Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
of the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody certainly cannot be fully explained without considering
its original link to Schiller’s lyrics as well as its place in the Ninth Symphony. It has
been praised as a humanist credo to universal brotherhood but also been loved by the
German Nazis who performed it at big celebrations, including Hitler’s birthday; it was
the national anthem of Rhodesia during apartheid but has also continued to inspire
left-wing revolutionaries as well as peace-loving romantics. 395 It has been invested with
immense positive value, but also with suspicion, on the verge of becoming an ‘empty
signifier’, but precisely in this general function, it at least seems to have a capacity of
signifying a wish for universal unification between humans in spite of divisions and
strife: a suitable musical expression of the European motto of ‘united in diversity’. In
order to get to grips with more of its signifying range, it is time to have a closer look
at the instrumental anthem as a separate text.
The anthem is not just an excerpt taken directly from Beethoven’s symphony, but
rather a transformed abstraction of a section from it. There are several versions of this
anthem itself available at different websites, including a main instrumental version
composed, recorded and copyrighted by Karajan, but also a vocal variant of this. A
search through various websites of the EU and the Council of Europe shows that a
whole range of different versions are available, several claimed to be to some extent
official. Some build on Karajan’s 1972 arrangement, others on a reworking from
September 2000 by the French composer Christophe Guyard, ‘specially commissioned
to illustrate documentaries, news and other programmes covering the Council of
Europe’. 396 ‘A Council of Europe CD, including the first hip hop version of the European
anthem world-wide, was put on sale to the public in April 2004. Entitled “Variations”,
it includes other adaptations of the “Ode to Joy”, in particular symphony orchestra,
organ, piano (classical and jazz), rock guitar, jazz violin, techno and trance versions.’ 397
Some versions boosted by the Council of Europe are instrumental, others vocal, and
with lots of different instrumentations, musical styles as well as lengths, tempos
and formal compositions. There is for instance a piano version, a hip-hop version
with a rapper and excerpt from famous politicians’ speeches, as well as four Romani
variations also released on CD (one with famous singer Esma Redzepova). The choice
of presenting rap and Romani styles is interesting. While the hip-hop versions testify
to a will to reach out to young generations, both of these stylistic offers also have
an ethnic twist, associating the anthem to mobile, migrant people and to immigrant
populations not least from the south and east. This is in line with the ‘Turkish’ sounds
in Beethoven’s original setting, and on a musical level seems to respond to Žižek’s
criticism, as it expresses a willingness to include those ‘foreign’ (stylistic as well as
cultural and demographic) elements into the larger European ‘we’.
However, no such reworked version—with or without lyrics—has any official status
at all. The original decision to adopt ‘the prelude to “The Ode to Joy”, 4th movement
of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony’ was not crystal clear, and more recent EU
172