BEETHOVEN THE EUROPEAN LUCCA, 4–6 DECEMBER 2020

Abstract

Whilst Covid prevented so many of the year's promised commemorative activities, one positive outcome was the delay of the original ‘live’ Lucca event scheduled for March and its transformation into an online event in Beethoven's birth month. (Edited by his daughter Margaret O'Sullivan, this was part of his project ‘Beethoven's Irish Songs Revisited’, which sought to reconstruct those folksongs for which George Thomson never got around to supplying texts.) In his stimulating address, ‘Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a Disputed Symbol of Community: From Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to the Brexiteers of 2019’, William Kinderman cast a wide intellectual net, developing themes from the final chapter of his most recent book, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). After this ingenious analysis we were then taken on a whirlwind video tour of performances of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in political events spanning almost a century, showing how – despite the movement's misappropriation by the Nazi regime and racist Rhodesia, and the way it is associated with aggression in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange – Schiller's text was reinterpreted to suit each different historical context, whilst remaining ‘an untainted symbol’ of affirmation and resistance. The examples of performances included those given by Germans held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in June 1918, the annual December ritual of massed choirs and orchestras in Japan, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York in 2011, the struggle of Chilean opponents of Pinochet, the playing of cassette recordings with makeshift amplification by students protesting against martial law in China at Tiananmen Square in 1989, right up to Tan Dun's 2021 work Sound Pagoda – composed to be performed alongside the ‘Ode to Joy’ – for a concert dedicated to Wuhan's Covid victims.