Susan McClary on Beethoven's Symphony #9

...Beethoven and Mahler quite regularly push mechanisms of frustration to the limit, such that desire in their narratives frequently culminates (as though necessarily) in explosive violence. This may be one of the factors that cause [them] to be received as more serious, more virile, more consequential [than Haydn and Handel]: they don't pull punches, they go all the way to the mat.

For instance, the point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music. The problem Beethoven has constructed for the movement is that it seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity: we witness the emergence of the initial theme and its key out of a womblike void, and we hear it collapse back twice more into that void. It is only by virtue of the subject's constant violent self-assertion that the void can be kept at bay: cadence [coming to rest] in the context of this movement spells instant death--or at least loss of subjective identity. Yet the narrative paradigm the movement follows [i.e., the paradigm encoded in "sonata form"] demands the eventual return to the beginning for the recapitulation.
[On the recording used in this module, the beginning of the recapitulation occurs at 9:55.]

In a more conventional sonata movement, recapitulation would signify simply the reconsolidation of thematic and tonal identity-- a kind of formal homecoming that marks the end of a successful adventure. But for the subject of the Ninth, to return to the beginning is to actually regress to a point further back than its own conscious beginnings: it is to be dissolved back into the undifferentiated state from which it originally emerged. And if its hard-won identity means anything, the subject cannot accept such dissolution, even if it is toward that conventional moment of reentry that the whole background structure of the movement has inexorably driven. The desire for cadential arrival that has built up over the course of the development finally erupts, as the subject necessarily (because of narrative tradition) finds itself in the throes of the initial void while refusing to relent: the entire first key area in the recapitulation is pockmarked with explosions. It is the consequent juxtaposition of desire and unspeakable violence in this moment that creates its unparalleled fusion of murderous rage and yet a kind of pleasure in its fulfillment of formal demands.

This explosive rage fuels most of the remainder of the symphony. The important exception is the third movement, which serves as a kind of negative image to the rest. If the first two movements are monomaniacal, the Adagio is dialogic. It stands strangely aloof from the striving narrative of the other movements:...it may be arcadian recollection, the imaginary sublime, or a dream of utopia. It offers the image of a world in which pleasure is attainable without thrusting desire, where tenderness and vulnerability are virtues rather than fatal flaws. But it can never be reality....And its seductive lure must finally be resisted. The return to the real world at the outset of the final movement quashes the alterity of the Adagio with startling violence-- violence that might seem excessive, if we did not understand culturally that to linger in that pleasurable, semiotically and structurally feminine zone would be an act of intolerable transgression. Like Faust we know (as proper patriarchal subjects) that to murmur, "Verweile nur, du bist so schon," ["Only linger, you are so beautiful"] is to be utterly damned.

The "triumphal" end of the symphony is likewise problematic, for how could any configuration of pitches satisfactorily ground the contradictions set forth over the course of this gargantuan composition? As the conclusion is approached, the promised (though, by definition, inadequate) cadences repeatedly are withheld at the last moment; and finally Beethoven simply forces closure by bludgeoning the cadence and the piece to death. For if death is inevitable in tonal music (and the reticence to resolve in this piece makes the connection quite pointedly), then one may as well make the most of it.

Adrienne Rich arrives at a remarkably similar reading of this composition in her poem "The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message:"

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
muisic of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody hand upon
a splintered table.