Simply as a moment of drama, it was effective. Beethoven’s majestic but tender slow movement unfolds over more than 15 minutes, with melodic lines and variations that soar ever higher as they unfold. The hymn-like first theme gathers around it faster-moving motifs, like beauty personified collecting ever more acolytes and worshipers. The Adagio clears away the clouds and ruckus of the preceding two movements, setting the stage for the finale, with its choral Ode to Joy, perhaps the greatest symphonic music ever written.
The dramatic effectiveness on Thursday night was similar to an actor beginning a monologue in a hushed voice. It quieted the room (at least a little). The striking contrast with everything heard earlier — not just the music but the blood-and-guts oratory — was bewildering, and in the midst of the temporary bewilderment, Melania emerged in her trim, bright-red skirt suit.
Some things on the program of the final evening were jaw-droppingly weird, like Hulk Hogan’s speech, with its shirt-tearing reveal of a Trump T-shirt, a fanatical mashup of confessional, coming-out and Superman’s quick change. Other things, like the choice of Beethoven, were deeply weird, tapping into the subterranean depths of the surreal that are fundamental to the aesthetic of the Republican Party now under the absolute control of Donald Trump.
The last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 includes a setting of a Friedrich Schiller poem, the Ode To Joy, which is an extended paean to love, brotherhood and belonging. An instrumental setting of its famous melody serves as the anthem of the European Union, and the symphony is often played at moments of great hope and sometimes sorrow. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Leonard Bernstein performed it in Berlin, with an orchestra of musicians from both sides of the Iron Curtain. That remains one of the most spectacularly moving performances of the piece — or any work of music — of the last half century at least.
Few other works of music are as effective at creating the incredibly dangerous but ecstatic feeling that many politicians and all demagogues hope to stir in their followers. It melts away the ego lines between individuals, creating a sense of collective rather than individual identities. In any decent performance of the symphony, you may feel yourself broadly in love with everyone around you during the tender passages used for Melania’s entrance.
Serenading an audience fresh from four days of divisive rhetoric, immigrant bashing and attacks on LGBTQ people with music from a sonic icon of Europe’s post-World War II quest for peace and dignity was either brilliant in its perversity or perversely hypocritical. Ordinary political advisers, those steeped in decades of the American political process, might have advised against music that underscores Melania’s Slovenian origins. Given the GOP’s isolationism, they might have bristled at the idea of anything that suggests connection to Europe, with its NATO alliance and its opposition to the territorial ambitions and militarism of Vladimir Putin. Sensitive to any accusation of elitism, they might have avoided use of classical music entirely, given its long (but mostly baseless) association with listeners who are rich and educated.
There were many good reasons not to use this music. Even the few good reasons to use it — among them the failed efforts by some in the convention to suggest a new, unifying tone — don’t really explain it. The larger associations of Beethoven’s symphony were almost certainly lost on the audience. Even knowledgeable listeners would need first to recognize the excerpt of the third movement and then recall the larger message of the whole symphony.
But Trumpian aesthetics work through a particular type of co-option, the appropriation of culture not to own it, but to neutralize it. Beethoven will never become Melania’s theme music, but its brief appearance at the convention makes it just one more surprise, one more dizzying moment. When the double-takes just keep coming, nothing surprises or shocks anymore. Trumpworld chews through the bizarre like Joey Chestnut devours hot dogs.
The surreal is essential to this. When everything is weird, nothing is normal. When everything is an exception to the rule, then there are no rules. Melania Trump has consistently been the exception to almost all the received rules of what it means to be a first lady, from her fashion choices to her weirdly postmodern gothic Christmas decorations to her more recent extended disappearance from the public stage. The music used for her entrance indicates that will continue, underscoring how she remains central to the Republican Party by consistently standing aside from it in symbolic ways.
That raises larger questions about how rank-and-file Republicans process the deluge of dissonance from events like this one. A political party whose biggest applause line is Trump’s promise to execute the largest deportation in American history turning to Beethoven’s message of brotherhood and compassion? If no one senses the oddity of that, it’s only because there was so much competition from other odd, hyperbolic and hypocritical extremities of rhetoric.
Schiller embedded in his poem, and Beethoven set to music, one line that stands apart from the rest. All those who cannot participate in this collective identity, says Schiller, should “slink away from this gathering in tears!” For a few more months, the right to slink away is still protected by the Constitution.
