The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" Author(S): Lawrence Kramer Source: 19Th-Century Music, Vol

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The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" Author(s): Lawrence Kramer Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1998), pp. 78-90 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746793 Accessed: 27/10/2009 11:24

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http://www.jstor.org The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"

LAWRENCE KRAMER

Everyone knows that there is a Turkish march One may have to hark all the way back to 1935 in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and Donald Tovey to find this Turkish march but no one seems to think the fact is worthy of treated as something remarkable. Tovey, how- much remark. Perhaps this is because the alla ever, shies away from the national characterof turca is a sufficiently well-established topic in the passage, preferring instead to understand the idiom of Viennese classicism that it seems to need no explanation,whatever aesthetic prob- lems it be felt to pose. Or perhaps the "Turkish"label shows up only later, also in passing);Mar- may tin Cooper cites the lineage of the passage in Haydn, Turkish topic creates a certain uneasiness when Mozart, and others, but otherwise says only that it comes knocking at the gates of the definitive Beethoven's juxtaposition of it with the immediately pre- Viennese masterwork. In any case, the most ceding image of the Cherubwho stands before God "seems almost perverse." (See Solomon, "The Ninth Symphony: distinguished recent criticism largely skirts the A Search for Order," in Beethoven Essays [Cambridge, issue, even though it bears directly on the pro- Mass., 1988], pp. 3-32; Webster, "The Form of the Finale fessed aim of affirming universal brotherhood.' in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in Beethoven Forum 1 [1992],25-62; Treitler,"History, Criticism, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony"and "'ToWorship That Celestial Sound': Motives for Analysis," in Music and the Historical Imagi- nation [Cambridge, Mass., 1989], pp. 19-45, 46-66; 19th-Century Music XXII/1(Summer 1998). ? by The Re- Kinderman,Beethoven [Berkeleyand Los Angeles, 19951, gents of the University of California. pp. 278-79; Cooper,Beethoven: The Last Decade [London, 1970], p. 333.) In his Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cam- 'A few passing references aside, MaynardSolomon, James bridge, 1993), Nicholas Cook counts as a partial exception Webster, and Leo Treitler do not comment directly on the here, citing the Turkish march as one of a number of passage; William Kinderman considers it briefly as "the "unconsummatedsymbols" that need to be heard in their section in B6major and 6 meter" forming a "scherzo"(the troubling strangeness (pp. 92-93), but not even Cook ad-

78 its bass drum, triangle, and cymbals as an ex- fled with both Reason and the Idea);it "shows LAWRENCE KRAMER pression of "the Grotesque Ideal . . . a veil [us] the development of the consciousness of Music and Love covering the terror of things too sublime for Freedomon the part of Spirit" through a gradu- in "Ode to Joy" human understanding."2Although he has sug- ated series of "increasingly adequate expres- gestive things to say about the relation of this sions or manifestations of Freedom, which re- music to images of cosmic space and the sults from its Idea"; and its objects of knowl- memory of Napoleon's armies, what Tovey will edge are the characteristic "'National Spirits' of resolutely not say is that the vehicle of these History," each of which functions like a single suggestions is a representation of what, when individual in a long journey that, like the sun the symphony was composed, stood as a non- itself, takes a westering path from the Orient to European,indeed an anti-European,militancy. Europe.Hegel's solar imagery is of a piece with Why, then, is there a Turkish march in the Beethoven's and Schiller's when they call for a finale of the Ninth Symphony? One answer band of brothers to run a victorious course like may be suggested by Beethoven's unusual, not suns flying through the field of heaven. That to say remarkable, treatment of the text. He call, of course, is the text of the Ninth extracts, arranges, and handles verses from Symphony's Turkish march. It resonates with Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in ways that resonate Hegel's text not only in deploying a similar with a narrative paradigm that flourished in image, but also in interpreting the image as one the symphony's cultural milieu. The object of that Spirit has internalized as a principle of this paradigm is world history, which is taken action. Hegel's historical process ends when to unfold in large epochal sweeps, the phases of "man has erected a building from his own inner a process by which truth or reason is gradually sun," thus completing "the great Day's work of realized in historical time. Each epoch is char- Spirit";the Beethoven-Schillerbrother-band also acterized broadly by association with an exem- inspirits itself by absorbing the solar principle, plary people and a certain attitude toward ex- taking action as "gladly as [the] suns fly."4(The istence. Fed by the writings of Lessing and brother-band,in fact, lives in a wholly figurative, Herder, and common to both the Goethe- wholly interiorized world: it acts joyously as a Schiller circle and the Jena Romantics, this hero, gladly as the suns.) The resemblances "universal history," as Hegel called it, focused here are something between a mere coincidence most often on the relationship between Greek and the result of a common attitude and a antiquity and German-Christian modernity. common image-repertoire.They form a kind of Hegel's own version, roughly contemporary symptom markingthe possibility that the finale with the Ninth Symphony, is more finely of Beethoven's symphony can be heard to do grained and also takes non-Western cultures aesthetically what Hegel's Lectures on the Phi- into account.3 losophy of History do analytically. The "Ode to For Hegel, "Universal History is exclusively Joy,"too, may envision a grandprogressive syn- occupied with showing how Spirit comes to a thesis of diverse world-historical Spirits. The recognition and adoption of the Truth" (identi- process may even involve a westering movement, given the Spirits involved: those of classical Greece, Ottoman Turkey, and German (or Germanized)Christendom. dresses the music's "Turkish" quality as an interpretive From the very first, of course, the finale of issue. Cook also points to a long critical tradition, dating the Ninth has been heard as an attempt to from FriedrichKanne's review of 1824, that seeks to nor- malize the passage (p. 92); Kanne's remarks exemplify the forge an organic synthesis from a bewildering anti-Turkishnervousness mentioned in my text (realTurk- diversity of materials; as Nicholas Cook ob- ish music, he says, is more chaotic than Beethoven's styl- serves, the tradition begins with Friedrich ization), as Cooper'sdo its reduction to a self-evident topic. 2Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis: Sym- Kanne's review of 1824.5My point of departure phonies and Other Orchestral Works (1935; new edn., London, 1981), p. 122. 3Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [Lectures on] The Phi- losophy of History (1822-31), trans. J. Sibree (1899; rpt. 4Ibid.,pp. 53, 63, 103. New York, 1956). 5Cook,Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, p. 92.

