CULTURE ON THE SITE OF BARBARISM?

`No poetry after Auschwitz', Theodor Adorno famously wrote. One can only wonder what he would have made of the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony from the site of the former Matthausen concentration camp in Austria and broadcast to the world (locally, SBS television on 8 May 2000).

No doubt there were good intentions in staging such a performance. Internationally renowned conductor Simon Rattle -- who was there to direct the work -- argued that if one can at least create something beautiful in a place such as Matthausen, then there is the possibility of hope for the future. Despite such good intentions however, isn't this actually a regressive move -- invoking precisely the `affirmative' character of culture that Adorno and others insist is complicit with barbarism? By performing one of the most grandiose pieces of classical music at one of the sites of the Holocaust, are we subsuming the horror and history of such a place under the powerful aesthetic experience of one of the chief works in the cultural canon?

There is no doubt that the Ninth Symphony is an extraordinary piece of music. It is seen by critics such as Dahlhaus as a paramount example of the musical sublime. But is it appropriate to choose such a monumental work, whose final movement, with its massive chorus, provides an almost overwhelming aesthetic experience that must through its sheer musical power sever the connection between event and place? Such power occurs under conditions of extraordinary structural violence within the piece. One needn't be a musical analyst to understand this -- look at some of the historical and cultural appropriations of the music. The ultra-violence in Clockwork Orange accompanied by a particularly kitsch version of the Ninth is apposite here, or alternatively, Adrienne Rich's poem `The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message', which speaks of the violence and patriarchal rage contained within the music. Or think of the use of the music in ads for four-wheel drives crashing through some pristine piece of nature, or the use of the Ninth to accompany sporting triumphs -- and you soon realise the cultural meanings which have attached themselves to this music.

According to Walter Benjamin `there is no work of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism'. Perhaps the intention of staging the, Ninth Symphony at the site of a former death camp was intended to highlight Benjamin's point. But I think it actually does the opposite -- the power and force of the music entwine us in the culture so that we forget the barbarism, or more accurately, appropriate it under aesthetic categories. The reality of the camps is a wound in the idea of history as progress -- yet staging the ninth at Matthausen, then televising it as a global event, works to reaffirm the idea of a progressive spirit of universal humanity via the spectacle -- endorsing those very categories which need to remain under question: spirit, progress, affirmative culture. Instead of making us aware of the culture/barbarism dialectic, such an act merely reaffirms its very condition of possibility.

What this concert presented us with, in the end, was a slightly more highbrow version of what occurred in Schindler's List. David Mamet argued that Schindler's List was ultimately an exploitation film designed to make us feel good simply because we are made to feel -- at the expense of those who were killed. If this is so, then the staging of the Ninth Symphony on the site of a former concentration camp similarly works to construct powerful emotions through music in a place where there ought to be no need for any sublime aesthetic supplements.