Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
it was still presented as a unique and new design, rather than as an adherence to a
pre-existing symbol. However, for the music, none of the proposed new compositions
gave any hope of finding anything remotely as attractive as what the European canon
of classical music had to offer. The implied signifying result was already by such a
decision to devalue later developments in music and to instead inscribe the anthem in
a rather conservative classicist tradition.
This also makes Beethoven’s oeuvre a clearly privileged intertext, in particular his
Ninth Symphony and Schiller’s poem which he integrated in its final movement. I
will therefore save comparative references to other intertexts until next section, in
order to focus on the most obvious contexts for the European anthem, in a concentric
set of circles from the European anthem, over Beethoven’s Ninth’s fourth movement,
Beethoven’s Ninth symphony as a whole, Beethoven’s total oeuvre and Schiller’s poem
to early nineteenth century bourgeois culture and art music and post-revolutionary
modern capitalism in general. As Esteban Buch has argued, the Anthem functions as
a metonym for ‘the whole fourth movement, the whole Ninth symphony, the whole
work of Beethoven, or even the whole Western “great music”, which, in this way, is
appealed to in order to reinforce the ethical and political legitimacy of the European
community as a whole’. 356
The interpretive analysis could either start with the EU anthem as a separate work
in its own right or approach it as a reworked excerpt from Beethoven’s symphony.
While only a minor group of art music specialists know the symphony context in any
greater detail, many will associate the anthem to Beethoven and thus have some basic
idea about some of those contextual aspects as well. The EU itself repeatedly makes
it known that the anthem has precisely that origin. The European anthem as such is
not yet sufficiently established to have full autonomous work status, even though this
may possibly change in the future, should the anthem survive and become successful,
in the way that for instance the Eurovision tune for most listeners has managed to
cut off its ties to Charpentier’s Te Deum, as will be discussed below. There are many
different anthem versions of shifting length, sung or instrumental, so that it remains
a bit uncertain how it goes as such, and in settings where it is used, it is repeatedly
linked back to Beethoven, so that the melody’s origin in Beethoven’s symphony still
tends to overshadow its independent existence as EU’s anthem. Therefore, I will here
start my analysis by relating the Anthem to its original Beethoven context, rather
than treating it as a completely distinct work. I will first discuss how it has been
understood in its original context within Beethoven’s own work, and then in the
following section listen closer to the arrangements of the Ode melody that have been
presented as the European anthem. Though it may sometimes be difficult to keep
them strictly apart, I will strive to reserve the term ‘Anthem’ for the EU version of
the tune, while speaking of the ‘Ode’ when discussing the core melody as found in
the symphony.
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