Beethoven in Clockwork Orange originally written to Pedro from the UK

Rating: 9/10 (9 January 2008)

I recently watched a Clockwork Orange and then read your review on it. Let me tell you first, it is people like you that kept geniuses in poverty.
The reason that I was looking through reviews in the first place was to find the significance of Beethoven in the movie and book--yes, if you did not know before, let me inform you now that A Clockwork Orange was original a novel by Anthony Burgess and we students all know about tedious readings such as this one where every word is filled with much more significance than it seems. The first thing that you wrote in your review that indicated that you were merely writing this to compensate for something like intelligence or ingenuity was when you wrote "Many scenes are quite revolting - and bizarrely they are even found revolting by some of the people who rate the movie highly!" and then indicated that revolting scenes had the purpose neither to educate or entertain.
I see the grotesqueness of the movie with one of two possible purposes. To educate or to provoke emotion and thought. Many of artists have created things not to inspire beauty but to inspire ugliness. For instance, Berlioz's famous fifth movement of his Symphony Fantastique. Throughout the piece he is warping a single theme. In the fifth movement it has warped into ugliness--he pairs bassoons with tubas, has the strings play below the bridge. He is making the instrumentalists play ugliness to provoke a sense of ugliness. People criticized this, but let me ask, why does all art have to inspire beauty? Why should it not inspire other adjectives. This movie does exactly that, it doesn't inspire beauty as you want it to--which is why you call it revolting--it inspires grotesqueness.
Let me now introduce myself a little further. I am a music major at Smith College, sister school to Yale University. Beethoven is by far one the most brilliant men to walk the earth. My speculations as to why he and his music were so important in this film, I might say this because you did not answer the question that I sought to answer, are as follows.
Some say that Beethoven single handedly brought in the Romantic period of music--a period where composers composed abstract ideas. Take Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique. This is pure romanticism. He wrote an entire symphony--and a gorgeous one at that--based of being high on opium and the feelings and emotions that the experience evoked. If Beethoven had not happened, I question whether such beauties as Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Bizet's Carmen or Copland's Rodeo would have been able to happen either. Perhaps you are starting to see Beethoven's significance to the musical world now.
Beethoven's ninth and last symphony is considered an Ode to a Revolution. Mind you while writing this masterpiece he was completely deaf. Now don't mistake me, I am not writing this because I am entirely in love with Beethoven or his ninth. Out of all his symphonies I love his sixth the greatest and I must say that I am a Mozartian at heart. But any true music buff will acknowledge the amazing significance that Beethoven had on this world. Therefore, playing his ninth continually throughout A Clockwork Orange cannot be random or meaningless.
In the scene of Alex's demonstration, static rennaissance music is playing in the background. This leads me to believe that Beethoven's ninth, being a revolutionary piece, stands for the natural tendencies and urges--violence and sex--of humanity. For when it is playing, Alex is thinking about or actually preforming acts of violence and sex. Another time it is played is when other people are preforming acts of violence or torture. The renaissance music earlier is maybe to indicate the old, common ways of music--using the preBach ways of writing music.