79 19TH here is the suggestion that Kanne and his suc- After the Christian verse has been elabo- CEMUSIC cessors heard things aright, but that the objects rated, the text-music relationship undergoes a of synthesis are not confined to stylistic ges- striking change. Up to this point, Schiller's tures, but include the modes of Spirit-in mod- verses have been set as wholes, verbally coher- ern terms, of the constructions of subjectiv- ent and musically distinct. But beyond this ity-that the stylistic gestures implicate. point the verses, or more exactly a pair of them, This is, obviously, a large claim; just how break down into loosely connected phrases that can it be grounded? One answer, as already are combined, repeated, compressed, or dis- intimated, may lie in the relationship between tended with scant regard for either verbal co- text and music. The verses of the "Ode to Joy" herence or musical distinctness. Initially static devoted to the daughterof Elysium evoke Greek and successive, the text-music relationship be- antiquity in several ways beyond the Elysian comes dynamic and processual;the change sug- image; I will turn to these shortly. The verses gests that the epochal topics of the finale can- themselves consist of three stanzas: the initial not be reconciled or synthesized merely by be- apostrophe to Joy ("Freude, sch6ne G6tter- ing presented, but only by engaging with each funken") and a pair of rhetorical amplifications other in terms that affect the shape and en- ("Wem der Grosse Wurf gelungen," "Freude croach on the boundaries of each. trinken alle Wesen"). Once these three have In particular, the remainder of the move- been combined with the "Ode to Joy" theme ment freely mixes phrases from the classiciz- and heard in full, the Turkish topic emerges in ing apostrophe to the daughterof Elysium with association with military imagery, the march phrases from the Christianizing injunction to of the band of hero-brothers to victory. Next, be embraced by the world-kiss and seek the the initial apostrophe to Joy makes the first of transcendental father. This Greek-Christian what will prove to be a cycle of returns. It is mixture first takes the form of contrapuntal followed by something new and sharply con- combination in the Allegro energico section trastive: the emergence of a Christian topic. following the Christian Maestoso. The dispar- Ecclesiastical trombones appearalong with the ate fragments of text are here rendered com- lines "Seid umschlungen, Millionen, / Diesen pletely indivisible as texture; at no point is Kuss der ganzen Welt" [Be embraced, you mil- either the apostrophe or the injunction heard lions, / By this kiss for the whole world]; the by itself. It is as if neither made sense without verse thus begun culminates in the image of the other, even though, strictly speaking, it is the heavenly fatherwho dwells beyond the stars, their combination that makes no sense. The a paternal counterpart to the daughter of Elysium. The contrast between an immediate this-worldly joy and a remote transcendental tory northwards, a common alternative to the westering divinity is very much in keeping with contem- movement noted earlier)takes a form that, insofar as it is porary accounts of the difference between the itself a common topic or trope, may have particularreso- nance with the Christian topic of Beethoven's finale. Writ- classical and modern ages; in August Schlegel's ing in defense of Gothic architecture ("which ought really typical formulation, "Among the Greeks hu- to have been termed Old German"),Schlegel claims that man nature was in itself all-sufficient . . . and "We Northernersare not so easily talked out of the powerful, solemn impressions which seize upon the mind at [sought] no higher perfection than that which entering a Gothic cathedral. We feel, on the contrary, a it could actually attain by the exercise of its strong desire to investigate and to justify the source of this own energies," whereas for modern Europeans, impression" (p. 24). The movement from awe to active engagementoutlined by Schlegel is anticipatedin Goethe's above all those of Germanic race, "everything account of his own response to the StrasbourgCathedral finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation ("On German Architecture" [1773], in Johann Wolfgang of infinity."6 von Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen and Emest H. von Nardoff [Princeton, 1994], p. 6). It also has its parallel in the Ninth Symphony finale as, in succession, the phrases "Seid umschlungen, 6August Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art Millionen" and "Bruider!uberm Stemenzelt muss ein lieber and Literature(1808), trans. John Black (London,1846), p. Vater wohnen" are heard first in the austere ecclesiastical 27. At one point, Schlegel's characteristic claim of Ger- texture of unison voices and trombones, and then (with manic pre-eminence (the result of the movement of his- textual expansion)in richly textured tutti statements.

80 1- LAWRENCE . .1 kill .ff. KRAMER s. Music and Love in "Ode to Joy" a der gan - zen Welt!

