Some unheard melodies in a Clockwork Orange

Notes on Contemporary Literature, Sept, 2008 by Roger Craik

Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange swarms with allusions to classical music. The favorite composers of Alex, the novel's protagonist, are Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, none of whom Burgess transforms into Alex's nasdat (teen talk) jargon. There are, however, other composers and musical works in the novel, disguised by Burgess to varying degrees and so far unidentified by critics.

In one case, identification is an easy matter. When at the novel's end Alex muses that "there was like this French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur was his first name" (London: Penguin, 2000: 140), Burgess is exerting himself, very obviously, to have us recognize Benjamin Britten's Illuminations (1939), his setting of Artur Rimbaud's poems. On the other hand, Burgess can choose to leave an allusion unglossed: for example, when Alex's probation officer has left and after Alex has had his breakfast, Alex turns the radio on and "there was music playing, a very nice malenky string quartet, my brothers, by Claudius Birdman, one that I knew well" (32). Who is this "Claudius Birdman"? Charlie "Bird" Parker at once suggests himself, and the novel's publication date of 1962 supports this, Parker then being in his heyday. But "Claudius" is not Latin for Charles--"Carolus" is--and Parker was a jazz musician not a classical composer. I suggest that Burgess' "Claudius Birdman" therefore has no connection with Parker, but instead is a fusion of two classical composers--Claude Debussy (who wrote many string quartets) and the French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose Catalogue d'Oiseaux (1956-58) imitates birdsong by means of piano. It is just possible, though, that Burgess is playing a private joke by mischievously trying to catch the reader out by having him or her think of Parker.

Shortly after listening to Birdman, Alex leaves for the "disk-bootick" in hopes of buying "this long-promised and long-ordered stereo Beethoven Number Nine (the Choral Symphony, that is), recorded on Masterstroke by the Esh Sham Sinfonia under L. Muhaiwir" (33). This Beethoven's Fifth is plainly the famous recording by the New York Philharmonic, under Leonard Bernstein ("L."), in the Columbia Masterwork ("Masterstroke") Series, released in 1962, after the publication of A Clockwork Orange, but known by Burgess to be forthcoming. "Esh Sham" is obscure. It matches the number of letters in "New York" and is Arabic for "the left," as in the Arabic name for Damascus ("Dimash esh sham"). "Muhaiwir" is also Arabic and is related to "har," meaning to return, and hence meaning a returner of words, a man who indulges in talk, conversation or argument. Burgess seems to be imagining Beethoven's Fifth performed by a Syrian orchestra under an Arab conductor rather than a New York orchestra under an American-Jewish conductor. Why Burgess should do so is unclear. He might, for reasons best known to himself, either be humorously suggesting that an unlikely locale has, in an imagined future, developed a world-class orchestra, or that Alex has wide-ranging tastes.

The next two instances are more puzzling still. When, toward the beginning of the novel, Alex in the Korova Milkbar hears a woman sing a bar or two of music, he is thrown into an ecstasy:

   it was like for a moment, O my brothers, some great bird
   had flown into the milkbar, and I felt all the malenky hairs
   on my plot standing endwise and the shivers crawling up
   like slow malenky lizards and then down again. Because I
   knew what she sang. It was from an opera by Friedrich
   Gitterfenster called Das Bettzeug, and it was the bit where
   she's snuffing it with her throat cut, and the slovos are
   "better like this maybe." Anyway, I shivered. (22)

As Philip E. Ray points out, Gitterfenster (best translated as "barred window") and his opera (which translates as "bed clothes") are both imaginary ("Alex Before and After: A New Approach to Burgess' A Clockwork Orange." Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess. Ed. Geoffrey Aggeler. [Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1986: 131-39]:137). However, something can be imaginary and yet its coiner can have something real in mind while doing the coining, and this does seem to be Burgess's way with allusions to classical music. Here, I suggest, Burgess is on some level thinking of Alban Berg's Lulu, where Lulu ends up being stabbed to death by Jack the Ripper, but he seems to be at pains to avoid any close connection by saying that his heroine is singing with her throat cut, which nobody could do (unless he is poking fun at the unrealistic conventions even of "realist" opera, and it is worth pointing out that in Lulu the Countess Geschwitz is stabbed but goes on singing). But the allusion that escapes me completely, and with which I am concluding in the hopes that a scholar quicker than I am, and with a better knowledge both of Burgess and of classical music, can identify, is "this new violin concerto by the American Geoffrey Plautus, played by Odysseus Choerilos with the Macon (Georgia) Philharmonic" (26). It is of no obvious help that Geoffrey Chaucer drew on Plautus (could Burgess have been remembering his days as an English undergraduate?) or that Choerilos of Samos was a fifth century playwright and poet mentioned by Horace. The "Macon (Georgia) Philharmonic" has never existed, but it is remarkable and perhaps even prophetic that the now-famous Macon Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1976, fifteen years after Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange.