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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th- Century Music. 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 move- ment, given the Spirits involved: those of clas- sical 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.