A. < J J J JJ J I I Pr r Ir jIJ JIr rTr r C f I wir be - tre - ten, Himm - li - sche dein Hei - - - - - lig - tum!

2 r - f rI 1? I T. r? ##J i r lr r FI-F r Mil- li - - o - nen!___ Die - sen Kuf_ der gan - zen Welt!

B. i#er se If f de 1-' f - l I Die - sen KufI der gan - zen, gan - zen Welt!

Example 1: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, finale: climax of Allegro energico.

chorus creates an image of complex mutuality the Allegro energico.) As if working dialecti- by continually passing "Joy"phrases and "Kiss" cally, this separation of topics leads directly to phrases from one choir to another, the indi- their reunion in the Prestissimo section that vidual choirs sometimes even switching be- concludes the symphony. Stated once more in tween phrase-types without pause. Punctuat- succession, divided by just one breathless beat, ing this process throughout are detached shouts the Christian and Greek verses unite by shar- of "Freude" and extended outbursts of word- ing the section's headlong tempo, continuous less vocalizing. The surging, full-cry abandon tutti texture, and jubilantnoisiness. Their union of the music suggests a fusion between a quasi- culminates when, in yet one more dialectical Dionysian ecstasy and the Christian parallel turn, the tempo breaks and the apostrophe to that the eighteenth century called "Enthusi- Joyreceives its final statement in the Maestoso asm" in the root sense of the Greek en-theos, vein first established by the Christian topic. At being possessed by a god; the suggestion crys- this point, everything has been said, and the tallizes as the Elysian half of the mixture forms orchestra rushes to a close. a gradualemphasis on the phrase "Wirbetreten The Prestissimo, however, also does some- Feuertrunken, / Himmlische, dein Heiligtum" thing else. It brings back the Turkish topic, [We enter fire-intoxicated, heavenly one, your which has otherwise been sidelined; the or- sanctuary], often compressed to a triumphant, chestral tutti now includes-continuously- the appropriative "Wir betreten dein Heiligtum!" janissary instruments that have been silent The jubilation reaches a grand climax as a since the Turkish march. The section even be- melismatic expansion of "dein Heiligtum" com- gins with a variant of the "Joy" phrase for bines with "der ganzen Welt," thus envision- janissary percussion, winds, and brass: pure ing an identity between the two terms in which "Turkish music." The effect is to establish the the fusion pursued by the whole section culmi- Prestissimo, and through it the entire finale, as nates (see ex. 1). a kind of anthem of universal history: one that, The section closes immediately thereafter in keeping with the textual emphasis that with a solemn, slow-moving, largely quiet re- emerges during the middle of the section, sym- statement of the injunction to seek a transcen- bolically takes in the whole world. At the same dental God. A new tempo, Allegro ma non tanto, time, however, this is a synthesis in which the then takes over, bringing with it an ecstatically classical Greek ethos stands as first among jumbled return of the apostrophe to the daugh- equals. Its priority is established both by the ter of Elysium. (Here the emphasis shifts to the refrain-likereturns to the "daughterof Elysium" second half of the stanza, the part missing in verse and by the double movement from the

81 19TH Christian to the Greek topic after their contra- intimacy. Goethe's essay of 1805, "Winckel- MCUSICRY puntal fusion in the Allegro energico.Joy's sanc- mann and His Age," links these features, re- tuary always stands as a destination. The finale spectively, with the Greeks' love of beauty, thus acts as if to satisfy Goethe's famous in- especially "the beautiful human being"; their junction, "Let everyone be a Greek in his own robust concentration on immediate reality in way, but let him be a Greek!"7 both joy and sorrow;and the need of their "com- Just what, though, does it mean to be Greek plete personalities" for a friendship in which in this context, and what do the Turks have to each man "could perceive himself as a whole do with it? To sketch an answer, the Turks will only if he was complemented by another."9 have to be sidelined awhile-not, as you see, Similarly, the "Greek" verses extracted by for the first time-but rest assured: as in the Beethoven from the "Ode to Joy" emphasize symphony, they will come back at a crucial both plastic form and the joys of brotherhood, moment. At stake here is something different qualities that the symphony ties to Grecian from the master narrative outlined by Schiller grandeurby means of the simple, noble charac- in his essay "On Naive and Sentimental Po- ter of the "Ode to Joy"theme that-after much etry" of 1795 and shared, accordingto Maynard searching-becomes the indelible setting of the Solomon, by the finale of Beethoven's Ninth.8 verse. Schiller had proposed a dialectical recovery of The specifically Hellenic dimension of the the ancient Greek ethos; although humanity Joy verses in the Ninth Symphony finale has could no longer go "back to Arcadia,"the artist not, I think, been much noticed.10In represent- could lead it "forward to Elysium." Though ing Joyas a daughterof Elysium in whose shrine couched in classical terms, this formula is ac- and under whose wings all men become broth- tually anti-classical, in the sense that it as- ers, Schiller creates not only a classical per- sumes the irremediable loss of the "Arcadian" sonification but also a sculptural image; Joy as harmony between nature and humanity sup- goddess belongs to an imaginary group of Greek posedly characteristic of the ancient Greeks, temple friezes or statues. The image might even even as it looks forward to an "Elysian" over- be said to suggest an inverted form of the coming of the modern self-consciousness that Laocoon group that drew famous essays from imposes the loss. The Elysian imagery of the Lessing and Goethe; here the sheltering daugh- "Ode to Joy,"written some ten years before the ter replaces the helpless father and the joyous essay, suggests a more naive classicism, one united brothers replace the agonized divided less in keeping with Romantic dialectics than sons. Joy's wings, in addition, may associate with the "Greekomania"-Schiller's own her with Nike, the goddess of Victory, though term-that swept through German intellectual they may also be a pair of standard-issue alle- life in the second half of the eighteenth cen- gorical pinions. In combination with the Chris- tury. tian and Turkish topics that it takes as subordi- German philhellenism, to give it its more nate elements in the "world-historical" syn- dignified name, was in large part inspired by thesis of the movement, the Joy image and the the work of the art historian Johann Joachim theme associated with it create an effect much Winckelmann. Among its most salient features like that of the Doric temple facades used for are a strong focus on visual art, above all on sculpture; the idealization of this art as the embodiment of nobility, simplicity, and gran- 9Goethe, "Winckelmannand His Age," Essays on Art and deur; and a fervent, at least quasi-erotic con- Literature,pp. 102-04. centration on the male body and masculine '0Solomon,however, notes a "speculative"parallel between the finale of the Ninth and the following statement in Schiller's preface to his drama The Bride of Messina: "I have blended together the Christian religion and the Pa- gan mythology, and introduced recollections of Moham- 7Goethe, "Ancient Versus Modern,"in Essays on Art and medan superstition" (Beethoven Essays, p. 213). Schiller's Literature,p. 93. statement, of course, contains in nuce all three modes of 8Solomon, "Beethoven and Schiller," in Beethoven Essays, world-historical Spirit, the interrelations of which I seek pp. 205-15. to trace in this essay.

