Music by Ted Gioia

Author:Ted Gioia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

You Say You Want a Revolution?

This leads us, by necessity, to the subject of Beethoven. All these tendencies reach their culmination in him. Music is now the declaration of the human spirit, and not just an ordinary human spirit. The audience demands a towering figure, larger than life. If subversion and outrageous behavior were previously hidden from view by musicians, kept to private moments when a patron wasn’t around to observe, they are now cultivated and put on display. Even stranger, musicians are now expected to have opinions, views on all sorts of matters, from the personal to the political. The music itself is transformed into a kind of sociopolitical manifesto, a statement on the world as well as a harbinger of changes to come.

No one really cared much about deciphering Bach’s political views, certainly not during his lifetime, and hardly at all even after he became enshrined as a canonic composer. But with Beethoven, everything gets viewed through a prism of revolution, upheaval, and clashing value systems. For the first time in music history, political factions battle over musical scores, fighting for them as if they were territory at stake in a war.

Do you still have an image of Beethoven as the ultimate classical music insider, the bedrock of the symphonic tradition, and symbol of the establishment? When Chuck Berry wanted to announce the triumph of rock ’n’ roll in 1956, he declared “Roll Over, Beethoven,” in a hit song that kept returning to the charts in various cover versions over the next quarter century. And every sock-hopper, hot-rodder, and rebel-with-or-without-a-cause knew exactly why the esteemed German composer was singled out for abuse. He was the Man, the whole annoying tradition of fuddy-duddy respectable music summed up in a single oppressive figure. Six years after Berry’s record took over the airwaves, Anthony Burgess published his novel A Clockwork Orange, featuring a young thug who is trained via aversion therapy to get nauseous every time he hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The System is out to destroy you, mates, and the “Ode to Joy” is its tool of domination.

Don’t believe a word of it. These are defining examples of the dialectic explored repeatedly in these pages, that remarkable flip-flop that transforms musical radicals into upholders of the status quo. Old musical revolutionaries never die, they just get assimilated into mainstream institutions. If you only see the institutional figure, you are missing the real action. You have been given Beethoven as brand franchise, a construct used to serve various interests, almost certainly financial or ideological in nature, and usually both.

And no figure in the history of Western music has been co-opted and distorted with more vehemence than Ludwig van Beethoven. His “Ode to Joy” has been embraced, over the years, by the leaders of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Mao’s Cultural Revolution (at a point when almost all Western music was forbidden in China), the Peruvian Shining Path terrorist Abimael Guzman, and the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Beethoven’s Ninth

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