Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
was not just a skilled musician but also a socially responsible thinker, already by his
contemporaries seen as a true ‘genius’ who regarded music as pregnant with meaning
and embodying more abstract human values and allegedly universal ideas. 360
It is thus no mere coincidence that Beethoven in several compositions used, developed
and invented themes relating to topical ideas of his time, including expressions of
universal humanism and heroic anti-authoritarian liberation, for instance in the
ballet The Creatures of Prometheus (op. 43, 1801), the third symphony (Eroica, op. 55,
1803) or the opera Fidelio (op. 72, 1814; the original version Leonore was from 1805).
He consciously linked himself to such leading ideas of what was to become classical
European modernity, and thus lends himself well to being appropriated by those who
later seek to express these ideas, either to hail or to problematise them. Beethoven is
perhaps the most widely known European art music composer. No other composer
is equally well known and above all respected all over the world, even though Mozart
and Bach come close. 361 Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll over Beethoven’ (1956) is but one example
of how the serious composer has been used as a generalised symbol for traditional
high arts, and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) being another example.
There is an interesting homology between Beethoven’s time and our own, in that
his hopes for the Congress of Vienna to estab lish European peace after the Napoleonic
wars parallel the intentions behind the Coal and Steel Union after World War II to
finally put an end to the repeated catastrophic hostilities between France and Germany.
Beethoven’s words sung before Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, ‘Freunde, nicht diese Töne’, were
precisely heard as a call against violence, silencing the preceding aggressive chaos.
This process of civilising domestication of dark forces is also represented in the music
itself, where chaotic strife is forced into reconciliation, not by expulsion of the brutes
but through their disciplining integration and submission under a more peaceful and
happy order, forging unity out of diversity. With the car ni valesque ‘Freude schöne
Götterfunken’ sung by a mass ensemble to an elevated but joyful dance tune that fuses
high and low culture, a kind of Promethean aura is established around a secular but
transcendental humankind, upholding Enlightenment values of human rights and
dignity. The music therefore is linked to both the Europa and the Prometheus myths,
and not least to the founding myth of the EU, in which Europe’s economic post-war
reconstruction is defined as an empowering peace project.
Already before analysing the music as such, the Anthem is clearly placed within
a classical European high culture tradition of elevation. Gerard Delanty argues that
the bureaucratic form of EU institutions has ‘a reifying effect’, mirrored in the chosen
anthem, with its ‘reifying tone’ through which ‘the politics of European identity sought
legitimation in bourgeois high culture’. 362 However, there are interesting complexities
involved here as well. Using an already existing tune from the classical art music
heritage, and specifically by Beethoven, has several implications that confirm the
theme of elevation that is so consistently present in all EU symbols discussed so far.
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