82 grand public buildings-university halls, mu- "it" than a "he," the brother always needs LAWRENCE KRAMER seums, banks-by many nineteenth-century supplementation. This is suggested in Beetho- Music and Love architects. More particularly, the effect might ven's redaction of Schiller's text not only by in "Ode to Joy" be compared to the one envisioned by Friedrich the need of the sheltering wing to create the Gilly's famous proposal of 1797 for a monu- brother-band,but also by the equivocal return ment in Berlin to King Friedrich II, in which of the figure of the father-king in the person of the pure lines of a new Parthenon would crown the absent God who dwells beyond the stars. a rough, massive, eclectic base set at the center The Turkish march, however, adds yet a of an octagonal promenade.'1 Once again, in fourth alternative. It suggests that neither a the spirit of Goethe's injunction, modern hu- maternal nor a paternal supplement is finally manity is to realize itself by becoming newly sufficient; there must also be a supplement Greek. The unity of humanity is to be retrieved generatedentirely from within the brother-band by reimagining the plastic ideal of the Greek itself. There is a flat contradiction here that world in a modern social and political context. nothing in the symphony will resolve: that the The means of that retrieval is brotherhood, united band of brothers (who are both all men or so the verses tell us. On closer inspection, and all humankind) both are and are not depen- however, what does that mean? When "alle dent on a transcendental agency in the forma- Menschen werden Bruder"under the wings of tion of their union. Contradiction or no, the Joy, what form does the redemptive brother- march is notable for being the only extended hood take? Are we to imagine that all human all-male enclave in the finale. Its verse is ad- beings become coequal partners in a commu- dressed solely to the band of brothers;the topic nity of joy? Or is it that all males become of the verse is military, at least at the figurative brothers through the mediation of a Joy that level; and the music is, of course, for tenor solo embraces them like a mother-the daughter of and male chorus. (If Schiller had in some sense Elysium identified as the mother of men sought a correctiveto Winckelmann's homoero- through the traditional maternal image of the ticism by centering his "statuary" on a femi- sheltering wing? Or is it that the band of broth- nine figure, not a male youth, the corrective is ers thus created is redeemed from a certain uncorrected here-especially by Beethoven's lack by the intervention of this all-embracing expressive and editorial choices.) But at this feminine figure, so that the agency of all viable point an interesting conundrum arises. Why brotherhood is ultimately feminine? This last evoke this band of brothers with music that alternative is not as obvious as the first two, putatively belongs to the traditional enemy of but it is implicit in both the dependency rela- European,and especially of Viennese, men and tionship and the strict gender separation de- their civilization? Why have recourse to the picted in the image. Without Joy'stender magic, very empire whose possession of modem Greece those divided by custom ("was die Mode streng alienates the ruins of classical culture from the geteilt") will never become brothers. This idea Europe that sees those ruins as one of its chief may also draw support from an important theo- glories? The reason, presumably, is that the retical argument by Juliet Flower MacCannell, march wants to appropriate something from who holds that the liberatory claims of post- those whom we might now easily call the ori- Enlightenment brotherhood have a dark, con- ental Other. But what? straining lining. Although the deposed figure of One answer may be suggested by "splitting" the father-king had been authoritarian, it was the music into two separateaspects, something also fully humanized; the figure of the brother that I hear it very nearly doing to itself. These is more impersonal and anonymous.12More an two aspects can also be heard to correspond to two different models of manhood current during the early nineteenth century, one rooted in IIFora reproduction of the design, see Hermann G. Pundt, classical Greece, the other in Ottoman Turkey. Schinkel's Berlin: A Study in Environmental Planning The first model involves an ideal of fervent (Cambridge,Mass., 1972), p. 50; for discussion, pp. 48-52. "2JulietFlower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: love and loyalty between comrades, which, un- After the Patriarchy (New York, 1991), esp. pp. 1-38. der the banner of military fellowship, is al-

