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There are master and classical thinkers in the history of music. Ludwig van Beethoven was the German genius of the symphonic cantata. With that he stepped on new ground and created music that remains fascinating even after two centuries. The genius was born in Bonn 250 years ago, but will only achieve fame during his stay in Vienna. But what fascinates Beethoven about the ideals of the Enlightenment? We go looking for clues.
250 years ago, on December 17, 1770, the genius Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn. And he was the revolutionary in spirit and music, pure explosive, emotional as a volcano, a superman who represents a new era of music and who will counter the brilliant classical music of Mozart with his symphonic cantata. If the Salzburg child prodigy was already known in “Le nozze di Figaro”, in “Don Giovanni” and in “The Magic Flute” by the liberal, bourgeois and anti-monarchical ideals of the Masons, Beethoven follows him when he is a fervent defender of he understands it the French revolutionary ideas, which he heroically manifests in his ninth symphony as his very personal creed.
“Liberty, equality, brotherhood whistled through the streets”
It was the victory of the Enlightenment over absolutism. What began as the French Revolution in 1789 fundamentally changed world history and laid the foundations for modernity. Liberty, equality, brotherhood whistled through the streets and then lit the fires in the minds that have been burning for freedom ever since. Whether it was the German idealists, Friedrich Schiller or the romantics, for all of them freedom became the motto of poetry and culture, and for Ludwig von Beethoven of Bonn it became a passion. It is Schiller’s ode “To Joy” that will accompany him throughout his life, but which can only be completed by the great and gigantic in music in 1824, three years before his death.
Schiller’s ode, the “embraced millions” in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s “Ninth”, was also the ideal of humanity for the man of Bonn. And just as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once complained about the “police state” in the 1890s, Beethoven also suffered from espionage, restoration, and a rising nobility under Metternich after the Vienna Congress of 1814/15. “Speak softly! Hold on! They listen to us with ears and eyes”, it is known in the freedom chorus of the only opera, the “Fidelio”. The call for freedom in Germany threatened at least to be repressed again. And Just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once complained of a “return to nature,” Beethoven’s Novena is a call to the incapacitated, liberal, unlimited bourgeoisie destined for the eternity of humanity, a global call to freedom by excellence, that with Schiller to France remembered in 1789 and wants to re-establish ties.
Freemasonry and the Enlightenment are the inspiration
Beethoven was a fervent defender of French ideas and Schiller provided the material for it. In 1885, the Leipzig-Gohlis poet had written the stanzas that were to make world history for his friend Körner, who, like Mozart, was also a Freemason and Enlightenment. But this Schiller was not a blank slate. He was the author of “Die Räuber” and it was celebrated frantically throughout Germany. And Schiller himself, still an outcast and fugitive, exiled from the Duchy of Württemberg under Duke Karl Eugen, had finally shed the yoke of tyranny. The verve of the ode was the concentrated power of a genius who wrote freedom from his soul. This will to be irrepressible, this sacrilege to critically question the existing order, this vitality and the pathos of the evocation of freedom have inspired Beethoven, who suffers more and more from hearing loss since 1802 and immortalized it in the famous “Testament of Heiligenstadt ”, against the wheels of absolutism to oppose. This energy has caused the blood in the patient’s veins to repeatedly swell.
The ninth symphony, the symphony in D minor, is comparable to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, at least that is how Claude Debussy described it in 1901. Fascinating and at the same time mysterious. Richard Wagner will speak later of redemption, since “it is not possible to go any further in it”, “because only the finished work of art of the future, the general drama, can follow immediately”. The barricade attacker Wagner, the revolutionary, was fiercely received by the rebels when on May 6, 1849 the Old Dresden Opera House caught fire. “Mr. Kapellmeister, does the joy of the beautiful gods sparkle? Burned, the rotten building burned to the ground.”
Pathos for freedom
The history of the performance of one of the most famous German symphonies, Beethoven’s “Ninth”, was easily written in conjunction with Hegel’s famous dialectic, and instead of harmony, dissonances were weed out. If Hegel’s philosophy disintegrated into existentialism with Kierkegaard on the one hand, and with Marx in fatal socialist realism, celebrating orgies of death with Lenin and Stalin, hardly any other work of art than the Ninth Symphony polarized the German spirit. far beyond Beethoven’s death. Beethoven died in 1827, sick, deaf, stigmatized by life, but his pathos for freedom remained intact.
