YouTube link to Ode to Joy, Sabadell, Spain, May, 2012
Almost everyone around the world knows Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It’s a simple tune that we all enjoy singing together. In fact, a recent YouTube posting shows an almost spontaneous outburst of this melody (a musical flashmob) on the streets of the Spanish town of Sabadell, Spain. The link is given above. It’s an inspiring clip, one that suggests that if we all work together, we can aspire to greater things. But there is an irony here: The video was made in front of a branch of the Banco de Sabadell, a regional Spanish bank, and as we listen, we wonder about how the Spanish are doing economically, given the difficult straits in which their banks and people find themselves at the moment.
What would Beethoven have thought of the current mess in Europe? Likely, as the song says, he’s rolling over in his grave. But why? What skin does Beethoven have in the game? He was a musician, not a politician or banker. Oddly, quite a bit. If the European Union collapses, Beethoven’s famous tune “Ode to Joy” gets a lot less “rotation” and his vision for humanity seems less realistic.
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is the national anthem of the EU. Indeed, the tune had been proposed as a sonic signifier for Europe as early as 1955. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 Leonard Bernstein raced to the city to lead a pan-European orchestra in a celebratory concert on Christmas Day. The featured work? Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the signature tune of which is “Ode to Joy.” Beethoven himself seemed to be leading the rejoicing over the unification of East and West Germany. Four years later, when the heads of state formally ratified the treaty of alliance establishing the European Union, “Ode to Joy” officially became the European Anthem. All embraced it as the obvious musical symbol of their togetherness. No one objected that both poet and composer were German.
The text of “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) is a hymn in praise of the allegorical figure Joy. Her magic will bind together what custom (read nationality, language, and currency) has rent asunder. Under Joy’s starry canopy, the masses will join together in a Utopian brotherhood : “Seid umschlungen Millionen!”
Beethoven’s music is equally unifying, but it didn’t come easy. He worked on the tune, on and off, more than twenty years before giving it final form at the end of Symphony No. 9. The melody has four balanced phrases, a limited range, and all pitches move by neighboring steps, not distant leaps. As appropriate for a unifying hymn, this is music everyone can sing—and that was Beethoven’s point.
Politically, Beethoven was a liberal republican—that is to say, he was a liberal who believed in a republican form of government, not the then-dominant monarchy. Beethoven spoke only one language, German, and his life unfolded in the Western-most and Eastern-most German-speaking cities (Bonn and Vienna). But so taken was young Beethoven with Napoleon Bonaparte’s democratic message of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality that he sided with the French at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. Only after Napoleon declared himself emperor, did a furious composer scrape off the new-tyrant’s name from Symphony No. 3, changing “Bonaparte” to “For a Fallen Hero.”
When the Napoleonic Wars ended, the first pan-European conference—the Congress of Vienna—convened to divvy up the territorial spoils. Nearly-deaf Beethoven hobnobbed with foreign ambassadors and played what proved to be his last public concert for the assembled dignitaries. He also provided politically ecumenical music, including a bombastic new composition. His Wellington’s Victory is a sappy “Battle Symphony” in honor of the British hero of Vitoria and Waterloo.
By the end of his life, Beethoven himself had become a hero, a poster-boy for cultural unity for all of Europe, as his music was published far and wide. When he died in Vienna in 1827, 20,000 people lined the streets for his funeral—one of every ten residents of the city. Schools were closed and the army called out to control the crowd, so great was the outpouring for this humanitarian.
But Beethoven was no humanitarian at all, certainly not in terms of his personal actions. In fact, he was a mistrustful misanthrope who alienated every human around him. Beethoven was a terrible neighbor and thus moved, or was forced to move, apartments continually, four times in the winter season 1822-1823 alone. He sometimes bathed himself by dumping copious amounts of water over his head (no tub) regardless of those living below. He was confrontational in public, throwing unappreciated food back at waiters and taunting street kids, as they taunted him. He was abusive to his domestic staff, sometimes hurling dishes in their direction. And after he drove his nephew and legal ward to attempt suicide, Beethoven’s reaction was not so much “how is the lad” but rather “this is terrible—it will ruin my reputation.” So much for Equality and Fraternity.
As to business, Beethoven obsessed over the almighty thaler (or gulden), especially late in life, and it got him into tangled and duplicitous dealings. In 1813 he took the wife of his brother Carl to court when she was 15 days late in repaying a loan made to Carl, one she had guaranteed. Occasionally Beethoven took payment for a commission without delivering the stipulated work. Sometimes he negotiated simultaneously for fees from three or four publishers for the rights to print one and the same piece. In the end, he was less concerned about getting his music out to millions, than with getting the money coming in his direction. Despite rhetoric about a commonly shared experience, Beethoven was not a “one for all and all for one” sort of fellow, personally or professionally.
As composer Beethoven demonstrated and Chancellor Angela Merkel of German is learning: humanitarian idealism and naked self interest are not easily reconciled. Where is Joy when we need her?