83 19TH lowed to assume a nearly explicit erotic qual- be taken to express the mournful unity-in-divi- CENTURY MUSIC ity. The prototype for such manhood was the sion of the parted friends specified by the military pederasty of Sparta, especially as per- music's program.Somewhat less conjectural is sonified by the sacrificial example of Leonidas the topical affiliation of the funeral march that and his troops at Thermopylae, an association forms the slow movement of the eponymous that led Richard Dellamora to name the phe- "FuneralMarch" Sonata, op. 26. This march is nomenon "Dorianism."A Spartanyouth, wrote said to have been written partly in emulation the philologist Carl Ottfried Muller, "wore the of its precursorin FerdinandoPaer's opera Achil- military dress which had been given him by his les, which Beethoven heard in 1801, the year of lover [philator], and fought in battle next his the sonata's composition. Paer's march evinces lover, inspired with double valour by the gods the grief of Achilles for Patroclus; to the extent of war and love."'3 Muller's description of the that Beethoven's march is allusive, its allusive- Dorian ideal was influential in both Germany ness would incorporate the feeling-tone typical and England during the nineteenth century, in of the cult of Dorian companionship. This tone both civic and erotic venues. It also gave the can perhaps be heard most clearly in the dis- ideal a sadly nationalist and racialist dimen- traught tritone-related section-on D minor in sion by stressing the "Aryan" purity of the the key of Al minor-that moves from pianis- original Dorians, who had invaded the Pelo- simo resignation to fortissimo lament amid the ponnesus from the North at the end of the otherwise ceremonial tread of the march (see Mycenaean era. The ideal also finds less ten- ex. 2).15 It's important to note, however, that dentious expression in Friedrich Holderlin's Paer'sAchilles is a romantic as well as a Dorian novel of 1797-98, Hyperion, in which, for ex- lover, as are both Holderlin's Hyperion and the ample, the narratorrecalls being "unspeakably members of Beethoven's and Schiller's brother- happy" with his beloved comrade, having "so band, who hope both to become "the friend of a often sunk into his embraces only to awaken friend"and to win "a lovely woman." Although from them with [a] heart [made] invincible," there is often tension between the terms, there while the comrade confesses to fantasizing that is no flat either/or of homo- and heterosexual the two of them "would fall together in one love in this cultural framework.16 battle-torn valley and rest together under one The second pertinent model of manhood in- tree." Similarly, Goethe speaks of how classi- volves controlled brutality and what Hegel cal authors, "with regard to two young men," called fanaticism, the superlative degree of tend to "inundate us" with accounts of "the single-mindedness. In general, this is the man- bliss of being inseparable, lifelong devotion, or hood of the Other,powerful, ruthless, and fierce; the need to follow the other into death."14 it is a kind of concentrated dangerousness The quasi-erotic absorptionin loss and death viewed with an unstable mixture of envy, awe, suggested by these extracts is a regular feature and revulsion. For Hegel, this "abstract and of the Dorian ideal, and one that Beethoven therefore all-encompassing enthusiasm-re- may have intimated, at least indirectly, in two strained by nothing, finding its limits nowhere, of his piano sonatas. In the "Les Adieux" So- and absolutely indifferent to all beside," is the nata, op. 81la, the unusual form of the slow principle of Spirit in the "Mahometan East," movement-a poignant minor-key utterance especially in the epoch of the Persian Caliph- followed seamlessly by its even more poignant ate. "It is the essence of fanaticism," he writes, recapitulation in a veiled subdominant-might

'5This sonata has bearings on the Eroica Symphony as '3RichardDellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures:Sexual Poli- well as the Ninth; for discussion, see my "Eroica-traces: tics and the Sense of an Ending (New Brunswick, 1994), Beethoven and Revolutionary Narrative" in Musik/Revo- pp. 43-64; quotation from Muller, p. 47. lution: Festschrift fur Georg Kneplerzum 90. Geburtstag, 14FriedrichHolderlin, Hyperion;or, The Hermit in Greece, ed. Hanns-WernerHeister (Hamburg,1997), II, 35-48. trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1965), p. 48; Goethe, '6Forfurther discussion of this complex topic, see the es- "Winckelmannand His Age," in Essays on Art and Litera- says collected in Outing Goethe and His Age, ed. Alice A. ture, p. 103. Kuzniar(Stanford, 1996).

84 15 I I I LAWRENCE I Ir-"q Irw- KRAMER Music and Love in "Ode to Joy" . ( cresc.) P pp i ?fi - i i

/~~~~~~~1;Wb;WW: ?** ? ?

Example 2: Beethoven, "Funeral March" Sonata: movt. III, mm. 15-22.