Beethoven once dedicated the “ninth” to Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia, in the expectation that the wavering and wavering ruler, who was willing to reform, but at the same time became a hardliner again after the Restoration, would disguise freedom of the press and civil liberties in favor of the nobility Later he would even demand the idea of civil liberty, the poet prince Thomas Mann in his “Doctor Faustus, The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, Speaking of a friend” to recover the Ninth Symphony. “The good and the noble”, he replied, “what is called the human. What the people fought, what they stormed strong, and what those who were fulfilled joyfully proclaimed, should not be so. It is retiring. I want to withdraw it, ”said the protagonist Leverkühn. But what led the winner of the Mann literary prize to want to recover Beethoven’s “Ninth”?
A classic misused by Stalin for the masses
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony orchestrated the world, either from the left or from the right. As a hymn of liberation from spiritual slavery, autocratic despotism woke up as a musical manifesto of the labor movement, as it carried the emancipatory idea of freedom, equality and brotherhood as a glorious banner like almost no other work. For salaried workers, it was seen as a liberation from the tyranny of an unleashed capitalist system of oppression.
For the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who sacrificed millions of people in the gulags or on the scaffold of his ideologies, it was “the right music for the masses” that “cannot be played often enough.” A far-left Beethoven cult had been established in the Stalin era, a Beethoven epidemic literally flooded the Soviet socialist republic, and Beethoven’s ideal of freedom was instrumentalized by left-wing rulers, so that nothing was left of the idea. original of freedom.
If Stalin radicalized the “Ode to Freedom” on the one hand, on the other there was almost national hysteria about Beethoven. The German national movement, inflamed by its stereotypes for the Ninth Symphony, twisted the old ideals, turned them upside down and together with them justified the cruel struggle of the Nazi regime. For Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels, freedom meant what the Nazis understood by it: the cleansing of unworthy lives, people without space politics, and the extermination of entire ethnic groups, as reflected in the Holocaust.
Also instrumentalized by the National Socialists
What striker and dränger and later classic Friedrich Schiller once wrote with ecstatic glee and transformed Beethoven into music, degenerated in the Third Reich into nationalist arrogance, the titanic music of war, terror and the dubious idea of freedom from the Nazis. For example, Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels announced in 1942 at an NSDAP celebration on Adolf Hitler’s 53rd birthday: “This time the sounds of the most heroic titanic music, ever to come from a Faustian German heart. , they should elevate this confession to a serious and solemn height. ” And Goebbels continues: “When at the end of our ceremony the voices of the people and the instruments begin the great final chord of the ninth symphony, when the roaring choir of joy sounds and a feeling for the size and breadth of this time moves to the last German hut when its hymns end all the expanses and lands in which the German regiments resound, then we all want, be it man, woman, child, soldier, farmer, worker or civil servant, to be aware of the gravity of the hour and that too Feeling lucky to be able to witness and co-shape this great historical era. “
Perhaps, if Beethoven had the foresight of the future, he would not have written the “ninth” at all because it was misused from left to right? Yes, he would have written it because, as a staunch idealist, he also believed that history can be learned and that freedom will ultimately triumph over tyranny.
European anthem since 1972 for “Unity in Diversity”
But it was still mysterious because it was strangely entwined with the aura of death, it was even supposed to signify a revelation of the near end. Beethoven will no longer write a “tithe”, like Anton Bruckner. Gustav Mahler also feared the term “Ninth Symphony”. And he won’t survive hers either. The myth of the ninth culminated in the superstition that no symphony orchestra should go further. In 1912, Arnold Schönberg summed up the extent to which blessing and cursing were combined: “The ninth is a limit. Anyone who wants to go further has to. It seems that we can be told something about tithing that we are not yet ready for. Those who wrote a ninth were too close to the afterlife. Perhaps the riddles of this world would be solved if someone who knows him wrote the tithe. “
As the European anthem, which has been the ninth symphony since 1972, it represents Beethoven’s desire for universal and global freedom. Beyond bloodlust, nationalism and chauvinism, “which shares the Schwerd fashion”, the Bonn musician’s vision remains highly topical in a Europe that has “unity in diversity” on the flag. And even after more than 200 years, Beethoven and Schiller are the spiritual masterminds of a world where common values prevail, where the diversity of cultures is not sacrilege but enrichment, and where the idea that all human beings must become brothers.
Stefan Groß-Lobkowicz studied German philosophy, theology, art history and literature and received his doctorate from Jena and Madrid; he was professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. He is currently editor-in-chief and text editor of the print and online editions of “The European”. Groß is the author of several books.
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