What happens when a melody created as a universal hymn of hope is co-opted by dictatorships and hateful regimes? A new book, A History of the World in 50 Pieces by Tom Service, delves into this complex question, revealing how the world's most recognisable tunes carry dark and contested histories alongside their uplifting messages.
The Double-Edged Sword of Beethoven's Universal Hymn
The final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, stands as one of the most potent musical statements ever composed. Beethoven laboured intensely to craft a melody simple and powerful enough for a new world to sing, setting Friedrich Schiller's proto-revolutionary text envisioning universal compassion.
Yet, as Service's analysis highlights, this very universality became its curse. The tune's apolitical simplicity allows it to be annexed by any ideology. It became a soundtrack for hope, blasted by students advocating for democracy in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 as tanks advanced. That same year, it was sung with altered lyrics celebrating 'freedom' after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Conversely, the Nazis twisted its message from 'all people should be brothers' to justify the extermination of 'non-brothers'. It served as the national anthem for the apartheid state of Rhodesia. Stalin, after a performance, reportedly endorsed it as 'the right music for the masses'. Today, while it is the anthem of the European Union, its history is a stark lesson in how musical utopias can be effortlessly mobilised for political propaganda.
Happy Birthday: From Classroom Tune to Corporate Asset
The journey of Happy Birthday reveals a different kind of appropriation: corporate rather than political. Sisters Mildred and Patty J Hill composed the melody in the 1890s as 'Good Morning to All' for their kindergarten class. A spontaneous decision to sing it for a friend's birthday transformed it into a global phenomenon.
However, the tune's path to becoming the planet's most recognisable melody is marred by legal battles. Despite the sisters' wish for it to belong to the creative commons, publishers and lawyers began claiming ownership after 1933. In 1988, Warner Chappell bought the rights for $22 million, earning an estimated $2 million annually from its licensed use.
It was only in 2016, after filmmaker Jenn Nelson's successful legal challenge, that the melody was finally declared public property, fulfilling the Hill sisters' original democratic intent for their simple, generous creation.
Shostakovich's Leningrad: A Symphony Weaponised
Perhaps the most potent modern example of music's contested meaning is Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh 'Leningrad' Symphony. Composed during the Nazi siege of Leningrad and performed there in 1942 under unimaginable conditions, it was initially a global symbol of resistance to tyranny.
Its first movement features a notorious, repetitive march theme—a deliberately banal and satirical tune based on a melody by Hitler's favourite composer, Franz Léhar. Shostakovich himself stated this passage was 'about all forms of terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit', explicitly linking it not just to Nazism but to any totalitarian system, including Stalin's Russia.
Today, the symphony is at the heart of a cultural battle. In August 2022, six months into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin addressed an 80th-anniversary performance. He enlisted the symphony, and the young musicians playing it, as part of the war effort, stating it instils a 'readiness to defend' the Motherland. Meanwhile, outside Russia, the same work is performed as an embodiment of resistance to the very autocracy Putin represents.
These stories, drawn from Service's ambitious project, demonstrate that music intended to unite humanity often reflects our deepest divisions. From Beethoven to the Hill sisters to Shostakovich, compositions that dream of commonality are inevitably reinterpreted, revealing that music's power lies not in a fixed meaning, but in its capacity to mirror the full, complex spectrum of human history—for better and for worse.
