Beethoven & Politics

Beethoven symphonies and 20th century politics

No four notes in classical music are more familiar than those that open Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Their powerful psychological resonance has often extended beyond music into overtly political contexts.

For example, on today's date in 1941, the British Broadcasting Company began using these notes as a theme for radio shows beamed across Europe to boost morale during the Second World War. In Morse Code, the "dit-dit-dit-DAH" that opens Beethoven's Fifth stood for the letter "V," which in turn stood for "victory." And so, in some European countries occupied by the Nazis, overly long applause and standing ovations following performances of Beethoven's Fifth became a coded means of expressing resistance to the occupiers while innocently seeming to honor the great German composer.

At the end of the war, in celebratory radio concerts on V-E Day and V-J Day, Arturo Toscanini conducted performances of Beethoven's Fifth and Third symphonies.

Beethoven's Ninth was used as a uniting political force at the end of the Cold War, when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted moving performances in East and West Berlin during Christmas in 1989, utilizing an orchestra with members drawn from Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, and the U.S.


For those special concerts, which were recorded and broadcast around the world, Bernstein asked the chorus to substitute the work "Freiheit" (Freedom) for the word "Freude" (Joy) in the choral setting of Schiller's poem, "Ode to Joy," which closes Beethoven's Ninth.