Read view.php?vol=10&iss=2&f=wierzbicki.pdf Read view.php?vol=10&iss=2&f=wierzbicki.pdf text version Banality Triumphant: Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again. --Thomas Paine, Age of Reason James Wierzbicki lthough various works by Beethoven are represented in the two principal anthologies of film-accompaniment music that have survived from the days of the &quot;silent movie,&quot; the Ninth Symphony is not among them.1 This does not mean, of course, that arrangements of the Ninth Symphony were never heard by the audiences of such films. Max Winkler, the enterprising clerk at the Carl Fischer music publishing company who in 1912 conceived the idea of providing theatrical music directors with a list of suggested cues in advance of a film's public exhibition, recalled that in order to keep up with demand he and his colleagues turned to crime.

&quot;We began to dismember the great masters. We murdered the works of Beethoven, . . . [et al.]--everything that wasn't protected by copyright from our pilfering.&quot;2 The Ninth Symphony certainly was in the public domain, and it is hard to imagine that film accompanists, somewhere along the line, did not make use of it. But performances of public domain music in the context of &quot;silent&quot; film are ephemeral, and even the rare, documented usage resists analysis.3 Likewise resistant, largely because of their similarity to needles that only 1. These are Giuseppe Becce's Kinobibliothek, first published in Berlin in 1919, and Erno Rapée's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists: A Rapid Reference Collection of Selected Pieces, Adapted to 52 Moods and Situations, first published in New York in 1924. Other popular sources of accompaniments were The Sam Fox Moving Picture Volumes, begun in 1913, but these include music entirely by J. S. Zamencnik. 2.

Max Winkler, A Penny from Heaven (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), cited in Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1973), p.38. 3. For a summary of the problems involved with such research, see the introductory chapters of Martin Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895­1924 (New York: Oxford up, 1993). A 114 jame s wie rzbicki possibly exist in a very large haystack, are references to the Ninth in any of the 6,000 or so feature films produced in Hollywood during the first decade of the &quot;sound era&quot;; although one supposes such references exist, they have yet to come to this writer's attention.

In any case, it seems that the earliest film from Hollywood's so-called classical period4 to appropriate the Ninth Symphony is Frank Capra's 1941 Meet John Doe, a romance-flavored drama about a washed-up baseball player (played by Gary Cooper) who assumes a false identity for the sake of a newspaper's circulation drive and in the process becomes the figurehead for a political movement based on the ideas of neighborliness and altruism. By 1941 the system of musicoemotional coding in scores for the &quot;classical&quot; Hollywood film had been well established,5 and composer Dmitri Tiomkin holds to the norm with his music for the film's various romantic scenes and action sequences. Tiomkin's original music is perfectly serviceable, but more interesting is his use of musical citations to make dramatic points.

Within the narrative itself, the most telling cited music is the tune from the song Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor's Life for Me) from Walt Disney's 1940 animated feature Pinocchio--played on an ocarina by John Doe's hobo partner (Walter Brennan) to remind John Doe that he has engaged in a morally dangerous fiction.6 Citations in the nondiegetic score are frequent and for the most part not very subtle in their meaning; during a montage that includes shots of farmers, miners, urbanites, and speeding trains, for example, the audience hears--right on cue--references to The Farmer in the Dell, Clementine, The Sidewalks of NewYork, and I've Been Working on the Railroad. In contrast to these and many other instances of imagery serving as the prompt for musical borrowing in the underscore, it is a shift in the narrative flow that triggers the music of Beethoven at the very end of the film. 4. The classical era of cinema is generally defined as the period from ca. 1933 to ca.

1950, that is, from the introduction of the dramatically significant musical score to the beginnings of the dissolution of the &quot;studio system&quot; of production. For the French film theorist André Bazin, whose writings in the 1950s and early 60s defined the notion of classicism,&quot;a level of classical perfection&quot; was reached &quot;by 1938 or 1939.&quot; See André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1967), p.30. 5. For discussions of the conventions of &quot;classical&quot; film scoring, see Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana up, 1987), pp.70­98; and Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: Wisconsin up, 1992), pp.113­34. 6.

With lyrics by Ned Washington and music by Leigh Harline, the song in Pinocchio is introduced by the ne'er-do-well characters of the fox and the cat for the purpose of luring the naive title character into abandoning a normal life for the sake of show business. As presented in Disney's animated feature, the otherwise innocent-sounding song fairly reeks with deception. 115 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films With John Doe's well-intended deception having been discovered, he opts for a symbolic suicide on a cold and snowy Christmas Eve; just before he can jump to his death from the observation deck of the newspaper building, the newspaper columnist who instigated the ruse (Barbara Stanwyck) declares her love for him and reminds him that his death is unnecessary.&quot;Someone already died for this once,&quot; she says.

&quot;The first `John Doe.' And He's kept that idea alive for nearly two thousand years.&quot; Thus wrapped warmly not just in the arms of a woman but also in Christian ideology, the redeemed title character grows teary-eyed as a jangle of distant church bells drifts into the soundtrack; as John Doe and the columnist walk away from the parapet, the underscore swells up in a wordless choral-orchestral arrangement of the second half of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; melody.7 Brief as it is, this quotation is potentially meaningful on a number of levels. In the first place, although the Beethoven fragment is clearly an example of musical iconography, it is capable of delivering an unambiguous emotional message even to those audience members on whom its symbolism might be completely lost. As presented here--in this quotidian musical setting and in this clichéd dramatic context--the music sounds neither monumental nor sublime. The music, in both affect and effect, is simply joyous. It signals the film's predictably happy ending,8 and one suspects that the semiotic task could have been accomplished just as well by almost any peppy material brightly scored and written in a major key.

Of course, this is not just any material. It is an obvious reference to music that in 1941 was likely to have been familiar to at least a significant percentage of the film's audience.Whether the familiarity sprang from the concert hall, radio broadcasts, or the church, savvy listeners would associate the melody with a title whose words precisely identify the emotion conveyed by the narrative at the moment the music is introduced. On this level of signification, another tune--&quot;Joy to the World,&quot; perhaps--might have accomplished the same effect. But such a tune would lack the deep semiotic resonance of the tune that Tiomkin, with Capra's obvious ap7. A full cadence, rubato, accompanies the on-screen appearance of the words &quot;The End.&quot; The quotation from the &quot;Ode to Joy,&quot; however, is not the film's final music.

For the lighthearted medley that plays during the credit roll, Tiomkin uses material from The Beer Barrel Polka, Stephen Foster's Oh, Susanna, and--presumably in a gesture that reminds the audience of John Doe's origins--Albert von Tilzer's 1908 song Take Me Out to the Ball Game. 8. In the film's original form, the ending--in which John Doe makes good on his suicide threat-- would have been neither happy nor predictable. According to Tiomkin in his autobiography, Capra changed the ending because he did not think a pessimistic message would be appropriate for a nation that seemed on the brink of entering World War II. Dmitri Tiomkin and Prosper Buranelli, Please Don't Hate Me (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp.207­08.

116 jame s wie rzbicki proval, actually did employ.9 Again, it is not just any up-beat material that is used here, nor is it just any well-known tune whose concomitant text makes explicit reference to joy; it is a direct quotation of the melody that Beethoven used in 1824 for his setting of Schiller's poem and that was later adapted for a Christian hymn, liturgically associated with the Easter season, titled &quot;Joyful, Joyful.&quot;10 To be sure, in 1941 only that small minority of moviegoers who also spent time in the concert hall and carefully studied their program booklets would have associated the melody with an aged German text that addresses the concept not only of joy but also of universal brotherhood. But to Capra, sophisticates capable of articulating their thoughts in one form or another--especially those sophisticates charged with penning film reviews--formed a target audience every bit as important as the hoi polloi.

Like other of Capra's better-known films from the 1930s and 40s,11 Meet John Doe contains not just a story but also a liberal-minded social commentary.12 Within the narrative, the &quot;John Doe&quot; movement that gains new life at the end of the story is originally sponsored by a Fascist newspaper mogul for 9. For the film's original ending, Tiomkin planned to have the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; quotation--which for him represented &quot;an idealist expression of hope for mankind&quot;--preceded by a choral-symphonic arrangement of Deep River. After Capra changed the ending, only the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; was retained. Tiomkin and Buranelli, Please Don't Hate Me, pp.207­08. 10.

The &quot;Joyful, Joyful&quot; hymnic treatment of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; music is commonly attributed to the American church leader and United States Navy chaplain Henry van Dyke.Van Dyke's 1907 text (first published in 1911 in the Presbyterian Hymnal), however, is actually a variation on an &quot;Ode to Joy&quot;-based hymn devised in 1846 by the English organist and choirmaster Edward Hodges on the occasion of his appointment to the directorship of music at Trinity Church in New York City. The van Dyke/Hodges hymn begins with the lines: &quot;Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory, God of love; Hearts unfold like flow'rs before Thee, op'ning to the sun above.&quot;While this adaptation of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; melody remains the most familiar to American churchgoers today, other texts exist. An early treatment by William J. Irons (1812­83), for example, begins with the words &quot;Sing with all the saints in glory, sing the resurrection song .

. .&quot;; recent treatments by Kevin Ford and Gerald E. Hoyer, both from 1997, begin with the lines: &quot;From the realms of unseen glory, Jesus came to earth below . . .&quot; and &quot;God of glory, God of power, mighty and eternal One . . . ,&quot; respectively. 11. These include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and State of the Union (1948). 12. The sincerity of Capra's politics has not gone unquestioned. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote that &quot;with Meet John Doe&quot; the director &quot;crossed the thin line between populist sentimentality and populist demagoguery. . . . [The John Doe character] embodied in Gary Cooper a barefoot Fascist, suspicious of all ideas and all doctrines, but believing in the innate conformism of the common man&quot; (Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929­1968 [New York: E.

