Sunday Review: The Lives of Others

The music, the music!

By Bob Boldt

“I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps naively so, to think that people can work such miracles!” Wrinkling up his eyes, Lenin smiled rather sadly, adding: “But I can’t listen to music very often. It affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm – what a hellishly difficult job!” –Maxim Gorky’s anecdote about Lenin listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata

With this quote, says Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the writer and director of the 2006 German film The Lives of Others [Das Leben der Anderen], began the genesis of the script for the film. Music, in Gorky’s Lenin anecdote, can have the power to overthrow ideology because it appeals directly to the emotions, stealthily bypassing the rational centers. Politicians and revolutionaries have known for over four thousand years that art can be a powerful ally and a deadly enemy of government. Few cultures, including our own, are ever comfortable in allowing its artists complete freedom of expression.
    Since this film deals so deeply with idealism, pragmatism, and aestheticism, I think it may be of some value to speak about the Gorky quote a bit more critically. Gorky, Von Donnersmarck, and virtually all the film’s critical reviewers from William Buckley on the right to Roger Ebert on the left seem to be of the opinion that a human sentimentality engendered by Lenin’s appreciation of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 (the Appassionata) would have been a good thing.

    I remember a comment Von Donnersmarck made concerning his instructions to Gabriel Yared, his composer. He was struggling with exactly the right piece of music for the character playwright Georg Dreyman to play on the piano for the eavesdropping Stasi officer Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler to hear and mark the beginning of his aesthetic and moral transformation. Character Dreyman says in the film, “Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean really heard it, really be a bad person?” Composer Yared was tasked by director Von Donnersmarck to compose a piece of music that could have turned even Hitler toward the light.

    One might have expected a composition similar to the hauntingly, slightly romantic love theme that appears earlier in the film. What we are treated to is a bold, modern, slightly dissonant, atonal composition that startled me with the unexpectedly powerful direction into which it moves. Because we, the audience, are so strongly affected by the “Sonata for a Good Man,” we may assume that Stasi officer Wiesler is likewise impressed. In actuality, I doubt if a person of Wiesler’s sensibilities would have responded well to such a complex and abstract musical composition. Affecting music that might have moved him off the party line would have been more of the Clair de lune ilk.
    In the supplemental interviews accompanying the DVD, director Von Donnersmarck tells how he tried to influence the composer to produce a composition more sentimental and emotionally accessible. The composer finally convinced him of the need for a piece of “real” (not reel) music. The original composition, “Sonata for a Good Man,” was the only thing that could authentically convey the proper gravity and intensity required by the script at that point in the film. At last the director, to his credit, agreed. Only a higher level of genius possesses the intelligence and the lack of ego to know when he is wrong.

I cannot say enough about the score of The Lives of Others. In some ways much of it harkens back to the days when music was nearly always used (sometimes with shameless manipulation) to guide the audience through the various emotional levels of the film and the characters’ moods. The Lives of Others uses this technique as well, but in beautifully subtle ways. The music blends so seamlessly with the cinematography, the dialogue, and the editing that, like some strange synaesthesia, it is impossible to isolate it from the other components, like the color of the room or the texture of the costumes. This is, to my way of thinking, the mark of a superb master of film music composition. The music is not mere background. In one nearly unnoticed moment in the very last seconds of the film, the love motif returns with a devastating if nearly subliminal effect. About another part of the film, I was awed to hear the director speak of the lengths to which he went to secure one piece of a popular song that was barely audible in the background of one scene in a bar.
    Back at the Gorky quote, I think it quite possible that it may have been laudable that Lenin was able to subdue his “weakness” for Beethoven in the interests of the revolution. Forgive me for the following statement, as I am not a diligent student of modern history, but I would not argue against the importance, necessity, and positive significance of the Russian Revolution. I think the popular attitude expressed by the director and the critics, that Lenin’s idea of revolution was inherently evil, is rather absolutist, if not imperialist. The Revolution was necessitated less by the theories of Marx than by the excesses of the Romanovs. Had Lenin been able to anticipate Stalin and the German Stasi, would he have abandoned his goal? I don’t know. Perhaps another art form might have served his perspective better – not listening to Beethoven but, say, reading Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed.
    It is no secret that revolutions have a way of getting out of the hands of the revolutionaries themselves. Are we then to blame Lenin for the excesses of Stalin, or Marx for the excesses of Lenin? I believe that most modern revolutions have been no more and no less excessive or bloody than they had to be, considering the horrors they were overthrowing—the French and Russian aristocracies. We were lucky. Ours no doubt would have been as excessive as many of the other revolutions except we were a mere colony and not subjects on the oppressor’s home ground. Our revolution did not decapitate the crowned head of George III. It merely got his boot off our neck.

    Different times call for different moralities, different aesthetics, and even different truths. I know that conservative anti-Communist critics have hailed The Lives of Others as the definitive indictment of Communism. I saw it in more universal terms, both as the chillingly representative portrayal of one of the most relentlessly brutal controlling regimes since Orwell’s prescient depictions in his own fictional 1984 and as the understanding representation of the excesses resulting from the domination of a bureaucracy (any bureaucracy) with absolute control and absolute power.
    I personally think that the vehement excesses of the Stasi under the German Democratic Republic of East Germany may actually say more about the obsessions of the German character than the evils of Communism. You may recall the obsessive record-keeping and documentation that the Nazis took to such heights under the Third Reich. Often their own documents provided the Nuremburg judges with the best, most complete evidence that could have been wished for in framing indictments. It is hard to say exactly when the Germans first acquired this compulsion to make maps larger and more complex than the actual territories – Kant, Hegel?
    But here then is one moral: We need art and artists. Society always tries to skate along the safe, sound ice that exists somewhere between tyranny and chaos. Artists most always are seen as a group that would push the societies dangerously close to anarchy. We love his paintings – only get him out of our drawing room! He smells bad and he is always chasing after our women.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt