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61 Reprise Beethoven’s Hair Some magnificent pieces by Beethoven sound from a distance like . . . mere “boom boom.” —Adorno, Beethoven B eethoven’s iconicity has a long illustrious history. Here, for example, is Wagner on the Maestro after hearing the Ninth Symphony (1824) in 1839 at a Paris Conservatoire Concert: “The effect on me was indescribable. To this must be added the impression produced on me by Beethoven’s features, which I saw in the lithographs that were circulated everywhere at the time. . . . I soon conceived an image of him in my mind as a . . . unique supernatural being.”1 If Beethoven’s music in the popular imagination has been associated since Wagner with the Ninth Symphony (and not, say, third-period works such as the late quartets or the Missa Solemnis of 1823), the history of Beethoven as an icon in the image archive of the West is arguably a function of that sublime object, his hair, “that wild mane that . . . framed his dark face in the waning years” and that symbolized, like Einstein’s, his “arresting personal presence.”2 Simply put, Beethoven’s hair, a deathbed lock of which scientists have analyzed to speculate about the cause of his celebrated deafness (dropsy as a result of lead poisoning!), can be seen as an indelible signifier of his romantic temperament. Now, given that the conceit of the preceding chapter is that Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” represents a historical reversal of the cultural hierarchy personified by Beethoven and championed by Adorno, just such a conceit also runs the risk of producing a mere reversal where, for example, rock is somehow better than classical music. In other words, while the anti-classical thrust of “Roll Over Beethoven” has real force in the context of Adorno’s work on popular music, it would be entirely too convenient to forget that Beethoven himself in the process of composing the Eroica (1804) “struck out Napoleon’s name,” thereby engendering a type, the “rebel artist hero,”3 that informs both Berry’s rock ’n’ roll persona and his anti-Beethoven anthem. At the same time, the problem of what Alex Ross wittily calls “marble-bust Beethoven”4 persists: as Marianne Moore once said about poetry, “I hate it too”—classical music, that is. Ross, who in the pages of the New Yorker has been engaged for some time in the thankless but necessary task of writing about “classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical,”5 readily concedes not only that classical music is now routinely “described in terms of its . . . resistance to the mass” but that even metropolitan sophisticates proudly wear their anti-classical badges on their sleeves: “‘I don’t know a thing about Beethoven,’ they say, which is not what they would say if the subject [were] Stanley Kubrick.”6 In this cultural climate, a little knowledge, whether about Beethoven or the history of popular music, is a good, because dangerous, thing. For example, it’s conventional wisdom, at least from the vantage point of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, to see the late Beethoven as the “presagement of the alienated music of Schoenberg.”7 Yet as Edward Said, whose understanding of the history of modern music owes an enormous debt to Adorno, acknowledges, Schoenberg’s music is “completely impossible (a) to perform, (b) to understand, and (c) to listen to.”8 While the historical trajectory from Beethoven to Shoenberg makes, alas, not a little sense, Adorno has pursued other dialectical tacks, arguing, for instance, that Beethoven’s symphonies (where the recapitulation mimes the dominative Aufhebung of the Hegelian dialectic) are less a presagement of serious music than a “prefiguration of mass culture.”9 The interest for me of this critique of classic, middle-period Beethoven, that his music sometimes violently “manipulates” or “manufactures ” transcendence,10 is that it suggests a possible consonance between the composer of the Ninth Symphony and the “dream factories” of Tin Pan Alley. Thus, according to Adorno, when an audience hears a Tin Pan Alley song—say, “Swanee” (1918)—they “become aware of the overwhelming possibility of happiness.”11 The catch, of course (and there’s always a catch with popular music for Adorno), is that the audience’s felt recognition of this transcendent moment of happiness simultaneously permits them to see “what the whole order of contemporary life ordinarily forbids them to admit”: namely, “that they actually have no part in happiness.”12 Escape and temporary release therefore...

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