"to bear only a desolating destructive relation- counters a massive portal guarded by a pair of ship to the concrete; but that of Mahometanism grotesque dwarfs: was, at the same time, capable of the greatest elevation . . . free of all petty interests, and Two little dwarfs, the least you could suppose, united with all the virtues that appertain to Were sate, like ugly imps, as if allied magnanimity and valor."'7 In the modern era, In mockery to the enormous gate which rose the East has degenerated in the grip of "hideous O'er them in almost pyramidic pride; passions" and the "grossest vice," but what The gate so splendid was in all its features, You never about these little remains of the fanatical spirit, although "cooled thought creatures, down," is lodged firmly in the janissaries of the Until you nearly trod on them, and then Ottoman Turks. From the mid-eighteenth cen- You started back in horror to survey the most embodiments of this tury on, typical The wondrous hideousness of these small men, type of manhood are probably a pair of "Orien- Whose color was not black, nor white, nor tal" types, the despotic Pasha and the brigand grey, chief. Examples might run from Mozart's Bassa But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Selim and Byron's Hassan (from The Giaour) Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may; who, unlike Selim, really does kill the hero's They were mis-shapen pigmies, deaf and dumb- beloved, to Tolstoy's Haji Murad and nine- Monsters, who cost a no less monstrous sum.18 teenth-century media constructions of real-life figures like the Mahdi, the Islamic leader who These "small men" exist for two purposes: to played Crazy Horse to General Gordon's Custer murder any bigger ones who happen to trespass in the Sudan in 1885. Both Byron's Don Juan, into the harem, and to open the gate for autho- however, and Beethoven's and Kotzebue's The rized women and eunuchs, which they alone Ruins of Athens offer revealing alternatives. are strong enough to do. Endowed with "little When Byron's hero, dressed as a girl, comes looks" said to be both poisonous and fascinat- to the threshold of a Turkish harem, he en- ing, the dwarfs represent masculine danger at

"Text from Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie Marchand (Bos- 17Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 359, 358. ton, 1958), V, lxxvii-lxxviii.

85 19TH its most concentrated. Misshapen, deaf, mute, be some time yet before the image of Saracen CENTURY MUSIC and minuscule, they manufacture extreme po- invincibility gave way to that of Ottoman Tur- tency out of extreme lack. In context, they can key as "the sick man of Europe.") be taken to represent the masculine essence Like Byron'sdwarfs, Beethoven's warrior-der- that Byron's Juanprogressively misplaces as he vishes produce extreme potency from extreme assumes the identity of the harem girl "Juana." lack-a lack, in this case, with a series of spe- In the dwarfs, that essence appears in its raw cifically musical definitions. First, the dervish form, that of the homunculus, the "little man" chorus has not even the most elemental har- traditionally thought to be carried by seminal mony; its tenors and basses sing in a strident, fluid-but the homunculus as toxin. (Slavoj unbroken unison, often abetted by doubling Zizek might see the dwarfs as little pieces of from cellos and basses. Second, the E-minor the Lacanian Real, the obscene substance of music of the chorus is almost wholly unre- pleasure or desire that cannot be symbolized lieved by the major mode, leaving the minor to and appears only as a blot or deformation in assume a relentless, motoric, "fanatical" char- ordinary reality. Hence their indescribability acter. Finally, and most importantly, the cho- and their racial indeterminacy in a text where rus contains not a single V-I cadence; cadences race is everywhere marked.19)In this guise the are replaced by movement from the tonic (mi- dwarfs also suggest an imperviousness to cas- nor) six-four to the five-three, a gesture given a tration, a topic certainly on Juan's mind and sense of resoluteness, if not of resolution, by one much joked about in a canto devoted to emphatic semitone motion to the melodic fifth cross-dressing and presided over by a eunuch. degree just prior to each cadential substitute That the priceless little creatures form an in- (see ex. 3). The dervishes thus lay claim to an separable pair is a none-too-subtle clue to their anti-Europeanmusical space and hold it with identity. defiant tenacity. Byron's dwarfs have less grotesque but The male chorus and solo tenor of the Ninth equally potent brethren in The Ruins of Ath- Symphony's Turkish march are at one level the ens, the dramatic spectacle by Kotzebue with very antithesis of these militant dervishes, but music by Beethoven written in 1811 as part of at another level their heirs. As is probably evi- the inaugural of a new theater in Pesth. Like dent by now, I have been leading up to the H6lderlin's Hyperion, The Ruins proposes that conclusion that the symphony's march is an the classical Greek spirit must be revived by amalgam of Dorian and "oriental" elements. cultural, not military, means. Awakening from On the Dorian side, the march is set in a jaunty a millennium of sleep, Kotzebue's Minerva de- 8 meter rather than a militant 4 and its for- spairs at the wreck of Turkish-occupied Ath- mat-the tenor first apostrophizing the chorus, ens and chooses to migrate to central Europe, then engaging in dialogue with it-emphasizes which will thenceforth become the new Greece. the process of bonding at the heart of the One source of Minerva's despair is the formi- brother-band.The vocal style is lyrical, florid, dable power of Islamic "fanaticism," repre- even at times effusive; it projects a heroism sented by Kotzebue in a chorus of dervishes groundedas much in ardoras in strength-"the that Beethoven amalgamated into a march of bliss of being inseparable, lifelong devotion, or janissaries.Accompanied by "all availablenoise- the need to follow the other into death." On making instruments such as castanets, bells, the oriental side, of course, there is the punc- etc.," continuous triplet motion in the upper tuation of the march by the janissary triad of strings depicts a dervishlike whirling while ag- bass drum, cymbal, and triangle. This "noise- gressive march rhythms in the brass invoke making" is continuous throughout, even "fa- martial force. (Hegel notwithstanding, it would natical" in its insistence on a single rhythmic figure. (When the same sonority returns in the closing Prestissimo, it is rhythmically quite varied, as if integrated with the other musical 19See Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to elements at a The Turkish Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., "higher" level.) 1991), pp. 1-47. rhythm section is also, however, self-con-

86 65 LAWRENCE .0 A 4 I II i I I KRAMER Hns. Music and Love in C , r r r r r : r r r r r 2 ~ r in "Ode to Joy"

Trpts. r r

irl sf r - #' r r -A Trb.

