1)The
fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘Ode to Joy’ is ‘a song of joy
for men who have won the women.’
2)Thoughts
on Akira Kurosawa’s film Dream - Should today’s reality be called ‘nightmare’
?
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Work by Alisa Tanaka-King
|
1)The
fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 'Ode to Joy,' is ‘a song of joy
for men who have won the women.’
Every
year at the end of the year in Japan, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is performed
all over the country, and many citizens join the chorus to sing the fourth
movement, ‘Ode to Joy.’ I don’t know when this became popular end-of-year event
in Japan. In the West, it is very rare for the 9th Symphony to be performed at
the end of the year, and instead the year-end program is usually Handel’s
oratorio Messiah, famous for its ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, as a regular feature of
the Christmas season.
It
was unusual for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to perform Beethoven’s 9th
Symphony on 29 November this year, so I went to the concert with my wife. The
venue, the 2,500-seat Haymer Hall, was packed. I had not heard a live
performance of the 9th for almost 20 years, so I was looking forward to it.
However,
for the reasons explained below, when the fourth (final) movement, Ode to Joy,
begins, although I am always deeply moved by the beauty of the melody and the
power of the rhythm, I also wonder why such old male chauvinist lyrics are
still sung today. I can’t help thinking that they should be rewritten. At the
end of the fourth movement, the audience stood up and applauded wildly, but I didn’t
want to get up from my seat, so my wife and I remained seated.
The
text is taken from “An die Freude”, a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in
1785 to advocate love of humanity and revised in 1803. However, Beethoven added
the introductory words and also significantly altered the original text when he
used it in the fourth movement. This wonderfully powerful chorus begins with
the following:
O
Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern
laßt uns angenehmere
anstimmen
und freudenvollere.
O
friends, not these tones!
But
let’s strike up more agreeable ones,
And
more joyful.
But
“Freunde” does not just mean “friends,” it means “male friends”; and the word “Freundinnen
(female friends)” does not appear even once in this song. And it is not just
this opening lyric, but all the following lyrics in which “men” are the main
characters. For example, the following lyrics are included here and there, with
the usual English translation also noted below the German.
Alle
Menschen werden Brüder,
All people become brothers.
Wer ein
holdes Weib errungen, Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Whoever has won a lovely woman, Add his to the
jubilation!
Laufet,
Brüder, eure Bahn, Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.
Go on, brothers, your way, Joyful, like a hero
to victory.
In this
way, women and LBGT are not included in “all people,” and women are conquerable
objects for men. So, it means that we will conquer women and continue to fight
for victory!
Therefore
this ‘Ode to Joy’ should really be called the ‘Ode to Joy for Men’ who have won
the women. With almost half men and half women in the choir and four solo
singers, two men and two women, I can’t help but find it very strange and weird
to see the women joyfully praising the joy of male chauvinism and joyfully
singing along with the men.
Thus,
no matter how loudly they continue to sing this poem, which is said to have
been written by Schiller to advocate ‘love for humanity,’ I think they will
never achieve the goal of ‘love for humanity,’ especially in Japan where women
are heavily discriminated against.
Here is
the Youtube URL of the fourth movement by the famous conductor Daniel
Barenboim. Barenboim had temporarily stopped performing a few years ago due to
ill health, but when I was in Berlin in June 2023, there was a concert of the
Berlin Symphony Orchestra conducted by Barenboim. I therefore bought a couple
of tickets and went with my wife. However, he seemed weak and not in his usual
good health due to his illness, and I wonder how he has been since then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeO-trAbi7U
I
actually like Beethoven’s Ninth, except for the lyrics of ‘Ode to Joy’
mentioned above. But I also like the Hymn to the Resurrection, with lyrics by
Friedrich Klopstock, sung in the fifth and final movement of Gustav Mahler’s
Second Symphony, Die Auferstehung. I am not a Christian, but I am a person who
cannot live without music by Johann Sebastian Bach and other religious music.
The URL below is a solemn and passionate performance of the final minutes of
the fifth chapter of Mahler’s Second Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein
and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with chorus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifZHwQ9jUI
 |
Work by Alisa Tanaka-King
|
2)Thoughts
on Akira Kurosawa’s film Dream - Should today’s reality be called ‘nightmare’
?
Both
Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Second, though fraught with problems, sing
powerfully of human hopes and dreams for the future, and there is no
doubt that they are symphonic music that has moved the hearts of many people
around the world for many years.
In the
real world, however, Israeli forces continue to carry out indiscriminate air
strikes in Gaza and Lebanon; and in Gaza in particular, nearly 2 million of the
2.3 million inhabitants are facing severe food shortages, and many people,
especially children, who are already malnourished, are on the verge of
starvation and death. On 21 November, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘violations
of international law.’ However, very few countries are likely to actually
enforce ICC arrest warrants, not least the US, which is not a member of the
ICC, and even Japan and the European Union countries, which are.
While
many people in Japan and Western countries, including myself, go to concerts of
Beethoven’s 9th and Handel’s Messiah and enjoy the music of ‘hopes and dreams,’
for the people of Gaza and Ukraine the situation continues to be what I would
call a “nightmare.” I cannot do anything about the fact that I continue to live
my normal and relatively peaceful daily life in such a terribly contradictory
situation, and yet over the past few years I have always felt a little anxious
and depressed because I cannot escape a kind of guilt. Yet, I don’t know what
to do to change this contradictory lifestyle. I don’t know what else to do,
except to keep doing what I can.
