Ode to Joy

I wrote this text over a decade ago, I don’t remember exactly when. But recently I was asked about the failure of the Anglican Church to oppose the manufactured crises on whose justification our freedoms are being removed, just as I’ve been asked, repeatedly, about the failure of the Left to do the same. Personally, I’ve never had much faith in either institution, and so haven’t been too surprised by their collaboration with the enemies of freedom. What has pained me more has been the steady and now free-falling decline of what we used to call our culture, and which is now little more than propaganda for the rules of behaviour in the New Normal. It is not by chance that our culture has been erased, banned and replaced by the orthodoxies of woke ideology, which now fills and constitutes the place previously occupied by art, literature, poetry, cinema, theatre, music. A dictatorship can be imposed by new laws and powers of enforcement and censorship, but a properly totalitarian society has to change the way a population thinks, feels and behaves, and to do that culture must be replaced by propaganda.

So today I thought I’d publish this short text, to remind myself and perhaps others of what culture is, and how desperately we miss it now that we no longer have one. For as we are seeing, a people without a culture are a herd of human animals susceptible to being fenced in, biologically augmented, their movements tagged and controlled, their bodies sold by their owners, finally butchered for profit, as we are being now. But somewhere, lost in the past but still present in our minds and hearts, are the people who produced European civilisation, with all its horrors, yes, but also its glories, including the one about which I’ve written here. And if the last three years have demonstrated something besides the cowardice and stupidity and servility into which we have sunk, it is the longing for that community we have never quite managed to create between us. If we are to escape from the abyss of lies and obedience into which we are sinking, it will be on the condition of us creating that community; for the only community capable of creating a culture worthy of the name is one forged in the struggle for its emergence. That struggle lies before us now.

Last night I went to hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played by the London Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall. The last time I heard this live it was over twenty years ago and on the other side of the world. We had a full orchestra, about a hundred instruments, including 30 brass and woodwind, and a choir of around 120, men and women, bass, tenor, alto-soprano and soprano. The stage was set.

With our seats in the absolute centre, and the orchestra laid out before us, I’ve never before realized how much the brass and woodwind lead the piece. In the first movement in particular, all that ensemble playing, all those famous chords, are like the sun clearing the morning mist to reveal the undulating ground across which first the horns and trumpets, then the flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, call to each other across the huge space of the hall. The conductor set his mark from the beginning: the phrases crisp and clipped, the pauses between them a heart’s beat longer than expected, each group of instruments distinct, with a separate personality and point of entry into this great hunt through the Black Forest, the ecstasies to come under a controlling hand.

I was struck, as always, at how quickly and efficiently the second movement, Beethoven’s great innovation, brings us straight back to the drama and then heightens it, the first and second violins echoing, following and tripping over each other in their pursuit of the prey. The conductor was like a master painter reaching into his box of paints, showing with a flick of his wrist what colours he could conjure, or like a sorcerer on the edge of a storm calling thunder claps down from the clouds. He took the molto vivace at its word. The sound swept back and forth across the room, and then he pulled it all together, mastered it, and held it at the tip of his baton. ‘Here,’ Beethoven seemed to be saying, ‘this is how to use an orchestra.’ To my ears, it doesn’t sound like any other orchestra, or musical experience for that matter. Sometimes it isn’t even clear where the sound is coming from as the horns and woodwind dip into, echo, repeat and articulate the bow and hum of the strings.

In the third movement, all this is reversed as the wind instruments lay down bands of colour that fade into the distance, and the strings take up the melody. The soloists had come in, and sat now at the front of the stage, staring out at the audience as the lilting flutes and brushed strings rose behind them. I watched their faces as this absolute beauty enveloped them. The red-headed soprano looked terrified. The Welsh alto was in what looked like a trance, her eyes on something invisible beyond the confines of the hall, and didn’t move a muscle the whole movement. The tenor, a curious looking chap, leaned back with his head cocked to the left, his face in an ecstasy of joy as he looked out at the audience. And the bass, as a bass should be, immovable. It was now that I remembered what all this is about, these more than two hundred artists who have devoted their lives to their craft, in this vast structure, with a thousand celebrants, in devotion to one of the greatest expressions European civilization has ever produced. During the more sublime passages the conductor had the habit, which I liked very much, of seeming to leave off conducting for a few seconds to walk back and forth across his small podium, his eyes closed, his hands raised as if in prayer, revelling in what was happening.