P. Dutton, 1968], p.87). 117 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films the purpose of political as well as commercial gain;13 that the movement takes hold with the public, to an extent that it seriously threatens what is depicted as a repressive status quo, is due precisely to its dedication to the idea--stated explicitly in the text for the portion of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; melody Tiomkin chose to quote-- that &quot;alle Menschen werden Brüder.&quot; In her illuminating essay on nineteenth-century critical readings of the Ninth Symphony, Ruth A. Solie explains that exegeses of the work fall into four basic categories--&quot;search narratives, creation myths, accounts that interpret the piece as autobiographical . . .

and those that content themselves with more general assessments of moral instruction.&quot; But in the long run, Solie contends, virtually all of the interpretations fit into the fourth category; however different they may be in detail, they all &quot;reflect ideological commitments of one sort or another, and these are overwhelmingly of a moral or religious nature.&quot;14 The interpretations are especially moral and religious in English-speaking countries, where a singing translation by Natalia Macfarren downplayed the text's arguably paganistic celebration of unbridled joy at the expense of a Christian emphasis on the concepts of brotherhood and love.15 Beethoven's magnum opus was not without its formalistic quibblers, of course, and even among the Germans there were naysayers who called particular attention to what they heard as a &quot;monstrous and tasteless&quot; finale.16 But the consensus of nineteenth-century opinion, as Solie points out, had it that the Ninth was a masterpiece whose extramusical content was entirely noble.This stamp of moralistic approval--a reflection of the nineteenth century's prevailing &quot;religious, philosophical, and political ideologies&quot;--played a huge role in shaping &quot;future perceptions of the piece and its

 place in the canon.&quot;17 Thanks in large part to the efforts 13.

At least in his politics and methodology, the villain in Meet John Doe bears a resemblance to the newspaper publisher described in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is a thinly veiled gloss on the career of William Randolph Hearst, and perhaps it is not simply coincidence that both films date from 1941. 14. Ruth A. Solie,&quot;Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism,&quot; in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988), pp.16­17. 15. Ibid., pp.34­35. 16. The quoted words belong to Ludwig Spohr, as cited in Richard Taruskin,&quot;Resisting the Ninth,&quot; 19cm 12 (1989), 246.

Similarly colorful condemnations of the finale of the Ninth Symphony can be found in Robin Wallace, Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer's Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1986). 17. Solie, &quot;Beethoven as Secular Humanist,&quot; p.3. 118 jame s wie rzbicki of Arturo Toscanini, the Ninth Symphony's place in the canon was solidified in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century,18 and American perceptions of the work's &quot;meaning&quot; were in keeping with the still-echoing pronouncements of the nineteenth-century European establishment. The uplifting essence of these dicta is encapsulated in the citation at the end of Meet John Doe. It is a fleeting reference, yet the appropriation of the Ninth Symphony at the end of the Capra film sends an irrefutably positive message. Extended references to the same piece of music send a starkly different message in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 A Clockwork Orange.

At least in terms of its linear flow and basic plot elements, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is a fairly literal treatment of the same-titled 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, which depicts a futuristic society in which youth gangs run rampant and in which the government at least considers chemically induced mind-control to be a viable method of criminal rehabilitation. Graphic in its violence and arguably pornographic in its sex scenes, the film tells the story of a sadistic teenager named Alex (Malcolm McDowell) who gets caught in the act of rape/murder and who, after being sent to prison, volunteers for an experimental rehabilitation program in order to have his sentence cut short. The therapy apparently works, and Alex is transformed into what the officials consider to be a model citizen. Stripped of his violent tendencies,Alex on his release is unable to defend himself against physical attacks; more significant, he is vulnerable to a peculiar form of torture devised by one of his former victims. This torture drives him to attempt suicide, and during his long recuperation he gradually recovers not just from his injuries but also from the brainwashing.

As the film ends, the glint in the protagonist's eye suggests the resurrection of raw evil.19 There is nothing at all joyful about A Clockwork Orange, yet the Ninth Symphony--and in particular the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot;--is the film's dominant musical icon. (My concern here is with the film, not the novel. Although Alex's passion for classical music in general is a constant theme in Burgess's novel, the Ninth Symphony 18. The Ninth was the work Toscanini chose for his first symphonic concert in New York (with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra) in 1913. In 1926 Toscanini led the Ninth on the second of the two programs that marked his debut engagements with the New York Philharmonic, and a year later the Ninth was featured on Toscanini's first broadcast for the NBC radio network. For details, see Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), pp.59­60 and 102­03. 19.

Kubrick based his film on the first American edition of the novel, which contained only twenty of the novel's twenty-one chapters.The concluding chapter of the original version of the novel has Alex starting to mature and contemplating the idea of marriage and fatherhood. 119 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films is privileged not nearly so much as it is in Kubrick's film.

The synopsis that follows refers exclusively to the film; detailed comparisons between the film and the novel, vis-à-vis the use of music, are offered in footnotes.20) Beethoven's music is first heard within the narrative itself, sung without accompaniment in German by a celebrity soprano in the milk bar where Alex and his cohort seek refreshment after gang-raping a woman and beating her husband nearly to death.21 In a first-person, past-tense monologue superimposed over the milk bar's ambient noise, Alex identifies the excerpt as one of his favorite passages from the magnificent Ninth Symphony of his beloved &quot;Ludwig van.&quot;22 The next scene shows Alex returning home in the early morning.23 Once settled in the apartment he shares with his parents, Alex places a cassette recording of the Ninth Symphony in a tape player and retreats to the bathroom.24 As the second movement blares, Alex positions himself before a portrait of Beethoven and masturbates.

