Beethoven Dada

Sometime around 1920, the German composer Stefan Wolpe, then eighteen years old, organized a Dada provocation in Berlin, in which he set up eight Victrolas on a stage, placed on each of them a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and had a team of confederates play the records at different speeds. In a 1962 “Lecture on Dada,” at Long Island University, Wolpe described his youthful escapade as follows:

I had eight gramophones, record players, at my disposal. And these were lovely record players because one could regulate their speed. Here you have only certain speeds—seventy-four and so on [he means seventy-eight]—but there you could play a Beethoven symphony very, very slow, and very quick at the same time… I put these things together in what one would call today a multifocal way.

The event was typical of the iconoclastic spirit of Dada in the years after the First World War. Yet it also turned out to be prophetic of subsequent experiments in musical simultaneity—notably, “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” John Cage’s 1951 piece for twelve radios. (Although Cage was probably unaware of Wolpe’s Beethoven collage, he had first-hand knowledge of the pre-Nazi Berlin scene, having visited the city in 1930, when he was a teen-ager; among other things, he attended a concert of “gramophone music” presented by the composers Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch.) You could even see the Beethoven happening as a distant premonition of the hip-hop art of turntablism, in which record-players become independent musical instruments. At the same time, there was a critical, quasi-political edge to Wolpe’s action: he was puncturing the nationalistic worship of canonical German composers that had been commonplace in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, and that would become even more hysterical under Nazism. (For more on Beethoven’s complex historical role, see David Dennis’s potent study “Beethoven in German Politics” and Matthew Guerrieri’s exuberantly wide-ranging book “The First Four Notes.”)

In my 2007 book “The Rest Is Noise,” a history of twentieth-century classical music, I devoted a few lines to Wolpe’s experiment, wondering what it could possibly have sounded like. This year, the Southbank Centre, in London, is mounting a year-long festival inspired by my book, and at an allied lecture, in March, I decided to attempt a realization of Wolpe’s piece.

My first thought was to try to replicate the feat live. But the challenge of tracking down eight vintage Victrolas, not to mention eight vintage Beethoven Fifths, seemed insuperable. Instead, I put together a digital simulation. I first obtained MP3s of three pre-1920 recordings of the Fifth: a pioneering account under the direction of Friedrich Kark, from 1910; a celebrated 1913 rendition by Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic, which is sometimes erroneously listed as the first full-length recording of a symphony; and a version led by François Ruhlmann, from around 1916. Then I used the program Audacity to slow down and speed up the audio files, following advice from several Victrola experts as to what range of speeds was then available. Finally, I layered eight distinct Beethoven files in GarageBand. The end result, immortalized in the YouTube video above, is far from being conventionally beautiful, but no one can deny that it provides a fresh perspective on a familiar work.