On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> 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.
>
> But it's a military march, amidst an ode to universal brotherhood.
>From a guy whose turning point symphony, the Heroic Symphony, would have
been called the Napoleon symphony had Napoleon not named himself emperor
before he finished it. So long as he was a general at the head of
conquering armies of egalite he was Beethoven's man. Brotherhood and
military marches are not opposed for him in the least. His was the heroic
style, it enacted heroic dramas.
The idea that war is inherently impersonal and inhuman -- rather than a proper place to enact the drama of individual heroism -- wouldn't arise on a large scale for another century, and not fully until post-Vietnam.
Zizek concludes:
> Things do not really go wrong only at bar 331, with the
> entrance of the marcia Turca; they go wrong from the very beginning. One
> should accept that there is something insipidly fake in the very "Ode to
> Joy" so that the chaos that enters after bar 331 is a kind of return of
> the repressed, a symptom of what was wrong from the very beginning.
At least he's consistent: the only way to really believe the Turkish March is a wrongness is to believe the whole piece is shallow and empty from the beginning.
If you believe that, all I can say it de gustibus.
Michael