Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?

skip=1

EYE ON THE NEWS

Making Beethoven Woke

Revisionist performances of classic works deconstruct our precious links to the past.

Heather Mac Donald

April 5, 2022

For decades, opera directors in Europe and the United States have felt licensed to
revise operas to conform to their political agendas. They do so through wildly
incongruous stagings that update the action to modern times and introduce
progressive totems that would have been unfathomable to an opera’s original
creators. Such directorial interventions left the libretto intact, however. Now even that
cordon sanitaire between the structure of a work and an interpreter’s political
preferences has been breached.

Beethoven has been a particular target for textual revision. In February, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City hosted a production of Fidelio, an
Enlightenment paean to freedom and to marital love. In Beethoven’s version of the
opera, a wife disguises herself as a male prison guard to free her husband from a
Spanish fortress; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fidelio became a Black Lives
Matter critique of mass incarceration. A BLM activist is writing a doctoral dissertation
on the Thirteenth Amendment and investigating corrupt “fascists” in the criminal-
justice system. In retaliation, racist cops shoot him, and a racist warden of a supermax
prison throws him into solitary confinement. The activist’s wife, unable to persuade
any lawyers to take up her husband’s case pro bono, goes undercover as a female
correctional officer in her husband’s prison. This change from a male to a female
disguise allows for a pleasingly homoerotic revision to the plot. In the original opera,
a prison guard’s daughter falls in love with the new “male” employee, echoing Lady
Olivia’s fruitless infatuation for the disguised Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In
the Met Museum’s Fidelio, produced by Heartbeat Opera, the prison guard’s daughter

1 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

is a lesbian; her black father encourages his daughter to court the new black female
assistant. Of all the production’s revisions, this paternal matchmaking is the most
counterfactual, given black working-class attitudes toward homosexuality.

In the current political and artistic environment, Fidelio was a Black Lives Matter
manifesto waiting to happen. What made the Met Museum’s production noteworthy
was that the revision did not occur exclusively through the staging; Heartbeat Opera
rewrote the spoken dialogue as well. (That dialogue was delivered in English, while
the arias and ensembles remained in their original German.) The activist’s wife
complains that the “real conspiracy” was not the one for which her husband was
detained but rather the “suppression of immigrants and people of color” in the U.S.
The supermax prison contains people “whose only mistake was being poor and
black.” The imprisoned activist rails against his black jailer: “You are complicit in a
corrupt system that oppresses our people. I see in you a field Negro.” The white
prison warden reveals the depths of his racism by announcing that if the activist really
“wanted to help his community he would tell them to stop burning down their
neighborhoods and to pull up their bootstraps.” Such an invocation of personal
responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy. None
of these lines is related to the original libretto.

The only reason the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted Fidelio was the Black Lives
Matter gloss. Without it, the museum’s leadership would have had no interest in the
work. The production provided the museum with a racial-justice twofer, however,
since opening night featured a post-performance discussion between five “social
justice advocates” on how to dismantle “current systems of incarceration through the
abolitionist movement.” The Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights
at Columbia University sponsored the discussion. Such a panel may have once
seemed tangential to the mission of an art museum; in the post-George Floyd era,
such racial-justice advocacy has become central to curating and programming.

2 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

Heartbeat Opera did preserve one aspect of the original Fidelio: the arias and
ensembles were, by and large, textually intact, if sometimes compressed or cut to
shorten the running time. The sublime quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” was reduced to a
trio, due to the elimination of a character who would have complicated the lesbian
subplot. The overture (Beethoven ultimately wrote four) and early arias were also cut,
replaced by a dumb show of a black male being gunned down to a backdrop of
mechanical noise.

O n April 7, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by Marin Alsop, will take
textual intervention one step further. A poem by Baltimore-based rapper Wordsmith
will replace Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony. Wordsmith has explained his goals in the rewriting: to use “present-day
social issues to highlight the need for positive reinforcement. Encouraging gender
equality, cultural acceptance, and living a purpose-driven life are worldly topics I
sought to shine a light on during the writing process.”

The result is a radical change of register. Instead of Schiller’s opening stanza:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

[Joy, bright spark of divinity,

Daughter of Elysium,
Drunk with fire we tread
Thy sanctuary!]

We get:

Live and love with open mind let our cultures intertwine.
Dig deep down, show what you’re made of, set the tone it’s time to shine.
We must fight for equal rights and share some common courtesy.
While pursuing all your dreams spread your joy from sea to sea.

Wordsmith intermixes self-help and progressive bromides, not always grammatically:

3 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

Family, friends share your opinion, push for gender equality.

Be yourself don’t judge too quick receive one another with open arms.
Oh this is our chance to unite, spread some genuine joy and charm.

We are admonished not to “hate,” which has a very particular referent in the circles in
which Wordsmith and his institutional patrons travel:

Brothers, sisters equally say:

“Together we can make hate history!”

In Beethoven’s excerpt for the Ninth Symphony, Schiller’s poem moves ecstatically in
its final strophe into the heavens:

Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?

Such’ ihn über’m Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

[World, do you know your Creator?

Seek Him in the starry canopy!
Above the stars must He dwell.]

Wordsmith concludes his “Ode to Joy” with a leaden admonition—a Hallmark card
version of a diversity training session:

Positive vibes for an ode to joy!

Rise, oh rise, be the voice of change,
We must show more empathy.

Wordsmith’s word setting is as clumsy as his content is banal. He regularly pits the
natural stress of a line against the musical meter (see, for example, “Oh this is our
chance to unite,” at measures 281 and 282 of the revised score).

Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin on Christmas

Day, 1989. The Berlin Wall had come down the previous month. To mark the
liberation, Bernstein changed one word of Schiller’s text: “Freude” became “Freiheit.”
This substitution was regarded as so momentous as to put Bernstein momentarily on

4 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

the defensive: “I feel this is a heaven-sent moment to sing “Freiheit” wherever the
score indicates the word ‘Freude,’” he explained. “If ever there was a historic time to
take an academic risk in the name of human joy, this is it, and I am sure we have
Beethoven’s blessing.” Bernstein’s one-word interpolation was still being talked about
long after the 1989 concert. The New York Times observed in 1998 that “Bernstein, who
in life got away with nothing and everything, boldly changed Freude, the joy in
Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ to Freiheit.”

But now, the wholesale elimination of Schiller’s ode, so integral to Beethoven’s score,
requires no justification at all. In fact, Wordsmith’s replacement poem is just one of
several commissioned by conductor Marin Alsop for what Alsop hoped would be an
attention-getting tour of “six continents with 10 renowned partner orchestras” in
2020. (Alsop’s so-called “All Together” tour, to mark the 250th anniversary of
Beethoven’s birth, was ultimately cancelled due to Covid lockdowns.) In London, the
poem “O Human” by British poet Anthony Anaxagorou was to have been slotted into
the Schiller slot. Where Wordsmith was clear, if trite, Anaxagorou was mannered and
opaque. Listeners were urged to “Speak up those who’ve held the tremble.” The poet
asked rhetorically: “Can you see us hurtling forward/Tying bells like vows to skin?”
To which the answer can only be: “No, we can’t!”

The most technically adept of the Schiller substitutes came from former U.S. poet
laureate Tracy K. Smith for an abortive Carnegie Hall performance. Smith concluded
her ode with a plug for sustainability:

Battered planet, home of billions,

Our long shadow stalks your face.
All we’ve fractured, all we’ve stolen,
All we’ve sought blind to your grace.

T he rewritings go beyond Beethoven. On November 5, 2022, the Baltimore

Symphony Orchestra will perform Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, with another
new text by Wordsmith. Stravinsky’s 1918 work pairs a seven-member instrumental
ensemble with three non-singing actors. The actors narrate the story of a soldier
persuaded by the devil to exchange his modest but beloved possessions for a
deceptive promise of wealth. The score is a concentrated gem of modernism, with
protean time signatures and rhythms, acid harmonies, and an eclectic range of
musical influences, including klezmer music and ragtime. Wordsmith will retell the

5 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

story from the “perspective of a Black American soldier during the Vietnam War,” the
publicity materials explain.

These modern bastardizations have eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precedent.