Vn. I . 3 3 3 3 3 sf 3 3 sf 3 3

3 3 3 3 3 3 33 Vn. II

Vla.

Ten.

Ka - a b- a, Ka - a - ba. Ka S Bass S#f r t c f r Ka - a - ba, Ka - a - ba. Ka

Vc. and Cb. I., :,#J J J J 1 1 ru;Cm"D i J J J J I ifl r AL -IL <^_ ^Tsf

Example 3: Beethoven, The Ruins of Athens: Chorus of Dervishes, mm. 65-72.

sciously symbolic, three times changing its simply transcended or erased. The synchronic rhythmic profile to form a "cadence" empha- relation of Dorian idealism and janissary vital- sizing the phrase "wie ein Held zum Siegen." ity is also a diachronic relation that traces, and As the march proceeds, the lyrical and mili- in tracing preserves, the shape of historical tant elements exert a variable pressure on each progress. The measure of that progress may other, depending in part on how the interplay perhaps be taken by the music that follows the of their fervid melody and tireless jangle is march: the orchestral double fugue marked heard at any given moment. The Dorian band sempre fortissimo, its form symbolizing the seeks to supplement its dream of victory with a acme of European musical intellect, its pacing certain "barbarian" invincibility that, in turn, and texture evoking a dynamism of spirit that seeks to sublimate its single-minded force in nothing can withstand. The fugue seems to the ethical beauty of the Dorian ideal. One signify both the fruits of the victory to be won might paraphrase the conjunction of these ele- and the means by which to win it. ments by saying that the lyrical march of the The topical mixture of Dorian and janissary European hero-band is pictured as unfolding (as masculinities in the Turkish march is consis- having to unfold) against a non-European hori- tent with the synthesizing, "world-historical" zon that may be subordinated but may not be impulses of the Ninth Symphony, but it can-

87 19TH 69 CENTURY M.-,* A U MUSIC

||#r r r r r ' r ' r r r rr

: r r ' r 1 r , r r r r r I sf

Sf sf f Sf f 3 3 3 3 3 i m mTr m #ma;t ^ ji rjfa Jjf j s f 3 sf Sf sf sf sf f sf sf sf

a - ba. Ka- a - ba. Ka -a ba. Ka - a - ba. Ka - a - ba! r' - I y#.?r' r I 5 ~ 1 i ~ I ~'i 1 I a - ba. Ka - a - ba. Ka -a ba. Ka - a - ba. Ka-a - ba!

il i I 3 v", # j J J1 jTI I I h t \ -L S-L sf Sf sf Sf Example 3 (continued)

not entirely be explained by them. If I am right never ventures beyond the harem threshold. At in suggesting that philhellenism is one of the the same time, he might also have been trying initiating impulses of the finale, then the logic to temper any feeling of effeminacy that might that impels the march might run something attach to the Dorian ethos. H6olderlindoes some- like this. The impulse to "be Greek" could not thing similar when he transfers Hyperion's love easily be separated in Beethoven's milieu from from a youth to a maiden, the Platonically the Dorian ideal, but the ideal brought with it named Diotima, who teaches him-in vain, as at least two difficulties. One was its eroticism, it turns out-the true meaning of his desire to which could only be sanctioned by disengaging restore the ruins of Athens.20 it from modern morality, as Muller, for example, explicitly sought to do. Goethe had done exactly the same thing in "Winckelmann and 20Thecomplex issue of Dorianeffeminacy is strikingly illustratedby a paintingI encounteredshortly after com- His Age" when confronting what we would pletingthis paper.The Nationalgalerieder Romantikin call Winckelmann's homosexuality. Beethoven SchlossCharlottenburg, Berlin, houses a copy(dated 1836) accordingly have been trying to desexu- of a panoramic"historical" canvas by the architectKarl might FriedrichSchinkel depicting the worldof ancientGreece. alize the Dorian topic by combining it with In the foreground,scantily clad or naked men labor at janissary music, which, like Byron's dwarfs, buildinga temple;in the middleground,heavily armored

