VERDI, HITLER & GODWIN

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Joe Greens! In fact, October 10, 2013 is a very special birthday—the 200th of Italian opera composer Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi.

Giuseppe Verdi, 1813-1901, Italian operatic master, vying with Richard Wagner as the greatest opera composer of the 19th Century. See http://goo.gl/rNZVpb.)

Verdi is renowned for such famous operas as Aida (elephants marching on the bank of the Nile), La Traviata (cough, cough; finita), Rigoletto (he of the occasionally misplaced hunchback), Un Ballo in Maschera (with the “Governor of Boston” to appease the censors), plus another 24, some of which even sound familiar, sort of.

His name is also associated with the term “Verdi A 432,” and thereby hangs a tale that eventually leads, by way of Godwin’s Law, to Adolf Hitler.

My oldest source on this is The New York Times, August 13, 1989, and its article by Fred T. Abdella titled “As Pitch in Opera Rises, So Does Debate.” (See http://goo.gl/pWknvo.)

This debate is implied at the beginning of an orchestra’s performance: The oboist sounds an A, and the other instruments tune to this note. By the way, an oboe is used because this reed instrument is considered one of the more stable in maintaining its tune with changing temperature and humidity.

And what, we ask, is an oboe’s A?

It depends.

Noted that article back in 1989, “The A used by most symphony and opera orchestras today for uniform tuning ranges between 440 hertz, or cycles per second, to 444 hertz.” What’s more, the tone A had gradually risen over 200 years.

Tuning fork for A 440. Image from www.FisherViolins.com.

A tuning fork of the era suggests that Handel (1740) set A at 422.5 Hz. The French standardized their A at 435 Hz in 1859. And, in 1881, the Italian Ministry of War required their military bands to define A as 432 Hz, at least in part at Verdi’s urging.

In 1939, an international standard A was set at 440 Hz.

This has been reaffirmed by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO16 in 1955 and again 1975.

Yet, according to The New York Times article, pitch continued to rise. “The New York Philharmonic, under Zuban Mehta, tunes to an A at 442 Hz, as does the Chicago under Georg Solti and the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. In Berlin, orchestras tune to an A around 448 Hz. In Moscow, the symphony’s pitch is even higher, near 450 Hz.”

Even today, conductors generally—though not universally—prefer higher pitch because it gives a brilliance, a brightness of sound. And, apparently, even the musically untrained respond favorably to this brightness.

The debate continues. And, as with many discussions occurring today on the Internet, Godwin’s Law applies. Formulated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990, Godwin’s Law states “As an online discussion grows larger, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Mike wasn’t being facetious. He offered the proposition as an aspect of memetics, loosely, of how culture evolves.

And, sure enough, the whackos have taken hold of Verdi A 432 and transformed the discussion to the Nazis, specifically Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, Ph.D. of 19th Century Romantic Drama, raging anti-Semite and all-around book burner Josef Goebbels.

Josef Goebbels, 1897-1945, Nazi, Reich Minister of Propoganda. Image by Sandau, German Federal Archives.

Goebbels, so runs the argument, recognized that a higher musical pitch encouraged more aggressive listeners—just what he needed to encourage his hateful agenda.

That 1939 international conference establishing A 440 is further alleged to have been an Anglo-Nazi affair, with the French pointedly left out. What’s worse, A 440 was also seen as catering to the U.S. jazz trade.

Gott im Himmel! Quelle horreur!

E buon compleanno, Giuseppe! ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2013