Feminist musicologist: Beethoven the rapist

Beethoven is my favorite composer. I have all of the symphonies and all of the piano sonatas on my MP3 player along with various other pieces. So I was amazed when I read that a feminist musicologist, Susan McClary, considers the Ninth Symphony was a "musical hymn to rape."

Or so Robert Anton Wilson claims in his book, Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death.

McClary wrote, "The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music… which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist…”

Wilson commented, "Although I write a lot of satire, I didn’t make this up. You can find McClary’s analysis in Minnesota Composers’ Forum Newsletter, January 1987. She also doesn’t like Western classic music in general, because of its 'phallic violence' and 'pelvic pounding.'

"I insist I did not invent McClary or any of her ravings. Honest to God. Some Femigogues just happen to sound like satire when you quote them verbatim."

I didn't think he made it up, but I did wonder if there was more to the story. Perhaps he was quoting some long-forgotten fringe figure. Wilson was not always generous in his later years in his references to feminists.

But when I did a little research, I found Wilson was not being unfair at all. Susan McClary is considered a prominent feminist musicologist, and she's in the Cleveland area, where I live. She is a professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University. She is married to a heavy metal musicologist who also is on the faculty. (You can't make this stuff up.) I don't know if she considers Beethoven more sexist than, say, Whitesnake.

If you read the entry on her on Wikipedia, you'll see that her Beethoven-as-rapist thesis has been solemnly debated, with musicologists who actually know something about Beethoven rejecting it.

A genuinely scholarly, feminist analysis of classical music would be useful, because perhaps it would explain why there are so few famous composers who are women. Maybe somebody has done it, somewhere.

As it happens, I ran across the McClary passage as I was reading Ted Gioia's new second edition of his The History of Jazz. It is a marvelously erudite and judicious work. Gioia obviously works hard to be fair-minded, often taking time to defend musicians who he believes have been unfairly attacked. Guess which musicologist is the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant?