Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
When such tones are suddenly heard in Beethoven’s Ninth, they immediately ask
for some kind of justification and interpretation, and critics have generally baulked at
their alien character in relation to what has come before. One example of this alienated
reception is when for instance Walter Riezler hears the Turkish music ‘like a march from
another world, war-like, but first almost incorporeal, as if it, hardly anymore audible to
us, emerged from the most distant far of the universe’. 391 However, the main provocation
of these sounds does not lie in the sounds as such, but in their structural position within
the work as a whole. A contrasting element of otherness could well be accepted if it was
in some way contained and made intelligible within a totalising meaningful narrative,
but the first appearance of these noisy and unsophisticated rhythms is combined with
angelic words that commentators have found inappropriate for it, creating an ‘almost
perverse’ effect. And when it then returns in the concluding orgiastic feast at the very
end of the work, this also has caused trouble for those who found it much too unpolished
and uncivilised to live up to their ideas of heavenly joy in an Elysian paradise.
As Cook mentions, interpreters have used shifting strategies to deal with these
apparent anomalies. For instance, the ‘Turkish’ music could either be understood to
denote the revolutionary mass activity of the common people, or to signify some kind
of eastern ethnic otherness in relation to the basic western classical idiom of the work
as a whole, with radical effects on how to understand Beethoven’s ‘message’—if there is
any to be understood, a fact which Cook’s deconstructive analysis seems to question.
One interpreter has linked this issue to the European unification project. In a
series of articles from 2006 and 2007, Slavoj Žižek saw the negative results of the EU
constitutional referendums as expressions of political populism that refuses complexity
and constructs simple bipolarities of us and them, where the enemies comprise Brussels
bureaucracy as well as illegal immigrants. He argued that instead of dismissing these
sceptical French and Dutch opinions as misled, one should dare to abandon the blind
faith in Europe’s technological modernity and cultural traditions in order instead
to dispel the fetish of scientific-technological progress AND to get rid
of relying on the superiority of its cultural heritage. […] It is time for
us, citizens of Europe, to become aware that we have to make a properly
POLITICAL decision of what we want. No enlightened administrator
will do the job for us. 392
This was the context in which Žižek, leaning on Cook, exemplified with the European
anthem, ‘a true “empty signifier” that can stand for anything’ and therefore can
ideologically serve as a musical basis for forgetting all existing inequalities in an
ecstatic moment of unification. Žižek’s primarily focuses on precisely the problem
with the ‘Turkish’ march:
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