On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Speaking of the 9th, what about that weird Turkish march that interrupts
> the Ode to Joy? Zizek claims it's an ironic self-deconstruction of the
> text's hymn to universal brotherhood.
God, that's so wrong it makes me wonder if he's even listening. The whole plot of the Ode to Joy is looking for and then finally a melody that is adequate to express this enormous joy, this feeling of all men being brothers. The march appears only a minute or two after this search has culminated in us finding it. With that, the instruments are transformed into voices. The cello becomes the baritone, the first voice we hear, and his first act is to reject the horror music and say Yes, This -- This is IT! (Really, he says this literally).
And then we get the Turkish march, which is exactly this tune, the Ode to Joy tune, set to a march rhythm. There's nothing ironic about it at all. It couldn't be more triumphal. This is a conquering army. And then it fans out into a fugue, which is the triumph -- the liberation -- of all peoples, represented vocally by the transformation of the other instrumental lines into the quartet of voices. And then we emerge into the full perfect tune, no longer marching but rather present and established, and sung by the entire choir.
The term "Turkish" shouldn't be taken seriously. It was a descriptive stock term in Viennese classical music for anything with an instrumentally exotic touch, especially percussion. Here you have percussion that represents the jangling of the spurs, and in the rarity department, you have a bass drum. (Trivia footnote: this is the only time a bass drum is used in any Beethoven symphony.) But the word "Turkish" is no more meant to disturb us here than it is in Mozart's Turkish concerto. As Robert Greenberg points out, the Turks were enemies, but they were also regarded as the giver of many great ornaments to civilization, among which was coffee, without which Viennese society wouldn't have been possible :o)
Michael