Beethoven Didn’t Roll Over

If you think protest music is a new thing, you’re off by a few centuries.

By Bryan Collinsworth

Few figures incite more reverence in modern progressive circles than the great “protest musicians” of history. We can recite their names off the top of our heads: Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Ludwig van Beethoven.

Oh, you didn’t know about the last one? The great choral finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony [Real Audio]—considered even by many non-classical music fans to be the most uplifting piece of music ever written—was based on a poem by the German author Friedrich Schiller called “Ode to Joy.” The real subject of Schiller’s poem, though, wasn’t an “ode to joy” so much as an “ode to freedom,” the words adjusted to avoid political repercussions at a time when “freedom” was still a rather dangerous idea in Germany.

Even if you didn’t know all that, many of those who would have heard the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony back in 1824 did, The aging composer jumped at the chance to set Schiller’s poetic celebration of human liberation and solidarity to music. After all, Beethoven, coming of age at the height of the European Enlightenment, had been a musical advocate for democratic progress from his very first major composition, which praised the Austrian Emperor and political reformer Joseph II. Later, Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” would dramatize the struggle to liberate a political prisoner.

Given the German composer’s fervent interest in freedom, it was only fitting that the late, great conductor Leonard Bernstein (composer of “West Side Story”) would commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall after Beethoven by leading musicians from both East and West Germany in a rousing rendition of the Ninth Symphony broadcast around the world. In a masterful touch, Bernstein insisted that the words the choir sang be changed from “joy” to “freedom,” thus bringing the musical message full-circle.

Nor is Beethoven’s musical advocacy an exception in the history of classical music. On the contrary, long before the emergence of modern popular protest music, classical composers were using their art to make striking political statements.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—like Beethoven, a product of the Enlightenment—turned his musical mind to politics in the last half of the eighteenth century. Scholars often single out Mozart for writing “music with a sense of humor,” and his final opera, “The Magic Flute,” delivers a uniquely entertaining treatment of the ideological debates that were beginning to rage through Europe in his day.

Volumes have been written interpreting “The Magic Flute,” which grapples not only with politics but with myth, Masonic folklore, and religion. In simplest terms, though, the opera glorifies human progress from ignorance to enlightenment, from oppression to freedom.

It opens with its heroes being enlisted by an imposing leader called the Queen of the Night to murder her political enemies, who she claims are utterly evil and deserving of destruction. Over the course of the story, however, the characters discover that the Queen is a vicious despot, ruling through fear, emotional manipulation, and superstition; her opponent, meanwhile, is in fact the benevolent head of a progressive community that values reason, loyalty, and equality for all of humankind.

Only by putting reason and virtue before sensation and self-interest do the characters in Mozart’s opera discover the true nature of their world, and thus gain acceptance into the community of equals. In fact, in a plot twist that must have challenged the comfort zones of even many reformers of Mozart’s day, the heroine gains equal status with the leading men in the closing scene. And even the location of the opera’s debut reinforced its message of enlightened equality—it famously opened not in the opulent court theater of Vienna, but in a sort of “people’s opera house” built in a middle-class suburb to provide entertainment for the city’s not-so-aristocratic set.

But while Mozart and Beethoven harnessed their musical genius to promote the budding ideals of democracy, perhaps the most dramatic story of a classical “protest composer” comes from the twentieth century and the age of totalitarianism.

In 1937 the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was locked in a battle with no less a demon than Joseph Stalin himself. As a young man, Shostakovich had been lauded as the prodigy of Soviet music, but his pursuit of avant garde styles began to rub the communist dictator and his henchmen the wrong way. In 1936 Stalin stormed out of a performance of Shostakovich’s opera, “Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk.” The next day, Pravda, the official paper of the Soviet state, printed an editorial denouncing Shostakovich’s work.

Subsequent attacks in Pravda followed, and the Soviet officials responsible for vetting artistic works began cracking down on Russian composers, even forcing them to publicly apologize for their art. But these were the least of Shostakovich’s worries; Stalin was more than just a nasty music critic. Not long after ”Lady Macbeth” was attacked, a high ranking Soviet general and ally of Shostakovich was accused of treason, convicted in a cursory trial, and executed. According to Shostakovich, he was summoned to an interrogation about his connections to the man, which ended well for Shostakovich only because his interrogator was also arrested a few days later.

It was in this climate that Shostakovich debuted his Fifth Symphony in 1937. The concert hall was packed with listeners eager to hear what he had produced after a year of public attacks and threats.

To this day, the performance is famous. The audience was overwhelmed with emotion. During the wrenching, tragic third movement [Windows Media], listeners openly wept. Then, as the bombastic final [Real Audio] progressed toward its close, audience members began spontaneously rising to their feet. At the final note, the entire hall erupted in praise. The conductor had joined them in celebration, and the audience repeatedly summoned Shostakovich to the stage.

But what was all this about? Panicked friends of Shostakovich and Soviet agents in attendance both sensed the real meaning—the performance had become a barely-concealed demonstration of protest against Stalin’s oppression.

The composer had achieved an incredible musical feat. Abandoning his earlier experimental style, he had taken the type of music that Soviet censors deemed “proper” and transformed it into a symphony of multiple meanings: on the surface, a paean to Soviet Russia that deceived the state, but underneath, a devastating critique unmistakable to all those suffering under Stalin’s rule.

The first three movements—sad and sarcastic—captured the depression and dread in Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges. “People who came to the Fifth in the best of moods wept,” Shostakovich asserted in “Testimony,” a memoir transcribed by a friend.

But what about the last movement, supposedly a joyous finale in the Russian folk style demanded by the Soviet state?

“I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth,” the composer explained. “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. … It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’ … The finale of the Fifth is irreparable tragedy.”

This is what the audience at the first performance heard. This is the overwhelming, defiant expression of grief to which they responded. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Shostakovich’s life was irreparable as well—his music was not enough to bring down the communist government. But he continued to infuse his later works with these strains of passionate protest, and today they are performed throughout the world in this spirit.

Music has always provided a means of expressing parts of the human condition that would be otherwise inexpressible; whether those limits of expression come from basic human weakness or the impositions of human tyranny. These days, it is often the guitar-strumming poets from whom we expect daring acts of musical protest. But, as the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Bernstein and Shostakovich demonstrate, that reclusive classical music major down the hall probably has something to say, that only his music can tell.

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