IPLAI Artefacts of Memory seminar meeting

Schiller’s “An die Freude”, Beethoven’s Ninth and the struggle over Europe’s identity

Convenor: Giorgio Resta, Visiting Associate Professor, Faculty of Law

The Treaty establishing a constitution for Europe, signed in Rome in 2004, expressly provided that “the anthem of the Union shall be based on the ‘Ode to Joy’ from the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven”. The Treaty was rejected by the majority of French and Dutch voters and was eventually replaced by the Lisbon Treaty, entered into force in 2009. The failure to grant formal legal status to the anthem, reflects the widespread distrust of any constitutional or federalist concepts and conveys the sense of an unending struggle over Europe’s identity. But the history of the Ninth – and the poem by Schiller of which it is a setting – is no less fraught with ambiguity. It has been celebrated by German nationalists in the nineteenth century, considered the new Marseillaise in France’s Third Republic, admired by communists as the symbol of a classless society, frequently played by the Nazis in public ceremonies (such as the opening of the Olympic Games in 1936), adopted as official anthem both by the Council of Europe and by…the racist Republic of Rhodesia. The richness of such a living tradition is not only evidence of the greatness of a work of art; it also provides a vivid illustration of the complex relationships between a text and its interpretation, which might be of great relevance for the reflections of both the musicologist and the jurist.