Singers notoriously inserted their preferred arias into opera scores, however
unrelated to the opera at hand. Publishers and conductors routinely “corrected”
Beethoven’s symphonies, which violated academic rules of harmony. In Paris,
Mozart’s operas were rewritten to match French tastes in musical theater. The
composer and critic Hector Berlioz described how a German composer “fixed” The
Magic Flute for a Parisian performance:

He tacked a few bars on to the end of the overture (the overture to The Magic Flute!),
made a bass aria out of the soprano line of one of the choruses, likewise adding a few
bars of his own composition; removed the wind instruments from one scene and put
them into another, altered the vocal line and the whole character of the
accompaniment in Sarastro’s sublime aria; manufactured a song out of the Slaves
Chorus “O cara armonia”; converted a duet into a trio; and, as if The Magic Flute were
not enough to sate his harpy’s appetite, gorged himself on Titus and Don Giovanni. . . .
After that, need one add that in the hands of this master the famous “Fin ch’han del
vino”—that explosion of licentious energy in which the whole character of the Don is
summed up—duly reappeared as a trio for two sopranos and bass, singing, among
other sweet nothings, the following lines:

Joy past all telling!

My heart is swelling!
How my lot is different from his!”

Berlioz lay down his rule of artistic respect:

No, no, no, a million times no! You musicians, you poets, prose-writers, actors,
pianists, conductors whether of third or second or even first rank, you do not have
the right to meddle with a Shakespeare or a Beethoven, in order to bestow on them
the blessings of your knowledge and taste.

I t took a century, but Berlioz’s lonely crusade for fidelity to a composer’s intentions
was eventually victorious—at least with regard to the notes and words on the page, if
not, in recent years, in regard to staging. It is not a cultural advance to return to

6 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

artistic revisionism. (To be sure, topical jokes and references are sometimes inserted
into operettas today, but those works occupy a different place in our culture.)
Beethoven chose Schiller’s “Ode,” not Wordsmith’s, for what would prove his final
symphony. That is sufficient reason to keep the original pairing. But there is a more
self-interested reason as well. In revising works to match contemporary sensibilities,
we diminish, not expand, our human possibilities. No one would write Schiller’s
“Ode to Joy” today. That is precisely why it should be performed intact. Its elevated
rhetoric belongs to a lost aesthetic universe of romantic idealism, classical allusion,
and exacting formal craft. It speaks to a now-alien way of being in the world that we
can nevertheless dimly sense through close engagement with its language. Likewise,
the original text of The Soldier’s Tale hearkens back to the unsettling world of Russian
folk tales, with their mysterious strangers, impenetrable forests, and diabolical traps.
That folk literature expresses what it was like to be human before Enlightenment
science and the conquest of nature; it captures primal fears that even now we may not
have transcended.

We are awash in opportunities to hear rappers and to condemn alleged police

brutality. Our means for entering the past, however, are finite and available only
through works of art that have survived into the present. It is narcissism to demand
that these precious vehicles of bygone form and feeling be dragooned into speaking
in our language, about our contemporary concerns. And it is delusional to think that
junking Schiller for Wordsmith or Beethoven for Black Lives Matter will increase the
“diversity” of the classical music audience. Such substitutions may please
institutional funders, but the only thing that will bring blacks regularly into the
concert hall is prolonged engagement, starting in school or at home, with classical
music.

An advocate of rewritings like the All Together project might respond that no lasting
damage has been done to the host works. The next performance can revert to the
work’s original structure; many future performances undoubtedly will do so. But
each rewriting legitimates the idea that understanding a foreign idiom, especially a
rarified one, asks too much of an audience. Such revisions imply that we should not
try to stretch beyond the boundaries of our petty, circumscribed lives into a radically
different aesthetic milieu. Many current revisions are animated by the hermeneutics
of suspicion, seeing in past works of art only oppression and illegitimate privilege.
Such deconstructive readings provide an excuse for ignorance and a pretext for
prejudice. Even without that deconstructive agenda, however, rewriters and

7 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM
Making Beethoven Woke | City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/making-beethoven-woke?skip=1

revisionists destroy the precious link between present and past that is the primary
means of transmitting civilization and of keeping our minds open to beauty.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a
contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The Diversity Delusion: How
Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.

8 of 8 4/24/22, 9:00 AM