(Photo by Ttsujigiri via Unsplash)
There is a strange panic that sets in when you discover, to your abject horror, that someone you disapprove of likes—even adores—an artist or work of art dear to your heart. Perhaps we could compare it to the disgust of seeing your worst enemy date or marry someone you just broke up with, or divorced. Let us just say that when a certain book, painting, song, or piece of music has guided the aesthetic principles of your life, only to be seemingly soiled by someone else, no hyperbole is too strong.
This is the horror I felt deep in my marrow upon learning, last summer, that erstwhile, and soon-to-be-again, First Lady Melania Trump was introduced to the 2024 Republican National Convention stage in Milwaukee using the third movement Adagio of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. If you know this symphony—and who does not?—it is appropriately quiet, serene, and for purposes of conservative gender conventions, aptly feminine. Convention programmers who would have otherwise chosen the blazing second movement Scherzo, after all, would have had their heads examined. Still, I could not help but wince.
I winced again upon learning more recently, in May 2025, that hot on the heels of President Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, former Trump national security advisor Gen. Michael T. Flynn gifted the National Symphony Orchestra $300,000 for a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. This seemed even stranger. Somehow it is easy to imagine the First Lady agreeing amicably to a staffer’s programming music of choice. It seems far harder to imagine the stalwart MAGA icon Gen. Flynn demonstrating a love for the great composer so large that it is worth such a large sum of his hard-won dinero. It is even stranger that Flynn would choose a work that the composer of genius considered his greatest achievement.
All of which goes to show how naïve I, and most people, can be in believing we could ever protect works of art we love most when these same works of art belong to everyone. The wonderful illusion of even the greatest works of art is that they speak to us so powerfully, so directly, we cannot fathom how anyone else could see and hear them differently to reach completely different conclusions about the world, the soul of humanity, and the human heart. How on earth could anyone listen to all of Beethoven’s awesome Ninth, then deny asylum status to a Haitian or Venezuelan family? How on God’s great Earth could a U.S. general profess a love so deep for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis that the dignity and potential of all nations would not supersede “America First”?
Well, it happens. In fact, we have been here before. And in the not-so-distant past Beethoven was arguably abused and misconstrued in far worse ways.
This abuse goes far beyond Stanley Kubrick’s ironic use of the Ninth in his 1972 film A Clockwork Orange. That, after all, was just a movie. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was rumored to have once said, regarding Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.” Stalin is on record as having adored Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony far more than Melania would likely ever publicly express. The Soviets in general got Beethoven wrong at every step, corner, and juncture when they abused his music and legacy for the ends of murder and gulags.
Then there is arguably the greatest abuse the composer suffered of all, in large part because it took place under the auspices of his own country and culture. At the height of the Second World War, March 1942, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Ninth in front of a full-regalia Berlin audience of Nazi thugs, including Joseph Goebbels. By that year, of course, the Berlin Philharmonic had ruthlessly dismissed all its Jewish musicians, with Germany itself in the grips of racist and fascist delusions. Irony becomes more or less useless in the face of a spectacle so bizarre as a choir singing about the brotherhood of man next to swastika banners. No matter. Fans of Furtwängler the conductor often laud this performance, dubbed “The Nazi Ninth,” as a demonstration of “how the contradiction makes the performance powerful.” For my part, it makes me want to vomit.
Advocates of this performance point out, almost endlessly, that Furtwängler himself despised the Nazi Party even as he loved his native Germany. What they fail to mention is that a conductor of even greater stature and conscience, Arturo Toscanini, left his native Italy in protest of Mussolini in 1939, and would never have dreamed of lending his talents to fascism, even for an evening. Also, there is every reason to argue, as professional music critics do, that Furtwängler’s “Nazi Ninth” is an undisciplined mess. And that is putting it mildly.
What hurts so much about these depressing examples is that they reveal one of the world’s greatest composers to be little more than window dressing to our naïve hopes about enlightened hearts and human progress. How could an artist of such immortal genius be so powerless, almost helpless, when confronted by the darkness of the human heart? And if art as elevated as Beethoven cannot help save us from ourselves, who can?
Cynics and pragmatists would say I am revealing nothing but snobbish pretensions. Fools would never believe great art could save the world. Instead, cynics and pragmatists persuade such fools otherwise so that the world might be saved by other means. There is nothing at all wrong in pointing that out, if we also allow for the fact that great art in the form of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Missa Solemnis will sustain us in hope and necessary illusions until those other means might be found.
