Beethoven’s Turks

by Neal Zaslaw

Reflecting on recent events in Europe, Professor Zaslaw has kindly forwarded these thoughts, which first appeared in a Festschrift for Professor Ebisawa Bin on his 80th birthday (Tokyo, 2011).

On Monday, 24 December 2007, the New York Times published a cleverly crafted essay on its op-ed page wherein its author, Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher who is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and author of innumerable books, films and articles about … almost everything, undertook a fashionably Po-Mo critique of the finale of Beethoven Ninth Symphony. He purports to show that much that was devious and evil in European civilization—cultural hegemony, colonialism, and racism, to name a few—is encapsulated there.

Žižek’s abuse of historiographical logic troubles me.

Wishing to make a political point about the European Union’s inability to deal with Turkey’s application to become a member, and having proven to his own satisfaction that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is an “empty signifier,” Slavoj Žižek has filled this imagined emptiness with nonsense largely of his own manufacture. True, the Nazis co-opted the Ninth for their nefarious purposes, but it is just as true that Leonard Bernstein conducted it in Berlin to celebrate the tearing down of the Wall. And the Ninth is indeed a cult piece in Japan, with annual performances in many large and small cities and at the opening of the Diet. It is not true, however, that the Ninth, or even its finale, is the anthem of the EU. The EU’s anthem is solely the unadorned hymn-like tune upon which Beethoven constructed his finale, stripped of the poet’s verses and the composer’s elaborations. To this tune each member-country attaches newly written verses in its own language. Yes, the Ninth has had an extraordinarily varied reception history, some of  it deeply troubling. But Žižek distorts what the inclusion of “Turkish” music meant to Beethoven and his audiences.

Viennese composers of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven among them—had few options when it came to representing the non-Christian world beyond Europe. Traders, colonists, and tourists had long carried reports and physical objects back to Europe. Music in unfamiliar styles was less easily transported. In such a context, imitations of Spanish dances (the Fandango in Gluck’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro) or of naturalized Gypsy melodies from eastern Europe (Haydn’s “Gypsy” rondo) passed for exotic.

a Janissary band miniature, Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

And then there is the so-called “Turkish” music. Austrian soldiers had heard the Janissarys in battle, and a Turkish crescent or “Jingling Johnny” captured from an Ottoman military band was considered a prize trophy. During times of peace the Turkish ambassador in Vienna sometimes maintained a Janissary band. Austrian composers created their own simulacrum of Janissary music, acculturated in ways that their performers could cope with and their audiences grasp—most often swirling melody accompanied homophonically, minor key, march tempo, static harmony, rhythmical bass line, and the addition to the then-customary orchestral forces of a piccolo or penny-whistle, jangling triangle or cymbals, and a side drum.

As I read him, Žižek’s take on this is that it was racist mockery. Hardly! (Or perhaps one should say, only if one takes Edward Said’s Orientalism as revealed truth, rather than the brilliant act of interpretation that it was and is.)

Of course Beethoven’s symphony was meant to entertain, to edify, to move its listeners. And of course his handling of Schiller’s Eurocentric attempt at universalism was emblematic of the ambivalent relations between adjacent, mutually uncomprehending cultures. More importantly, however, it was an attempt at a kind of thought-experiment, at stay-at-home anthropology, at imagining oneself outside of European culture in order to critique it. This is clear, for instance, in Mozart’s “Turkish” opera, The Abduction from the Harem, in which the denouement reveals a Moslem prince to be more magnanimous than his Christian counterpart.

And Beethoven? He didn’t simply set Schiller’s long poem to music. He selected those passages whose message resonated with his own ideas, creating his own vision of utopia. The words that inspired his “Turkish” march are these:

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels pracht’gen Plan,
Laufet, Bri.ider, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Joyously, as His suns fly
Across the glorious map of the Heavens,
Brothers, run your course,
Gladly, like a hero to victory.

That the Ninth has been burdened with so many contradictory meanings should
not be allowed to hide its original (and continuing) fullness: Schiller’s and Beethoven’s
brothers are “Turks” standing in for non-European humankind. Lest anyone doubt this;
two strophes later we are informed (in Natalia Macfarren’s free, rhymed translation):

By Thy magic is reunited
What stern custom parted wide;
All mankind are brothers plighted
Where Thy gentle wings abide.

In our despair over the present state of the world, we may find it all too easy to project our feelings of anomie onto iconic targets. The history of the two centuries that have succeeded Beethoven’s (and Schiller’s) wishful, naive utopianism qualifies the “Ode to Joy” as such a target. But misrepresenting the past in a ploy to score points in the present is dishonestly self-serving.

Lewis Carroll had apparently met some Victorian Žižeks: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.’” The signifier is empty only to those who choose to regard it as such.

Neal Zaslaw is Herbert Gussman Professor of Music at Cornell University. Zaslaw’s numerous and influential books and articles on performance practice, and on Mozart and his music, have shaped the way a generation of scholars and music lovers understand this foundational figure, in this country and around the world. He is editor of the revised Köchel catalogue, forthcoming.