This
year marks the 70th anniversary of the release of Akira Kurosawa’s epic film, Seven
Samurai. I don't know how it was in Japan, but many cinemas in Australia
had special screenings of Kurosawa’s films. In Melbourne, where I live, some
cinemas showed films like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of
Blood, Ikiru and many others every Saturday for about three months.
I appreciate the work of Hashimoto Shinobu, who co-wrote the screenplay for Seven
Samurai and some of Kurosawa’s other films, and I have read several of Hashimoto’s
books. So, I re-read some of his books and watched some of Kurosawa’s films on
the big screen again. I was once again struck by the sheer scale of Kurosawa
and Hashimoto’s imagination and creativity with profound humanity.
One of
Kurosawa’s late films, Dreams, consists of eight separate dreams. One of
them, ‘Tunnel,’ I just can’t forget for some personal reason, and I often watch
it on Youtube. The story goes like this:
An army officer
who survived defeat and has been demobilized is walking along a deserted
mountain road in Japan to visit the bereaved families of his men and comes to a
tunnel when a strange dog runs out from inside and threatens him. As he runs to
the tunnel’s exit, he is confronted by the ghosts of his platoon men, all
killed in action, emerging from the darkness of the tunnel. He tells his men of
his own agony of survival and tells them that there is no point in wandering
around as ghosts, so rest in peace. He then leaves the tunnel, but the dog
reappears and barks at him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30dKCzGS6-g
This dream
‘Tunnel’ depicts the misery of the Japanese soldiers who died in the war and
the anguish of the officers who survived in a brilliant, intense symbolist way.
The reason why I cannot forget this work is that Lieutenant Yamashita in this ‘Tunnel’
could also be my father. As a lieutenant in the Kwantung Army, my father fought
against Mao Zedong’s army in Manchuria and was seriously wounded and taken to
an army hospital in Harbin, where he survived. After recovering and being
discharged from the hospital, he was transferred to his home regiment in Sabae,
Fukui Prefecture, where he remained until the end of the war without returning
to Manchuria. The soldiers in my father’s unit that he commanded in Manchuria
were from Iwate Prefecture, and most of them were killed in the war. When I was
a child, my father would leave home every year around the Obon holiday and be
gone for a week or more. Each time, I worried that he had run away from home.
In later years, my mother told me that my father went to Iwate once a year to
visit the graves of his men and apologize to their mothers. I believe that my
father’s stubborn refusal to accept a military pension after the war was due to
his remorse that he was the only one who had survived.
My
father often told me how terrible and difficult the actual fighting in
Manchuria was, and that he thought the Japanese army would not be able to
defeat Mao Zedong’s army because they were brilliantly disciplined and had high
morale. But he never said a word about the atrocities committed by his unit and
other Japanese troops against the civilian population. I think he lacked a
sense of remorse as a perpetrator. Akira Kurosawa made two war films - I
Live in Fear and Rhapsody in August - both about the damage done to
the Japanese people by the atomic bombs, but neither touched on the issue of
Japanese wartime atrocities against other Asians.
On the
other hand, there were many US, Australian and other Allied men who were
prisoners of war and survived until after the war. Many of them insisted after
the war that they had been spared because the atomic bomb had ended the war. I
myself became very close to some of these POWs. The many major US films that
have been made about the Pacific War - such as The Pacific, made in 2010
- also show that if the war had gone on any longer without the use of the
atomic bombs, the US casualty figures would have been unimaginably high. The
film presents a monolithic narrative that glorifies the courageous sacrifice of
their own men for the protection of their nation, while simultaneously
downplaying the immense suffering of Japanese civilians at the hands of
indiscriminate fire and atomic bombings of Japanese cities and towns. This is
also the reason why the Youtube video clip of the film The Pacific is
entitled ‘This War Is The Reason Why The USA Used The Atomic Bomb In WW II.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa6zSv0xdqY
It is
evident that the two countries’ perspectives on war are aligned in terms of
their shared neglect of the role of perpetrators. What measures might be taken
to effect a fundamental transformation of this profoundly biased “view of war,”
which has been shaped by the media and has become firmly embedded in the public
consciousness? What measures might be taken to establish a genuinely universal
and humane belief system that could serve as a basis for overcoming such biased
views? The current global situation is, unfortunately, moving further and
further away from these idealistic objectives.
I would
like to conclude this year’s message with a story that may be perceived as
somewhat utopian and hope that the forthcoming year will bring about a littel more
positive outcome. The final story is entitled ‘Village with a Water Mill’ and
is also from Akira Kurosawa’s Dream.
On my journey I
arrive at a watermill village with a quiet river running through it. I meet an
elderly man fixing a broken waterwheel and am intrigued when he tells me that
these villagers reject modern technology and respect nature. As I listen to
him, he tells me that there is a funeral today. However, I am told that it will
be held as a glamorous celebration. My puzzled ears hear lively sounds and
joyful chants. Instead of mourning and grieving, the villagers rejoice and
celebrate their good life to the end, marching around the coffin with smiles on
their faces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrSBRuDPNtQ
This
old man in the waterwheel village said “Some say life is hard. That’s just talk. In
fact, it’s good to be alive. It’s exciting.” I
would like to end my message at the end of this year by praying that the time
will come when everyone in the world can say, “Life is good, it's very
interesting.”
With
best wishes
End of
year 2024
Yuki
Tanaka
