artistic
integrity: the truthful indexing of the failure of the very
Enlightenment project of universal brotherhood.)
Beethoven's Ninth is thus full of what Nicholas Cook calls
“unconsummated symbols”: elements that are in excess of the global
meaning of the work (or of the movement in which they occur), that do
not fit this meaning, although it is not clear what additional
meaning they bring (B, p. 103). Cook lists the “funeral march” at bar
513 of the first movement, the abrupt ending of the second movement,
the military tones in the third movement, the so-called “horror
fanfares,” the Turkish march, and many other moments in the fourth
movement—all these elements “vibrate with an implied significance
that overflows the musical scenario” (B, p. 93). It is not simply
that their meaning should be uncovered through an attentive
interpretation; the very relation between texture and meaning is
inverted here. If the predominant “musical scenario” seems to set
into music a clear preestablished meaning (the celebration of joy,
the universal brotherhood, and so on), here the meaning is not given
in advance but seems to float in some kind of virtual indeterminacy.
It is as if we know that there is (or, rather, has to be) some
meaning, without ever being able to establish what this meaning is.
What, then, is the solution? The only radical solution is to
shift the entire perspective and to render problematic the very first
part of the fourth movement. Things do not really go wrong only at
bar 331, with the entrance of the marcia Turca; they go wrong from
the very beginning. One should accept that there is something
insipidly fake in the very “Ode to Joy” so that the chaos that enters
after bar 331 is a kind of return of the repressed, a symptom of what
was wrong from the very beginning. What if we domesticated too much
the “Ode to Joy,” what if we got all too used to it as a symbol of
joyful brotherhood? What if we should confront it anew, reject in it
what is false?