A flashmob of young Azeri musicians gathered on the Baku waterfront in 2016 to play Beethoven’s music (1823) for Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy (1785.)
They sang part of Schiller’s poem in Azeri and part in German. Horns and strings played to honor the visit of a European Union (EU) delegation forging a friendship association with Azerbaijan. The ruling dynasty there is hostile to many EU values, but it welcomed the association agreement.
And the young musicians, half of them female, were exuberant as they sang to honor joy and human solidarity. There was no trace of the anti-Western feelings shown by Ali, a young Azeri Muslim, as he left Nino, his Georgian Christian woman, in the novel Ali and Nino (1937) to bloody his own back during Ashura ceremonies in neighboring Persia.
Are today’s Russians brothers with anyone? Has Russia become the fulcrum of a Eurasian civilization, as Putin’s ideologues aver — a core that absorbs by a kind of magnetism the Muslim, Buddhist, and other cultures on its periphery?
Or are they an integral part of Europe as assumed by the diplomat and educator Vasily Malinovski in his 1803 Treatise on War and Peace, written while he was posted in England. (Rassuzhdenie o mire i voine: Skt Peterburg, 1803).
Malinovski’s treatise called for a sort of security council consisting of Russia and the other great powers of Europe — a concept later reflected in the Concert of Europe but not in the smaller and arch-reactionary Holy Alliance (1815) which joined only the autocrats of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and was scorned by England (as “a piece of … sublime nonsense”) the Vatican, and the Ottoman Empire.
Russian intellectuals and politicians have for centuries been torn between Westernism, Eurasianism, and Russianism.
The diplomat and poet Fyodor Tiuchev. for example, spent more than half his life in Germany and other parts of Western Europe. He preferred literary salons in Munich to the comparatively drab life of 19th-century St. Petersburg.
But he urged the Tsarist regime to mount a soft power propaganda campaign to offset hostile reporting by critics such as the Marquis de Custine, a reactionary who was nonetheless appalled by the depths of Russian autocracy when he visited in 1839. By contrast, the 20th-century views of Andrei Sakharov on arms control and human rights radiated a basic humanism with no national or geographic bias.
Soviet leaders like Lenin and Khrushchev appreciated some of Beethoven’s music. Ultimately, however, they — like Stalin — insisted that music and other art forms must be understandable to the working class and advance the cause of the Communist revolution.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he listens with pleasure to so-called popular classical music — Bach, Beethoven, and, above all, Mozart. He has also praised the melody in Liszt’s adaptation of Schubert’s “Ständchen.” As for “our” (Russian) composers, Putin singled out Rachmaninoff, who lived in the West after 1917, having played his last concert in imperial Yalta that September.
Purporting to be a man who can do nearly anything, Putin has permitted himself to be filmed playing the piano, with embarrassing results.
Regardless of Putin’s musical tastes, his policies have juxtaposed Russian civilization and the West. Not only are their policies diametrically opposed, Putin says, so are their values as the West drowns in drugs and sexual deviancy.
For their parts, however, the Council of Europe (in 1972) and the EU (in 1985) have declared Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its Ode to Joy to be Europe’s anthem.
In 2015, the Dutch conductor Andre Rieu conducted Beethoven’s music for Schiller’s poem before an outdoor audience of thousands including Europeans and Asians (many of the crowd crying with emotion) in Maastricht.
Here are some of the key lines sung in German but rendered here in English):
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods
Daughter from Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly ones, your sanctuary.
Your spells bind again,
What fashion sets apart.
All people become brothers,
Where your gentle wing rests.
Whoever managed…
To be a friend’s friend;
Whoever has won a devoted wife,
Join in with his cheers!…
All beings drink joy
At the breasts of nature.
If these sentiments are revered in Europe, how do they compare with Putin’s attacks on everything held dear in a Ukraine seeking to be part of the West? Putin is like those described by Schiller as having:
not one soul to call their own on the face of the earth.
and must creep away weeping away from this union.
Walter Clemens is an Associate at Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, at Boston University. He wrote ‘Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims.’
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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