And then the fourth movement. Everyone knows what’s coming, but will they pull it off? The rapid fall and tumble of the opening, like rocks through a river gorge, and a deliberately long pause, reminding us that its return will mark the breaking dam of the choral section. Now the double basses and cellos asserted their dominance. It became clear to me what Beethoven was doing here, matching instrument to voice, their deep, resonant tenor and bass answered, on the other side of the orchestra, by the soprano and alto of the violins and violas. And behind them the choir. When the basses and cellos, alone, played the famous phrase Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium, the conductor brought them down to a whisper. The hall was silent, and as they leaned into Beethoven’s addition to Schiller’s text, Was die Mode streng geteilt / Alle Menschen werden Brüder, you could feel the shiver of joy rise through the hall like sap through a spring branch. ‘All men will be brothers’. And then the answering female voice, ‘Joy, beautiful spark of the gods, daughter of Elysium.’

Then they all stand up, soloists and choir, and it’s hard not to stand up with them. It’s like waiting for a bomb to go off, and wanting it to. It’s an impossible ask, to stand up, after an hour of this, alone, no matter how big your chest, and silence the whole thing with O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! / Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere. But he does it anyway, and almost pulls it off. But not quite. As Rilke wrote, a god can do it, but how can we pass through the strings of Apollo’s lyre to his more divine singing? The soloists get the plaudits and the bouquets, but the real stars of this piece are the choir, dressed all in black, men, as is right, to the right, women to the left. It brought home to me how male the choral section, the fourth movement, and perhaps the whole symphony, is. It’s always the male voice that leads the way, the female that answers. The conductor had marshalled them beautifully. The phrases were clear and clipped, the four voices that compose its unity distinct and identifiable, but merging into a beautiful harmony. The German sibilants were clear, and, most importantly, they sounded like they knew what they were saying, rather than singing a foreign tongue. It’s the best choir I’ve heard do this.

The tenor came in, blonde and prancing like a deer in the rising sun, as a tenor should be, his feet almost rising off the stage as he sang: Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn / Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen. And then the choir again: Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt! This is Beethoven’s model of community, here, in this hall. The orchestra, in this piece, is not just an instrument of expression. The orchestra, and above all its choir — which I’m struck again how odd and strange it was for him to introduce it, without precedent, into the symphonic form — is his demonstration, his evidence, of the truth of the credo it sings. Look, he says, what we can be! And as the male and female voices sweep back and forth across the room, answering each other, intermingling, weaving their mortal breath into the voices of angels, their separation by gender is written not in ‘what custom has divided’ but in the flesh, in the varieties of the human larynx.

The Ninth Symphony is, above all, a dynamic unity composed of difference and contrasts, conflict and harmony. There’s no greater heart than the heart that composed it. And the further we move from its vision of community the more we are diminished as a culture and a civilisation.

O friends, no more of these tones!
Let us raise our voices in
More pleasing and more joyful sounds.

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods
Daughter of Elysium,
Drunk with fire, we enter burning,
Heavenly one, your holy shrine!
Your magic power reunites
Those whom custom has parted;
All men on earth will be brothers,
Where your gentle wing alights.

Who has ever had the fortune
To be a friend to a friend;
Who has ever won a woman,
Let him join our celebration!
Yes, who can call even one soul
Upon the earth’s sphere his own!
But let him who never has, steal
Weeping from this circle’s bond!

Every creature drinks deep of joy
At the breast of Mother Nature;
All the good and all the bad
Follow her trail of roses.
Kisses she gave to us, and wine,
A friend faithful unto death;
Even the worm has its pleasures,
And the cherub stands before God.

Joyfully, like his suns flying
Across heaven’s glorious plan,
Run, my brothers, run your race,
Like a hero to victory.

Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss is for all the world!
Brothers, beyond the starry sky
A loving Father must dwell.
Do you bow down, you millions?
Can you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him beyond the starry sky!
Beyond the stars he must dwell.

— Ode to Joy (1785/1824)