ODE TO BABEL

One Man Seeks Lyrics to Unite The Fractious European Union (Wall Street Journal, 5/7/2003)

Christoph Leitl knew there was something missing when he stood for the European anthem at a gathering last summer. "Everybody in the room was mute," he says. That's because the anthem -- Beethoven's soaring "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony -- doesn't have official lyrics....

Mr. Leitl's plan is to hold a Europe-wide contest ... to write lyrics for the anthem....

In January, German songwriter Karl Wolfgang Barthel watched French and German leaders stand silent as the anthem played at an anniversary of a French-German friendship treaty in Berlin. It just didn't seem right, so he wrote his own lyrics. His song (translated from German) begins:

People, gather close together
On this ancient continent
We're all Europeans now,
Strife can't keep us separate....

Mark Niedzwiedz, a songwriter for Universal Music, a unit of Vivendi Universal, in Britain, was also taken by the idea and wrote lyrics to the famous melody over a weekend. Titled "Stand Together," the song starts:

We who join hands stand together
Nations bound by land and sea
Build a bridge that will forever
Span across the centuries
There will be no more division
Only a vision in our hearts....

"Could you have one song with different languages?" wonders Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou.

Yes, insists Mr. Leitl.... People singing competing verses at a major event might well produce a cacophony, but that can't be helped, he says.

It's significant that the proposed lyrics speak of "strife" and "division." Europeans, in truth, are whistling past the graveyard: in their hearts they know that conflict is not permanently buried, and that ghosts of past strife may rise from the grave to haunt them.

But what could be a better emblem of European "unity" then people simultaneously singing in twenty-five different languages? Mr. Leitl is a symbol-maker of genius.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at May 7, 2003 9:51 PM