In A Clockwork Orange, when Alex is being psycho-conditioned against violence, he is forced to watch a Nazi propaganda film with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on the soundtrack – which inadvertently makes him phobic about hearing the “Ode to Joy.”
I always assumed the film in question was the classic Triumph of the Will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_Of_The_Will) – but I rented Triumph and the “Joy Ode” is nowhere on the soundtrack. So what was the film that soured Alex on Beethoven?
To my ears, Ode to Joy is hard to distinguish from Deutschland Uber Alles which was the Nazi National Anthem. Damned if I can hum the German National Anthem used today.
I always thought they made him watch all sorts of unsavory stuff and just played Ludwig Von as the background music since Alex was such a fan. Not so much as the soundtrack to the film they showed him, but as even extra punishment to put him off Ludwig Von. Beethoven was what the old guy and his cronies finally used to torture Alex, IIRC.
What I mean is, I think the film and the music were separate. A film of ultra-violence (which Alex loved) played to the music of Ludwig Von (which Alex loved), combined to put him off both. There was no need to make Beethoven a trigger for the illness reaction, they just did it as a petty, additional punishment.
It’s the same music. What happened was, in 1797, Haydn wrote a piece called “The Emperor Quartets”, and one of them, the third, was called “The Emperor’s Hymn”.
Then in the 19th century, the German liberal nationalist poet/professor August Hoffman von Fallersleben wrote the poem “Das Deutschlandlied” (“the song of Germany”) and put it to the music of the Emperor’s Hymn. After WWI, it was made the German national anthem.
After WWII, the first two verses were discarded, and now, only the third verse is used. The first verse lays out the borders of the German speaking world in the mid 19th century (“From the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt”), and since the State of Germany’s current borders are much reduced from that, it’s seen as provocative.
Incorrect. It was revealed to the doctors during the conditioning (by Alex, as he objected to the score, IIRC, to the gang-rape scene) that little Alex was a music lover. Dr. Brodsky (sp?) turned and mentioned to a colleague that it couldn’t be helped, and maybe it would be a “punishment aspect” of the treatment.
But it wasn’t done with malice forethought, just passing callousness, which is the real irony. Burgess’ novel may have spun it differently, though.
It’s been a while since I’d seen it, thanks for the correction.
The gang rape scene wasn’t part of the Nazi propaganda film, was it? Perhaps the soundtrack to the propaganda film was separate from the other snippets they used, each with it’s own score. Like I said, it’s been a while.
They could have just killed the audio, but that they let the music continue with a good idea that it would provoke a reaction when Alex heard it seems like petty punishment, or just callousness, but they still knew and did nothing to change it.
It does make it all the more ironic that it wasn’t intentional and was then ultimately used against Alex.
Now that I think about it, the gang rape may have been scored to something else.
As far as the Nazi film, it may have just been random news clips pieced together, or it may not have been notable enough to be widely available outside of academia, though I must admit, it does seem a bit familiar.
In the novel, the music-aversion effect on Alex was likewise unintentional but, when he pointed it out to the docs, they did not kill the sound. The only difference was that in the novel, most of the films Alex was shown had musical scores, and he wound up conditioned against practically all music, not just the Ninth Symphony.
Man o man did we trip out to the Clockwork soundtrack back in my college days. Especially “Timesteps”.
And in its original meaning, “Deutschland uber alles” – “Germany above all” – did not mean Germany should dominate other nations; it meant Germans everywhere should be more loyal to Germany-as-a-whole than to the petty principalities of which they were subjects at the time. It celebrated unification, not imperialism. Hitler may have spun it differently, of course, but he did not make it the national anthem – it was in place when he came to power.
Right…it was made the anthem in 1922.