Susan McClary  

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Susan McClary (born 2 October 1946) is a musicologist considered to be a significant figure in the "New Musicology". She is noted for her work combining musicology and feminism.

The Beethoven and rape controversy

A sentence by McClary which has been very widely quoted is given below. Here, "the Ninth" refers to Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

The sentence appeared in the January 1987 issue of Minnesota Composers' Forum Newsletter, a journal with a relatively small circulation. Nonetheless, it continues to elicit a great range of responses. McClary subsequently rephrased this passage in Feminine Endings:

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music. The problem Beethoven has constructed for this movement is that it seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity. (128)

She goes on to conclude that "The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment." (129) It is significant that the critiques of McClary discussed below refer primarily to the original passage from the Minnesota Composer's Forum Newsletter.

Readers sympathetic to the passage may be connecting it to the opinion that Beethoven's music is in some way "phallic" or "hegemonic," terms often used in modern feminist studies scholarship. These readers may feel that to be able to enjoy Beethoven's music one must submit to or agree with the values expressed, or that it requires or forces upon the listener a mode or way of listening that is oppressive, and that these are overtly expressed, as rape, in the Ninth. For related views, see discussion above, as well as sonata form.

Hostile reactions were posted on the Web by several commentators; here are four examples:

• Jewish World Review May 16, 2000 /11 Iyar, 5760: "Here, there and everywhere, people have gone bonkers" by John Leo
• "Painter Jailed for Committing Masterpieces" by Robert Anton Wilson (also Wilson, Robert A. (1998). Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups, p.64. ISBN 0-06-273417-2.)
• Historical Review Press: "The Godfather of the Multi-Cult Nightmare" by Robert Stacy McCain
• "The Feminist Interpretations Debate, Concluded" by Glenn Lamont.

The intent of such postings often is not so much to discuss Beethoven as to support an attack on the purported decadence of modern academia, particularly in the humanities. Such commentators assume that the reader will immediately agree that McClary's opinion is absurd, and then take this absurdity as evidence that modern academics have "gone astray" and are unworthy of the public's support.

Leaving aside readers whose main interest is political, there are other reasons why readers might take offense at McClary's sentence. For instance, on one reading, the passage could be construed as unfair to Beethoven: this would be so if one assumes that the "throttling murderous rapist's rage" putatively expressed in the music is supposed to be a spillover from Beethoven's own habitual thoughts and feelings, which McClary does not suggest. Scholars and historians have found no evidence that Beethoven ever committed a rape or harbored an intense urge to do so. On the other hand, it is also clear that McClary did not literally accuse Beethoven of these things, so the objection might well be considered hypersensitive.

Another possible source of controversy is the possibility that McClary's passage trivializes the horrific experience of actual rape victims, reducing it to a mere metaphor. Even readers sympathetic to criticism of Beethoven's music may find that pinpointing a vague unintended colonial program as "rape" is inaccurate.

The noted pianist and critic Charles Rosen has also commented on the famous passage. He avoids taking offense on any of the grounds mentioned above, and indeed is willing to play with sexual metaphors just like McClary. Rosen's disagreement is simply with McClary's assessment of the music:

We have first her characterization of the moment of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:

[passage appears here]

The phrase about the murderous rage of the rapist has since been withdrawn [see below], which indicates that McClary realized it posed a problem, but it has the great merit of recognizing that something extraordinary is taking place here, and McClary's metaphor of sexual violence is not a bad way to describe it. The difficulty is that all metaphors oversimplify, like those entertaining little stories that music critics in the nineteenth century used to invent about works of music for an audience whose musical literacy was not too well developed. I do not, myself, find the cadence frustrated or dammed up in any constricting sense, but only given a slightly deviant movement which briefly postpones total fulfillment.

To continue the sexual imagery, I cannot think that the rapist incapable of attaining release is an adequate analogue, but I hear the passage as if Beethoven had found a way of making an orgasm last for sixteen bars. What causes the passage to be so shocking, indeed, is the power of sustaining over such a long phrase what we expect as a brief explosion. To McClary's credit, it should be said that some kind of metaphorical description is called for, and even necessary, but I should like to suggest that none will be satisfactory or definitive.

The term "withdrawn" in Rosen’s passage alludes to McClary's later work (1991) in Feminine Endings, quoted above.

Though McClary no longer focuses strictly on gender and sexuality in music (she remains fascinated with how music generates pleasure, however), her original controversial remarks about Beethoven (and also Schubert), despite being nearly twenty years old, continue to exist for her critics as ever-contemporary examples of her scholarly transgressions.

It is worth noting that McClary "can say something nice about Beethoven" (1991, p.119) and discusses his Op. 132 positively, saying "Few pieces offer so vivid an image of shattered subjectivity as the opening of Op. 132." One may also contrast with McClary's Lou Harrison's view of Beethoven's codas as "an exasperated absentee landlord pounding on the door for back rent." (Miller and Lieberman 1998, p.192).