Along with close-ups of Alex's blissful face, the visual components of the scene include a collage of violent images--in some cases edited to coincide precisely with the music's downbeats--that focus on details of a bathroom sculpture depicting multiple comically posed versions of the scourged Christ; along with the propulsive scherzo, the audio components of the masturbation scene include a monologue that seems to reference Nietzsche.25 The Beethoven music continues 20. In the comparative notes that follow, page citations are to Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 21. The doorbell of the victims' house chimes the opening motif of Beethoven's Symphony No.5 in C Minor; as the masked Alex repeatedly kicks the husband in the ribs, he sings Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's Singin' in the Rain, à la the version made famous by Gene Kelly as the title song for the 1952 film. 22. In the novel, the excerpt that Alex recognizes is from the fictitious &quot;opera by Friedrich Gitterfenster called Das Bettzeug&quot; (p.27). 23.

The scene is accompanied by an electronic realization of the slow march from Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary; Alex whistles the theme as he enters the elevator, but otherwise the music seems to be nondiegetic.Arrangements of the same Purcell music accompany the film's opening credits, and later the scene in which Alex's lack of response to an enticing woman demonstrates that his &quot;cure&quot; has been a success. 24. In the novel, Alex indulges himself first with a fictitious &quot;new violin concerto by the American Geoffrey Plautus&quot; (p.32), then Mozart's &quot;Jupiter&quot; Symphony (p.33), then finally with an unspecified Brandenburg Concerto of J. S. Bach (p.34). 25. Apparently speaking from some point in the future, Alex in the film says that the experience was &quot;gorgeous and gorgeosity made flesh.

It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.&quot; Nietzsche uses similar imagery in one of his homages to the Ninth Symphony: &quot;At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, [the listener] might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortal- 120 jame s wie rzbicki as Alex goes to sleep and then feigns illness when his mother tries to awaken him for school, and it continues too as Alex hours later crawls out of bed; the music abruptly stops--on a half cadence--only when Alex unexpectedly encounters a guidance counselor who had been waiting in the apartment's living room.

Immediately after his chat with the counselor, Alex browses in a record shop.26 The fast-paced orgy in which Alex engages with two young women he meets at the record shop is accompanied nondiegetically by a high-speed electronic arrangement27 of the &quot;Lone Ranger&quot; section from Rossini's Guillaume Tell overture.28 But the music that underscores Alex's proposition to the women is clearly part of the narrative; to the detriment of the conversation between Alex and the women, it pours from loudspeakers in the record shop, and it is a treatment of the Janissary segment of the Ninth Symphony's finale29 in which not only the instrumental parts but also the vocal parts are garishly synthesized.30 Over the ensuing forty minutes music by composers other than Beethoven wafts in and out of the soundtrack. The overture to Rossini's opera La gazza ladra, in a conventional reading, sounds prominently as Alex bullies the members of his gang31 ity in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards&quot; (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans.

Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann [Lincoln: Nebraska up, 1984], p.106 [orig., Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1876­79]). In the novel, Alex delivers a slightly different version of the soliloquy; it is prompted not by the Ninth Symphony, but by the above-noted fictitious violin concert (p.33). 26. In the novel, Alex listens to a fictitious &quot;string quartet . . . by Claudius Birdman&quot; (p.41) before going out. At the record shop, he seeks out a new recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (p.42). 27. The electronic arrangements of standard orchestral music heard in A Clockwork Orange, as well as the segments of original electronic music, are the work of Walter (subsequently Wendy) Carlos. 28. In the novel, the orgy--a rape of two ten-year-old girls, actually--is accompanied by repeated playings, from Alex's newly purchased recording, of the finale of the Ninth Symphony (pp.46­ 47). 29.

In the novel, it is pop music that emanates from the record shop's loudspeakers (p.43). 30. Carlos hit on the idea of synthesizing not just the instrumental parts but also the vocal parts of the Ninth Symphony's fourth movement before he read the Burgess novel and before he was contracted by director Kubrick to provide the score for A Clockwork Orange. The results of Carlos's experiments with voice synthesis are featured in an extended composition titled Timesteps, only portions of which were used in the film. See Chris Twomey, &quot;Wendy Carlos--Still Switched On,&quot; in Exclaim, Dec. 1998 / Jan. 1999; available from http// Internet; accessed 10 February 2003. 31. In the novel, Alex hears a fragment of Beethoven's Violin Concerto emanating from a car radio just before he sets on the gang members (p.53).

121 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films and then leads them in an attack on the home of the proprietress of a health spa;32 the Rossini music continues as Alex breaks into the home and bashes in the owner's head with a phallic sculpture,33 and it ends--in an audio cross-fade with Klaxon sirens--when the police arrive.Arrested34 and then sentenced to a long prison term, Alex wangles a job as research assistant for the institutional chaplain; during a worship service Alex dutifully sings the hymn I Was a Wandering Sheep, but during his library work he enjoys a fantasy--propelled by Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade--about torturing Christ.35 After Alex volunteers for the rehabilitation program, the first march from Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance is heard as wardens inspect Alex's cell;36 as Alex is transferred to the medical facility, the film's audience hears the fourth march from the same Elgar set. The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven plays an accidental but nonetheless pivotal role in Alex's experience with the ironically named Ludovico treatment.

