Take That, Ludwig

To Western music lovers, Beethoven may have written "the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man," as Novelist E.M. Forster felicitously phrased it. But to China's propagandists, Beethoven, along with Schubert and Mozart, was just tinkling out a tune on that dreary old capitalist cash register. "There are some people who to this day are still uncritically introducing these things to our youth," huffed Peking's People's Daily last week. "If we go on like this, where will our young people be led?"

Apparently alarmed by the enthusiastic response given three visiting orchestras from the West last year, the London Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Peking has launched an attack on the decadent composers who are the mainstay of the classical repertory. Beethoven, said the newspaper, was a "German capitalist," while Schubert's gloom resulted from his oppression by Austria's feudal rulers. If he had been a good Marxist, Schubert would of course have finished the "Unfinished" Symphony. Mozart is scarcely worth considering. Nothing he ever wrote compares with The White-Haired Girl, the propaganda-laden Chinese revolutionary ballet.

Was Peking seriously espousing such nonsense? Well, not exactly. The propagandists' real target, some Western observers speculated, was not Beethoven, Schubert, or even poor Mozart, but someone much closer at hand. Though Sinologists differed as to who the target might be, one school went so far as to speculate that it was none other than Chairman Mao's wife Chiang Ching, the self-anointed cultural overseer of the People's Republic. Chiang Ching had warmly welcomed the Western orchestras and had specifically asked the Philadelphia Orchestra to include Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the "Pastoral," in its program.

Newfangled Ideas. Chiang Ching and her colleagues, this group of Sinologists noted, had been behind recent attacks on Confucius, which, as everyone in China seemed to know, was really their way of denouncing the pragmatists led by Premier Chou Enlai. The ball is now back in Chiang Ching's court, and who knows how she will show her wrath against Chou's group? Will she lash out at such modern composers as Bartdk and Stravinsky, assuming that everyone realizes she means you-know-who and his newfangled ideas? Or will she defiantly schedule a Peking Beethoven Festival and, like Schroeder in the Peanuts cartoon, carry a bust of Ludwig wherever she goes?