Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
Beethoven’s music is obviously an eminently open text, full of ‘unconsummated
symbols’ says Cook, borrowing a term from Susanne Langer. He shows how this
has tempted different listeners to interpret the Ninth in highly contradictory ways,
letting it support universal peace, western democracy, Nazi rule or even Chinese
communism. 384 Cook instead follows Theodor W. Adorno by stressing the inner
contradictions in this music: ‘its lack of organic unity, its fragmentary quality, its
ultimate refusal to make sense’. 385 ‘The work that symbolizes the pursuit of wealth
in Hong Kong and communist orthodoxy in the People’s Republic, that stands for
Western democracy and forms part of Japan’s social fabric—how can such a work
be said to mean anything at all?’ 386 This work is ‘profoundly ambivalent’: the music
deconstructing Schiller’s lyrics which in turn deconstructs itself, as the Turkish march
clashes with lines such as ‘And the seraph stands with God’. 387 Cook believes that
Beethoven here detached himself from his own affirmative message. 388
Beethoven’s last symphony proclaims the ideals of universal
brotherhood and joy; that is unmistakable. But at the same time,
and just as unmistakably, it casts doubt upon them. It sends out
incompatible messages. And that is why, like Parsifal, the Ninth
Symphony has the capacity to resist being wholly assimilated within
any single, definitive interpretation; however it is interpreted, there is
always a remainder that lies beyond interpretation. But this resistance
can only be effective it we remain conscious of the incongruities, the
incoherence, the negative qualities of the music. 389
In spite of this, Cook does not at all abandon interpretation but on the contrary argues
for the need for continued reinterpretation, as ‘the only way to prevent the Ninth
Symphony from being consumed by ideology’. 390
The most scandalous obstacle to any straightforward interpretation of the symphony
lies in how the ‘Turkish’ march music is positioned in the overall design of the work. As
Cook has shown, it has been perceived as an ‘outrageously foreign element’. It had since
the late eighteenth century been common to play with ‘alla Turca’ elements in classical
music, inserting exotic touches of rough marching rhythms and instrumentation of
percussion and wind, inspired by the military march music of the Ottoman Empire’s
janissaries, which had existed since at least the fourteenth century and had a growing
influence on Europe, as part of an Orientalising vogue for Turkish culture. These
military bands originally had the function to make maximal frightening noise so as
to rouse respect when Turkish troops came marching in. When tamed by classical
composers, with Mozart’s piano sonata no. 11 in A-major K. 331 (c. 1783) as the most
famous example, the style was reduced to an exotic spice signifying a combination of
popular and Oriental roughness and rage.
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