The Sound Of Dystopia

Text: Olivia Giovetti, VAN Magazine

Among the moments that defined 20th century cinema was the Ludovico Technique sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.” The subject of this experimental aversion-therapy procedure is violent-yet-charismatic antihero, Alex, and likely you’re already imagining some of the key elements of the scene: Malcolm McDowell, hair moppish, arms straight-jacketed, eyelids propped open. In an attempt to break Alex of his criminal impulses, heinous sprees that often ended with him listening to “a bit of the old Ludwig Van,” Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom expose him to nonstop violence of increasing intensity.

“When we're healthy, we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea,” Dr. Branom explains to her patient. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be healthier still.”

In Madge Ryan’s authoritarian performance as the good doctor, that second thought comes across more as a threat than a promise. We cut to footage of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will,” underscored by an electronic version of the final movement to Beethoven’s Ninth (reorchestrated by Wendy Carlos).

It’s a dystopia within a dystopia, and the realization that his beloved “Ludwig Van” is underscoring all of it is too much for Alex to bear. “It’s a sin!” he cries over and over. Anthony Burgess, whose novel of the same name served as the source material for Kubrick’s adaptation, was deliberate with his use of Beethoven in Clockwork—which carried over from page to screen. His description of the novel as “the defense of self, no matter how twisted it may be, and the condemnation of the state, no matter how benevolent it pretends to be,” could easily be applied to Beethoven’s Ninth.

Nearly 50 years after the 1971 premiere of “Clockwork,” both television and film have increasingly returned to this theme of the defense of self against dystopia. While the phrase “dystopia” was first used in the late 1860s, the concept felt more relevant than ever a century later: The Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the climate crisis, multiple economic crises, and more, led to works that presented imagined futures and alternative realities aimed to critique the current zeitgeist. As Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash wrote in the introduction to Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, both utopian and dystopian narratives are merely “histories of the present.”

Beethoven became dystopia’s unlikely soundtrack. At turns, his music is used as a symbol of the status quo, an anchor to the real world of the audience, a moment of nostalgia for the pre-dystopian era, or even a tool of resistance. The Ninth comes up time and again: “Harrison Bergeron” (1995), “Equilibrium” (2002), “Surrogates” (2009), and the Hulu adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2019). While “V for Vendetta” (2005) is better known for its use of Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture, Beethoven still knocks on the door of fate with a moment of the Fifth Symphony, a symmetry that is so uncanny it can only be deliberate (V is, after all, the Roman numeral for five). The “Pastoral” Sixth Symphony has an equally apt moment in 1973’s “Soylent Green.” As ubiquitous as the Ninth in film is the Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony, including cameos in television series “Mr. Robot,” “Watchmen,” and “Westworld,” and a memorable role in 1974’s cult-classic “Zardoz.”

And that’s just the symphonies. Tracing the cross-pollination between dystopias and Beethoven’s entire canon is a much more involved process. His String Quartet No. 1 factors into “The Lobster.” His “Pathétique” Piano Sonata No. 8 and Piano Concerto No. 4 are both heard in “Elysium.” That same piano concerto also bounces around from different types of dystopias. It accents the class imbalance of “Elysium” just as nimbly as it underscores the time-warps of the dystopia-adjacent Netflix series, “Russian Doll.”

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The Piano Concerto No. 4 (along with a brief moment of his Piano Sonata No. 31) also weaves in and out of Drake Doremus’s 2015 film “Equals,” which gives us a future where war, inequity, and suffering have been eliminated—at the expense of love and other human emotions. The use of Beethoven here is so imperceptible, it’s almost subliminal. But, against Ben Frost’s coolly-detached score, it’s impossible to miss the moments of warm, Romantic chords. More than a reminder of the desires that are, in the world of “Equals,” an “ancient vestige of our past,” it’s a note of resistance.

In fact, the character of Silas (Nicholas Hoult) can be read as Beethoven himself, with his diagnosis of Switched-On Syndrome (SOS) mirroring Beethoven’s increasing deafness. Beethoven would have known SOS’s symptoms intimately—including hostility, impulsivity, and oversensitivity; had he lived in the world of “Equals,” this would have been a fatal diagnosis. SOS is a social ostracizer, engaging in acts of physical romance grounds for arrest. When Silas begins to discover his own capacities for emotion, along with a growing, mutual attraction to his colleague Nia (Kristen Stewart), we hear Beethoven. Silas’s growing acceptance of the condition speaks to the Romantic era: While others who carry SOS have often resorted to suicide in order to escape the alien sensations of human emotion, one older woman tells Silas, “There is value in living,” even if “it’s difficult to see things and not be moved.”

The idea that such feelings may even be inevitable, no matter how much the society of “Equals” tries to eradicate them is reminiscent of the note Beethoven scrawled in the score to his String Quartet No. 16: “Muss es sein? Es muss sein.”

The world of “Total Recall” (2012) is more catastrophic than that of “Equals,” wearing its disorder, entropy, inequality, and suffering on its sleeve. Having gone through a government-mandated, Ludovico-esque brain reset before the start of the film, Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) begins to realize his identity and memories have all been false, to life-threatening consequences. Finding his old apartment from his previous life as Carl Hauser, Quaid excavates his past self in an attempt to regain his sense of selfhood. He sits down at a piano, spent.

Almost absentmindedly, he begins to pluck at the keys, an action that morphs into him playing the last movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata. Farrell himself chose “The Tempest,” having gone through (in his words) “a **** load of classical music to find something that I felt a certain urgency to it, but also with a hint of melancholia and maybe a sense of longing.” It’s one chord of “The Tempest” in particular that unlocks a hologram message from Hauser, filling in the necessary blanks for Quaid. It is, quite literally, Beethoven as a key to total recall.

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It’s not that Beethoven himself sought to write music that illustrated utopias gone horribly wrong, but in many ways his own lifetime and circumstances were premonitions of the worlds that authors like Burgess and Philip K. Dick (whose short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” served as the basis for “Total Recall”) would later create. At first, Beethoven revered Napoleon as a liberator, dedicating his Third Symphony to the statesman. When Napoleon declared himself emperor, Beethoven’s spirits were dashed. “Now he, too, will tread underfoot all the rights of man [and] indulge only his ambition,” he said. “Now he will think himself superior to all men [and] become a tyrant!” (The Third Symphony was rechristened the “Eroica” in this wake.)

Beethoven survived Napoleon’s siege of Vienna only to be confronted with the rule of Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. Considered by many to be the grandfather of the modern police state, Metternich suppressed revolution and dissent through censorship and a comprehensive network of informants. Hsi-Huey Liang even linked Metternich’s autocracy to the rise of the Third Reich in his 1992 study, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War.

The Third Reich became a recurring theme in dystopia for much of the second half of the 20th century, including another Dick work, the 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle. An alternative history in which the Axis Powers won World War II, its Amazon series adaptation placed a high importance on music.

“I began looking at Nazi-approved music, i.e. Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, and Strauss,” said High Castle music supervisor Gary Calamar, who stressed the importance that music played in creating the reality of the show’s world, a 1960s America divided between Germany and Japan. “This was a world where Elvis Presley and rock and roll never happened,” he explained. “Jazz and blues by African-Americans were mostly heard in the Neutral Zone and [on] resistance radio behind closed doors.”

While Beethoven is a composer favored by the Reich, three key moments across the seasons of High Castle use him as both propaganda and moral conduit. In Season One episode “Three Monkeys,” “Für Elise” plays on the Smith family’s hi-fi during VA Day celebrations. It’s the 1960s Nuclear Family, as if crafted by Riefenstahl: SS Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell) shares a late afternoon whiskey with his old colleague Rudolph Wegener, and his new protegé, Joe Blake, but the conversation soon turns tense. The arpeggiated C-section of “Für Elise” kicks in just as a disillusioned Rudolph questions whether what was done during the war was good. Just asking this question skirts the line of treason, and both Smith and Blake are visibly uncomfortable. “Für Elise” returns to its opening A-section just as Smith argues that it was for the greater good. “Now we have a better world,” he says.

Joe has his own Beethoven reckoning in Season Two’s “Travelers” while at a party held by Reichsminister Martin Heusmann (who fathered Blake with an American mother). This illegitimate and strained father-son relationship provided a shaky foundation for Blake’s allegiance to the Nazi Party. In Berlin, surrounded by the haves of the native German ruling class, Blake turns to leave. When Heusmann asks him to stay, Joe responds, “I’ve seen the blood that pays for this champagne.” All of this plays out to the moody rhythms of the “Moonlight” Sonata. In both scenes, Beethoven implicitly helps these two men—Rudolph and Blake—to see the glitches in the system. While serving as entertainment for those in charge, he’s also a means for these characters to divine that the party is over.

The Season Three finale, “Jahr Null,” takes this to more bombastic levels with, once again, the Ninth Symphony, which accompanies the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. It’s an epic moment of ceremonial pomp and bombastic demolition. On a boat in New York Harbor, Heinrich Himmler addresses a crowd, Smith by his side. “Those who would anchor you to the past must be eliminated to make room for the new. Today we tear down the old,” Himmler says in his speech, which ends with him bellowing: “A new beginning: Jahr Null!” As the audience of Reich elite erupt into applause, the final chorus of the “Ode to Joy” takes over. Lady Liberty’s torch breaks off as she crumbles, skidding across the surface of the water and almost touching the boat where Smith and Himmler stand.

“At long last, the light goes out,” Himmler murmurs to Smith. The camera then pans on Smith’s face, weary and wan. Beethoven, in hindsight of Napoleon and Metternich, would have known exactly how Smith felt.