Ambiguities of Violence in Beethoven's Ninth through the Eyes of Stanley Kubrick'sA Clockwork Orange

Abstract

As the result of its beleaguered political baggage, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has drawn so much critique that the author Anthony Burgess proclaimed it to be a “damnable hybrid.” This essay argues that the choral symphony owes its ambiguities to Schiller's intrinsically flawed ode, which at once celebrates unity and wholeness and adumbrates disunity and exclusion, as Freud has outlined in some of his writings. Moreover, the essay makes the case that Kubrick's film adaptation (1971) of Burgess's dystopian novelA Clockwork Orange(1962) is the work that to date most keenly lays out the tools for uncovering the mechanisms at work when we address the ambiguities in Schiller's exalted poem and the reception of Beethoven's last symphony—firstly, because this film abundantly exhibits acoustic and visual representations of Beethoven, and especially of his Ninth, and secondly, because it unveils the links of both to the ambiguities, and in some cases, certainties, of violence.