Based on the idea of negative association, the psychopharmaceutical &quot;aversion therapy&quot; involves injecting the patient with nauseating drugs while forcing him to watch films that depict severely antisocial acts. Alex's initial round of treatment is underscored by ominous nondiegetic electronic music.The next day, Alex's second round of treatment culminates in his viewing a vintage Nazi propaganda film. Whereas the films to which Alex was previously exposed featured only the realistic noises 32. The same Rossini music is heard early in the film when Alex and company stumble across an in-progress gang rape; they put a stop to the rape, but only so they can have the opportunity to brawl with the perpetrators. 33. In the novel, Alex attacks the woman with a silver sculpture, but he notices that the sculpture collection includes a bust of Beethoven (pp.62­63). In the film, the woman tries to defend herself with the bust of Beethoven. 34. In the novel, Alex after his arrest has a dream in which he hears a version of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; in which the text is corrupted to describe his own situation (pp.73­74). 35.

In the novel,Alex's fantasy about the crucifixion is accompanied by &quot;bits of lovely Bach&quot; (p.79). An earlier fantasy, about Hebrew men having sex with their wives' handmaidens, is accompanied by &quot;slooshy holy music by J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel&quot; (p.79), and, after participating in the brutal beating of another inmate, Alex has a dream in which unidentified orchestral music is conducted by a &quot;mixture of Ludwig van and G. F. Handel&quot; (p.89). During a chapel service the inmates sing a hymn with the words &quot;Weak tea are we, new brewed / But stirring make all strong. / We eat no angel's food, / Our times of trial are long&quot;; the service's exit music, chosen by Alex, is a fictitious &quot;Symphony No.2 by Adrian Schweigselber&quot; (p.80). Still another chapel service has Alex playing a recording of Bach's Wachet auf chorale prelude (p.83). 36.

Although it seems not to matter to the plot, one of the wardens takes note of the portrait of Beethoven that hangs over Alex's washbasin. 122 jame s wie rzbicki of screaming victims and fists smashing on victims' faces,37 the film that glorifies Nazi atrocities comes with a musical soundtrack;38 Alex is horrified when he realizes that the potent chemicals are inducing a revulsive response not only to grisly scenes from concentration camps but also to music that he dearly loves. &quot;It's a sin!&quot; he bellows in a futile attempt to drown out the Ninth Symphony's jangly march.39 To which one of the supervising psychiatrists responds: &quot;Are you referring to the background score? You've heard Beethoven before?

So you're keen on music?&quot; Quite aware of what is transpiring, the psychiatrist who designed the experiment mutters to his colleague that it &quot;can't be helped.&quot;40 Unfortunately for Alex, the publicity generated by his release from prison mentions this unplanned musical side effect of the Ludovico treatment.Vengefully beaten by a pair of his former gang members who now serve as police officers, Alex seeks shelter at the very home where early in the film he led the brutal gang rape. The owner of the home, a writer, recognizes Alex;41 on questioning, the writer and some 37. The novel suggests that music is featured in virtually all the films to which Alex is exposed. Of the initial therapy session, in any case, Alex says that &quot;all the time the music bumped out, very like sinister&quot; (p.102), and later he describes the accompaniment for a film in the same session as &quot;very pathetic and tragic music&quot; (p.103). 38. In the novel, the music that accompanies the film of Nazi atrocities is the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (p.113). 39.

The music is clearly supposed to be diegetic, yet what the audience hears during this scene is probably not what Alex hears within the film's narrative. Instead of a scratchy orchestral-choral recording technologically consistent with the Nazi propaganda footage, the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange at this point features the same synthesized arrangement that accompanied the scene in the record shop. 40. In the novel, Alex's remarks to the doctors indeed have to do solely with Beethoven. The doctors' response to Alex's protest, however, clearly indicates that they are aware that Alex has been negatively conditioned against music in general. The relevant passage is: &quot;`Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like music. `So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know.Well, well.What do you think about that, eh, Branom?' `It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. `Each man kills the thing he loves, as the poet-prisoner said. Here's the punishment element, perhaps.The Governor ought to be pleased'&quot; (pp.113­14).

Although Alex complains to the doctors that &quot;it's not fair I should feel ill when I'm slooshying lovely Ludwig van and G. F. Handel and others&quot; (p.115), he apparently does not realize the extent to which he has been conditioned. On his release he looks forward to &quot;a quiet think on the bed to the sound of lovely music&quot; (p.133). A short while later, he visits a record shop and asks to hear a recording of Mozart's Symphony No.40; the clerk brings him the &quot;Prague&quot; Symphony instead, and while listening to it Alex--as he did during the therapy sessions--becomes violently ill (pp.138­39). 41. Alex is recognized as the recipient of the Ludovico treatment because his picture has appeared in all the newspapers. He is recognized as the rapist not by his appearance but by his voice; as Alex bathes, he lapses into a vigorous rendition of Singin' in the Rain, the song he sang during the assault.

123 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films accomplices learn that it is not all music against which Alex has been conditioned but only a certain work of Beethoven.42 Taking his cue, the writer locks Alex in an attic room and subjects him to loudly played recordings of what Alex describes in his monologue as &quot;the dreaded Ninth Symphony.&quot;43 When Alex can stand it no longer, he hopefully leaps out the window. To Alex's surprise, he is not killed by his plunge to a stone-paved patio; instead, his broken body becomes the cause célèbre of liberals who feel the Ludovico treatment is an outrageous violation of free will. Succumbing to political pressure, the government minister who first sanctioned the brainwash fawns over the convalescing Alex and brings him--along with many other gifts--a stereo set.

