Anthem - Intellect

Signifying Europe
The tune constitutes the climax in the final movement of a late Beethoven work that
is generally understood as a high peak in his oeuvre. He was himself the last of the
big three Vienna classics providing a transition from classical early modernity to the
Romantics and later the self-critical fragmentation of the Enlightenment impulses.
His mature period is often associated with seriousness and wisdom. The main tune of
the final movement thus draws a great work to a conclusion. Romain Rolland regarded
Beethoven’s ‘immortal Ode to Joy’ as ‘the plan of his whole life’: ‘All his life he wished to
celebrate Joy; and to make it the climax of one of his great works.’ 363 In many respects,
the Anthem bears the mark of age, maturity, finality, rich experience and wisdom.
However, this stands in opposition to some aspects of the musical composition—as
well as of the lyrics—that have an almost revolutionary and almost naïvely youthful
urgency.
The music itself is in the centre of the classical European art music tradition,
using the twelve-tone equal temperament foundation of major/minor tonality and
functional harmonics that underpinned new modes of modern musical narrative
through structural progression and tension development, including verse/chorus
transitions as well as the sonata form. These creative tools evolved from late sixteenth
to early nineteenth century Europe and enabled a series of new modes of musical
expression corresponding to the lifeworlds and outlooks of an emerging modern
society, with the bourgeois public sphere as an important hub of civil society.
Big changes took place in the period around the French Revolution, as the postaristocratic
ruling classes took over the initiative and strived to construct a more
suitable sound organisation that emphasised individualised emotional development,
but also lifted up popular expressions in sublimated and refined forms into a more
elevated sphere of fine arts.
Nicholas Cook has succinctly pointed out that Beethoven’s music is full of
contradictions and ambivalences: between unity and fragmentation, energy and
despair, Classicism and Romanticism, seriousness and ironic jokes, sorrow and
happiness, solemn abstraction and physical force, high art and ‘low’ popular
earthiness, and universality and subjectivity. 364 This music in many respects expressed
and tried to come to grips with basic contradictions in emergent bourgeois society
and culture. 365 Susan McClary describes this music as juxtaposing ‘desire and
unspeakable violence’: ‘The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling
articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal
culture since the Enlightenment.’ 366 János Márothy has argued that the early
nineteenth century bourgeoisie developed a kind of ‘Dionysian complex’, resulting
from a basic contradiction of bourgeois society and art: an ‘insoluble duality of the
citoyen-bourgeois’. 367 Modern life had become abstract and private, creating a nostalgic
longing for public collective experiences. The loss of public experiences of Dionysian
mass collectivity of antiquity was recovered in romantic events, sparked off by the
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