Anthem - Intellect

Anthem
paradox that seriously limited its signifying potentials. Who sings an anthem without
words? Are citizens supposed to whistle or hum? In practice, the use of an identificatory
anthem lies in using it, and in particular for crowds to sing it jointly, which becomes
so much more difficult when there are supposed to be no lyrics to the song! It seems
obvious that the repressed lyrics will still contribute to how the anthem is perceived
and interpreted.
While the anthem was selected to celebrate shared values of freedom, peace and
solidarity, Beethoven found Schiller’s words necessary to adequately express precisely
these values. Music historians agree that instrumental music did not suffice to express
Beethoven’s ideas at this specific point in the Ninth Symphony. 407 The path-breaking
decision to introduce a choir and sung words in a symphony was a necessary step in
order to express the ideas he wished the work to embody. Beethoven himself made that
very clear, by taking the extraordinary measure to add vocals to a symphony, and also
by the way he constructed the musical texture of the finale movement. In the 6 minute
instrumental introduction to the finale, fragments from the preceding movements are
presented and each time stopped by an increasingly impatient double bass. The ‘Ode
to Joy’ melody then appears as a kind of alternative solution in a hopeless situation, a
final rescue in a cul-de-sac of humanity. The melody is first tentatively presented by
woodwinds that are interrupted again by ‘negotiations’ with the sceptical bass, but then
the strings start playing it with growing confidence, building up a dramatic crescendo.
However, this is not the whole story: it is here that the composer seems to betray his
respect for the necessity of words and human voices to convey his core message. There
is a new stop, and that is where the bass voice recitative enters (‘Oh friends, not these
tones!’) to introduce the singing of the ‘Ode to Joy’ lyrics. The melody itself does not
seem sufficient to stop the chaotic tragedy: human verbal expressivity is a necessity.
This makes the omission of lyrics in the European anthem even more problematic.
When the music was adopted as anthem without words, the German lyrics having no
official status and not being used by the EU, then it remains an open question how
the music in itself could manage to have that function in the absence of the lyrics that
Beethoven himself could not manage without. One may seriously doubt if Beethoven
could ever have agreed with the EU website: ‘Without words, in the universal language
of music, this anthem expresses the ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which
Europe stands’. 408 If so, that would probably be just because those who use the anthem
will always also remember at least some parts of the original lyrics to which it is sung
in its original symphony context.
To briefly sum up this last discussion, the omission of the lyrics thus has two main
consequences. (1) On the semantic level, it represses an element of signification
that even Beethoven himself found necessary, hiding the verbal narrative away and
reducing the total expressive force of the anthem. (2) On the pragmatic level, it
contradicts the original motivation for adopting an anthem by reducing it from a basis
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