Alex's body still needs mending, but by this time his mind is apparently back to normal, and Alex seems to know exactly what he is going to do as soon he gets out of the hospital; he smirks devilishly as the stereo set is wheeled into his hospital room, for playing on it is the concluding section of the Ninth Symphony.44 The meanings that can be attached to the brief reference to the Ninth Symphony at the end of Meet John Doe form a paradigm of exegetical readings by nineteenthcentury commentators. But how do we interpret the many and varied quotations 42. In the novel, it is clear that Alex has been conditioned by all classical music, not just Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.The writer is aware of this before he recognizes Alex; his knowledge comes not from a newspaper article but from Alex's account of the therapy sessions (p.156). Beethoven's Ninth comes into the conversation, but only in a remark that Alex makes after learning that the writer wishes to tell Alex's story in an antigovernment tract. Alex asks: &quot;And what do I get out of this? Do I get cured of the way I am?

Do I find myself able to slooshy the old Choral Symphony without being sick once more?&quot; (p.161). 43. It is only the scherzo--in a standard orchestral version that transitions into a macabre electronic arrangement--that is heard during the torture scene, but the audience can presume that Alex has been exposed repeatedly to the entirety of the Ninth Symphony. In the novel, the music used for the torture is not Beethoven's Ninth but the fictitious &quot;Symphony Number Three of the Danish veck Otto Skadelig&quot; (p.167). 44. The music is heard in a standard orchestral-choral recording. In the novel, Alex is asked to choose the music he wishes to hear; in one of the few instances in which musical references in the film and the novel are in agreement, his choice is &quot;the glorious Ninth of Ludwig van&quot; (pp.178­79). As noted above, the film is based on the first twenty of the novel's original twenty-one chapters.

In the concluding chapter of the novel's original version, Alex develops a taste for &quot;romantic songs, what they call Lieder, . . . very quiet and yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and the trombones and the kettledrums&quot; (p.186). Alex, by this time eighteen years old, also observes that by the same age &quot;Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios&quot; and that Mendelssohn had produced &quot;his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture&quot; (p.189). 124 jame s wie rzbicki from the Ninth in A Clockwork Orange?

The easily decoded symbol in the 1941 film is an orchestral-choral paraphrase that lasts but a few seconds; the problematic musical symbol in the 1971 film is found in no less than six different scenes, some of which feature unadulterated excerpts that extend for several minutes.A film about the unintended effects of mind-control experiments could efficiently use a different piece of music, or an altogether different sort of stimulus (colors, tastes, aromas), for its &quot;accidental&quot; element. Why, one has to wonder, does film director Kubrick, much more so than did novelist Burgess, focus so much attention on the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven?

Early in his essay on references to the Ninth in twentieth-century fiction, literary critic Jean-Pierre Barricelli writes that the use of this music in the Burgess novel (and in Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos) is &quot;outwardly imposed and arbitrary,&quot; an example of the &quot;modernist tendency to take bulwarks of our culture&quot; and somehow employ them &quot;directly to point up Western moral bankruptcy or indirectly to question Western achievement.&quot;45 Barricelli is discussing the novel, not the film, and thus he exaggerates when he suggests that the Ninth in particular is so utilized by Burgess; while the Ninth Symphony indeed figures into the narrative more often than any other composition,46 surely in the novel it is the idea of a violent sociopath who loves classical music in general that serves as the metaphor for moral corruption. Nevertheless, the literary technique identified by Barricelli merits attention, and it can be considered as much in relation to Kubrick's screenplay as to Burgess's novel.

It is a simple technique, Barricelli says, and he terms it &quot;grotesque juxtaposition.&quot;47 If it were simply a matter of &quot;grotesque juxtaposition,&quot; however, other representatives of Western culture could serve the narrative needs of a story such as that of A Clockwork Orange. After all, neither in the film nor in the novel is the story per se about music. Burgess felt that the film blunted the main point of his literary effort, not because of anything having to do with Beethoven but because with its cynical ending the film ignored &quot;the possibility of moral transformation&quot; contained 45. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, &quot;Beethovenian Overlays by Carpentier and Burgess: The Ninth in Grotesque Juxtapositions,&quot; in Melopoiesis: Approaches to the Study of Literature and Music (New York: New York up, 1988), p.140. 46.

As noted above, in the novel the Ninth Symphony is referenced five times: as the recording Alex has ordered at the record shop; as the accompaniment to Alex's rape of the girls he has met at the record shop; as an element of a dream Alex has in prison; as an example that Alex cites when he asks if he will eventually be &quot;cured&quot;; and as the music he requests and listens to when, at the end of the novel's penultimate chapter, his &quot;cure&quot; is apparently effected. 47. Barricelli, &quot;Beethovenian Overlays,&quot; p.140. 125 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films in the novel's final chapter;48 Barricelli's synopsis of the novel--as a tale &quot;whose dystopian vision centers around politics (the authoritarian socialism of future society) . . . and morality (actually the immorality of the curtailment of freedom of choice)&quot;49--could apply just as well to the film.

