Unlocking The Secret of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Both economist and statesman, the late Lyndon LaRouche, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the International Schiller Institute, have continuously located the essence of real political change in the ability of every person of good will to choose to “think like Beethoven.” What does that mean?

Classical pianist and symphonic conductor Daniel Barenboim this week reminded the world that “Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first performed exactly 200 years ago Tuesday (May 7) and has since become probably the work most likely to be embraced for political purposes…Beethoven might have been surprised at the political allure of his masterpiece.
He was interested in politics, but only because he was deeply interested in humanity….. Instead, he was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was concerned with moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting all of society. “

Notoriously, the Nazis also attempted to deploy Beethoven’s Ninth for their purposes, and were stopped from doing so, to a large degree, by the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler. Furtwangler saw it as his duty to remain in Germany, and oppose Nazism through advocating Beethoven’s idea of humanity, in the same way that Socrates refused to avoid execution by leaving Athens, and that Thomas More refused to “save his head” by leaving Henry the Eighth’s England. “If I leave Athens, Athens is no more.”

Right now, the defacing of the Ninth Symphony, by changing the words of Schiller’s “An die Freude/ To Joy” —the text that Beethoven worked to set to music for over thirty years—is being attempted. Out with Schiller’s universal idea, expressed in the poem as “Freude;” instead, in with “Slava,” “Glory to Ukraine/Slava Ukraini,” like cheap 1930s propaganda. This crime is being committed by a hopelessly clueless, but arrogant conductor, Keri-Lynn Wilson. “It was an idea I had because I felt it was even more powerful than Beethoven’s masterpiece, the greatest symphony perhaps ever written,” she says, with no hint of how pathetically stupid she sounds.

Confronting and opposing this soul-destroying enterprise, and the thinking behind it, is essential to stopping mass depopulation, genocide and war. Why? Because there is only one humanity, and all of our actions in statecraft must proceed from that One. If our idea of humanity is bestial, and perpetual war is our practice, then we are morally unfit to survive, and we will instead march triumphantly into Hell.

Beethoven’s idea of humanity must prevail, now. How can millions be brought to the threshold of “thinking like Beethoven” in time to reverse our destructive course? How can the genius of the Ninth Symphony free us from ourselves? Speakers: Harley Schlanger, John Sigerson