88 The second difficulty with Dorianism is its its ultrabass quality, it may even suggest an LAWRENCE KRAMER association with sacrificial death. Schiller's and obscene, abjected piece of the male voice, per- Music and Love Beethoven's military image of the transcenden- haps of the very baritone that ushers voice as in "Ode to Joy" tal achievement of the brother-bandis, on the such into the symphony. (When the baritone, contrary, an affirmation of life. By overlaying after singing mainly in his upper register, ends his Dorian music with a janissary sheen, the opening solo on a pair of low As, a visceral- Beethoven may have been trying at a symbolic guttural tone almost always intrudes.) This ob- level to reverse the fate of Leonidas and his noxious sound forms the nucleus of the march. comrades. (Here again there is an analogy to It is absorbed into the purely "Turkish" first Hyperion, who is destined to live and who, for episode for percussion, winds, and brass, and, that reason, is explicitly denied a Thermopylae though the contrabassoon breaks off when the of his own.21) Perhaps Beethoven needs to inti- vocal part begins, it returns under the voices in mate a Dorian vitalism because he is worried, the concluding passage. The sound thus acts as however unwillingly, by the lifeless imperson- a kernel of radical otherness underlying not ality that may threaten the ideal of brother- only the Dorian efflorescence but even the hood from within; the very verses he sets, join- Turkish jangle, in which, again like Byron's ing the hero's careerwith the preordainedmove- dwarfs, it figures as a presence both integral ments of the cosmos, are inflected by that and alien. threat. Or perhaps, with greater confidence, he This otherness also has an important har- wants to suggest that the spirit of classical monic dimension that deserves at least passing Greece can be reborn in central Europe despite mention. The march forms the first point of the oppressive rule of modern Greece by the large-scale harmonic contrast in the finale, a Turks. Whatever the reasons, he seeks to se- shift to the flat submediant. The initial grunt- cure the triumph of Europeanvalues by mend- ing noises announce that shift, but the sonority ing a defect in European masculinity. He guar- is so bizarre that the structural value of its antees the invincibility of European brother- pitches is rendered dubious-or at least so hood by endowing the brother-bandwith a mea- defamiliarized that the chromatic third-rela- sured, medicinal dose of concentrated danger, tion assumes a quality of incalculable remote- the masculinity of the Turkish Other. ness. If, as is sometimes suggested, the har- Furthermore, like Byron with his dwarfs, mony here suggests something like the second Beethoven at one point lets that dose of mascu- group of a sonata form, the sonority simulta- linity appear in its own right as a "wondrous neously implies the impossibility of any such hideousness" deforming the texture of normal thing. experience. The music involved is that of the I do not, of course, want to pretend that this notorious introduction to the Turkish march, a passage in any aspect is the little treasure that series of grunting noises produced by combin- holds the key to the "Ode to Joy." It is merely ing the bassoons and contrabassoon in abyssal symptomatic of something-but nonetheless, octaves with strokes on the bass drum. The of something important. The radical or, so to sound is half guttural, half visceral, a travesty speak, Real otherness embedded in this music of the body as a source of vocalization. Given tellingly exceeds the more manageable orientalizing otherness of the Turkish topic, although the latter is far from being a simple device of cultural imperialism. Once recognized, troops march off to war. To the viewer's left, two men in the foregroundwatch the departingtroops, the arm of one once localized, this more difficult otherness around the other's shoulders. At the foregroundcenter, a becomes traceable in vital places elsewhere, naked man lounges in a posture usually reserved for fe- both as actual sonority and as a more general male nudes in modern Europeanpainting; another, also in a stereoptypically feminine posture, stands nearby, twist- alienating effect-one might almost say alien- ing himself around to gaze at the lounger. There are no ation-effect. The most notable sonorous trace actual women anywhere in the scene. undoubtedly comes in the final Maestoso state- 21"If only [there were] . . . a Thermopylae where I could honorably let it bleed to death, all the lonely love [for ment by the chorus, where the key phrase Greece] for which I never find a use!" (Hyperion, p. 161). "Freude,sch6ne G6tterfunken" receives heavy

89 19TH janissary reinforcement, the drums and cym- ermore about to be."23Critics or performers CENTURY MUSIC bals pounding and triangles trilling on every who demonstrate that resistance are advancing beat at the fortissimo peak. More generally, the music's own project. They offer a valuable there are the leaps of logic that seem almost a corrective to the idolatry (and its obverse, the "structural" principle in this movement, such derision) that the finale of the Ninth has some- as the bizarre juxtaposition of the cherub pas- times elicited, but the result is still to legiti- sage, march, and fugue, or the ending of the mate the work, to reaffirm its monumental choral part with the repetition of an epithet, status, by identifying its aesthetic interest with "G6tterfunken," that has received little em- a desired social attitude. Perhapswhat is needed phasis in the body of the movement. here is a measured resistance to the very dia- These features of the music may help throw lectic of resistance and assent. By opening it- new light on what has become perhaps the self to a radical otherness, and by locating that major cultural issue surroundingit. Late-twen- otherness at the nexus of masculine identity tieth-century sensibility has often tended to and the westering movement of universal his- prefer what might be called, following Richard tory, the finale of the Ninth exposes the raw Taruskin, a "resisted" Ninth, a work that to nerves of the utopian project,the uneasy ground some degree distances itself from its own affir- on which the "inner sun" must build a subjec- mative message.22The preference, as Taruskin tivity at a particular moment of history. Per- suggests, stems from a perception that the ide- haps this music endures-and endure it does, alistic frenzy of the finale is dangerously close despite being oversold, overplayed,debased, and to the fanaticism it seeks to subsume, even cliched-because, although the moment has borderingon totalitarianirrationalism. To some passed, the sexual and cultural grounds of en- degree, however, the presence of an ironic or gagement remain, uneasy as ever, if not #^ skeptical distance in the finale is part of the more than ever. ao problem, not the solution. The Romantic utopianism voiced by the "Ode to Joy"is argu- ably self-resisting as a matter of genre, its idealism engaged on principle with "something ev- 23Thequotation is from William Wordsworth,The Prelude (1805), VI, 542; on the self-resisting characterof Romantic utopianism, see my "Beethoven's Two-Movement Piano Sonatas and the Utopia of Romantic Esthetics" in Music 22RichardTaruskin, "Resisting the Ninth," this journal 12 as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley and Los Ange- (1989), 241-56. les, 1990), pp. 21-71.