Granting that a film, with its capacity both to juxtapose and to overlay contrasting elements, might require a cultural icon that is expressed aurally, it would seem that the icon for a story of &quot;transformation&quot; and &quot;dystopian vision&quot; might just as easily be a different work of Beethoven,50 or a revered masterpiece by any other composer, or--to move outside the musical envelope--a soliloquy from Shakespeare or a poem by Wordsworth. Of course, even for the musically ill-educated, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony belongs to the short list of Great Works, and thus it is perfectly reasonable that both Burgess and Kubrick would choose this piece, from a multitude of possibilities, to &quot;symbolize the values of Western culture, which [their] plot places in jeopardy.&quot;51 But plotted in the way that it is, A Clockwork Orange demands a symbol that communicates something rather more specific than simply the values of Western culture, and in the case of the soundtrack-dependent film it is crucial that this richly communicative symbol be aural.

Consider the canon: How many of the initiates to this pantheon not only count as popularly acknowledged masterpieces but also deal simultaneously with issues of politics, morality, joy, and--as some would argue--violent sexuality?52 Maynard Solomon suggests that it is precisely its combination of masterpiece 48. Anthony Burgess,&quot;Introduction: A Clockwork Orange Resucked,&quot; preface to the above-noted edition of A Clockwork Orange, p.viii. 49. Barricelli, &quot;Beethovenian Overlays,&quot; p.149. 50.

In an essay on filmic citations of Beethoven's late string quartets, Christopher Reynolds observes that &quot;literature in the nineteenth century and film in the twentieth have frequently turned to Beethoven when the context suggests violence, or sexual aggression.&quot; Along with the many turbulent passages from the piano sonatas included in the silent film anthologies, he notes the eponymous &quot;Kreutzer&quot; Sonata of the 1889 Tolstoy short story and the purely visual reference to the Eroica Symphony--when the camera lingers over the recording on the phonograph in the title character's room-- at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho. Christopher Reynolds, &quot;From Berlioz's Fugitives to Godard's Terrorists: Artistic Responses to Beethoven's Late Quartets,&quot; Beethoven Forum 8 (2000), 157. 51. Bruno Nettl, &quot;Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,&quot; in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V.

Bohlman (Chicago: u Chicago p, 1992), p.149. 52. For an analysis of the Ninth as a phallic symbol, see Susan McClary, &quot;Getting Down Off the Beanstalk,&quot; in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: u Minnesota p, 1991), pp.128­ 29. For support for this archly feminist point of view, see Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1993), pp.223­24. 126 jame s wie rzbicki status and extramusical associations that has turned the Ninth Symphony, for some, into a &quot;model of affirmative culture, a culture that by its beauty and idealism . . .

anaesthetizes the anguish and the terror of modern life, thereby standing in the way of a realistic perception of society.&quot;53 To help make his point, Solomon cites the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who, writing after the publication of the Burgess novel but before the release of the Kubrick film, observed: &quot;Today's rebels against the established culture also rebel against the beautiful in this culture, against its all too sublimated, segregated, orderly, harmonizing forms. . . . The refusal now hits the chorus which sings the `Ode to Joy,' the song which is invalidated in the culture that sings it.&quot;54 As Burgess demonstrates, a large number of musical compositions--some real, some fictitious--can collectively represent one of the novel's themes. But for Kubrick, only the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot;--and the entire symphony that encompasses it--can singularly serve a wide range of the film's narrative needs.

And surely it is not its musical content alone--&quot;rich in dissonances that only the professional ear can detect, but filled also with as many untapped, infinite (so it seems) harmonies&quot;55--that makes the Ninth uniquely appropriate for the filmed version of A Clockwork Orange. Anti-Fascist politics, Judeo-Christian morality, and the purest forms of joy-- romantic as well as spiritual--are the triple themes of Capra's 1941 Meet John Doe, and composer Dmitri Tiomkin cleverly conveyed all three ideas with his citation of the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; in his underscore for the film's final seconds. Taking his cue from the Burgess novel, Kubrick thirty years later used the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; and other sections of the Ninth Symphony to subvert this symbolistic triad. If associations triggered by the brief nondiegetic reference at the end of Meet John Doe can be said to form a paradigm for the Ninth Symphony's traditionally positive message, it would seem that the knotty web of meaning spun out by repeated and lengthy treatments of the Ninth Symphony within the narrative of A Clockwork Orange represents that paradigm's polar opposite.

Near the end of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 1977 Hitler, Ein Film aus Deutschland, after the tale has been told, the camera's vision settles on a young girl unrelated to the narrative; she wears a shroud of celluloid motion-picture film, and--in a filmic gesture that Caryl Flinn suggests might be interpreted as &quot;a sign of hope for post53. Solomon, Beethoven, p.411. 54. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp.46­47. 55. Robert K. Morris, The Consolations of Ambiguity (Columbia, Mo.: u Missouri p, 1971), p.69. Quoted in Barricelli, &quot;Beethovenian Overlays,&quot; p.149. 127 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films war German culture&quot;56--her appearance is accompanied nondiegetically by the choral-orchestral finale of the Ninth Symphony.

In the opening scene of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1979 Die Ehe der Maria Braun, the titular wedding ceremony is accompanied by the sounds of screams, bombs, and--apparently emanating from a radio--the Adagio movement of the Ninth Symphony; barely audible, and &quot;mixed with enough other sounds so as to be very nearly drowned out entirely,&quot;57 the Beethoven music continues into the next scene, during which a radio announcer identifies the composition and then goes on to list German soldiers who, like Maria Braun's husband, are missing in action. In Alexander Kluge's Die Patriotin, also from 1979, the central character is a professor of history who naively attempts to put a patriotic &quot;spin&quot; on the documentable facts of World War II; toward the end of the film, as the professor celebrates New Year's Eve with her female friends, the radio offers the finale of the Ninth Symphony, which inspires the guests to join in with a &quot;thoroughly deprofessionalized&quot; and &quot;drunken kitchen reading of Schiller, . . .

a karaoke singalong to scratchy, prerecorded accompaniment.&quot;58 In Ingmar Bergman's 1950 Till glädje (To Joy), the bitter story of the dissolving marriage of two musicians is told, largely by means of flashbacks, within the context of a rehearsal of the Ninth Symphony. In the opening segment of Polish director Wojciech J. Has's narratologically cryptic 1965 Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Saragossa Manuscript), composer Krzysztof Penderecki sets the Napoleonic-era scene with a pastiche whose stylistic sources range from the High Baroque to late Classicism; the only direct citation--actually, a &quot;quasi-quotation&quot; arranged for chamber orchestra59--points to the &quot;Ode to Joy.&quot; In the final moments of Soviet director Andre Tarkovsky's grim 1979 science-fiction film The Stalker, after it has been clearly established that in the depicted futuristic world there 56.

Caryl Flinn,&quot;Strategies of Remembrance: Music and History in the New German Cinema,&quot; in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.:Wesleyan up, 2000), pp.125­26. 57. Ibid., pp.126­27. For more commentary on the use of Beethoven's music in this film, see Roger Hillman, &quot;Narrative, Sound, and Film: Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun,&quot; in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies,Visual Anthropology, and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: u California p, 1995), pp.181­95. 58. Flinn,&quot;Strategies of Remembrance,&quot; p.123.

For more commentary on use of music in the Kluge film, see Roger Hillman, &quot;Beethoven, Mahler, and the New German Cinema,&quot; Musicology Australia 20 (1997); and Martin Hufner, &quot;Composing for the Films (1947): Adorno, Eisler, and the Sociology of Music,&quot; in Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (Oct. 1998). 59. Ewa Siemdaj, cited in &quot;The Saragossa Manuscript&quot;Virtual Class:The Music (Houston,Tx.: Rice University, 2000, accessed 24 March 2002); available from /~slav412/ music.htm; Internet.

128 jame s wie rzbicki is little reason for hope of any kind, the mutant daughter of the protagonist recites a poem, exercises her telekinetic powers for a moment, and then lays her head on a table; as a train rumbles past, buried in the noise is the sound of a scratchy recording of a choral-orchestral version of the &quot;Ode to Joy.&quot; In the same director's 1983 Nostalghia (Nostalgia), which tells the story of a Russian poet who travels to Italy to research the life of a seventeenth-century Russian composer, the &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; ironically underscores the scene near the end of the film during which an insane mathematician burns himself to death in front of his neighbors.60 To be sure, these are provocative filmic uses of music from the Ninth Symphony, and their multiple layers of symbolism will doubtless sooner or later be peeled away by scholars of hermeneutic persuasion.

But the concern here is not with arguably profound citations of the Ninth in relatively obscure examples of the socalled art cinema of Eastern Europe; rather, the concern is with appropriations of the Ninth Symphony in films that in recent years have flowed freely through the mainstream of contemporary American popular culture.61 All but one of the films discussed below date from the 1980s and 90s. Not all of them are in fact products of Hollywood, but all of them (including the British Help! and the Taiwanese Eat, Drink, Man, Woman) are Hollywood-like in their commercial circumstances. Unlike the German, Polish, and Soviet films mentioned above, none of them benefited from government subsidy; however artistic their content might be, they were created not so much for the sake of making an artistic statement as for the sake of making a profit.

Their target audience, in other words, is not the sophisticate for whom Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is obviously rich with meaning; rather, the target audience is the average moviegoer for whom an allusion to Beethoven might somehow--if anything--&quot;ring a bell.&quot; Consider the following: · In the Beatles' 1965 comic film Help!, the rock group's drummer--who wears on his finger a ring desperately sought by an exotic cult--finds himself trapped in the cellar of a London pub. An apparently ferocious tiger blocks the only route of escape. &quot;Don't worry,&quot; says the Scotland Yard detective who observes the situation through a trapdoor.&quot;He's absolutely harmless. All you have to do is sing Beethoven's `Ode to Joy' from the famous Ninth Symphony in D Mi60. Nostalghia was filmed in Italy, and its dialogue is in Italian. No composer is credited, but the &quot;music consultant&quot; was Gino Peguri. 61.

For an alphabetical but hardly exhaustive list of films that make use of works from the socalled classical music repertoire, see Benjamin Chee's &quot;Classics from the Silver Screen,&quot; available at ~bchee/movies.html.The same material, as it becomes updated, can also be viewed at Pierre R. Schwob's &quot;The Classical Music Archives,&quot; available at archives.com/movies/movie1.html. 129 Iconographic Use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Recent Films ·

Question: An aversion therapy called the 'Ludovico technique' from the 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange features which composer's music? Kudos if you can name the piece too.
Answer: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony