Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the anti-fascist poetics of T. S. Eliot’s Coriolan I “Triumphal March” (1931)

Eliot’s Beethoven-inspired "Coriolan I Triumphal March" (1931) responds to and challenges the right-wing reception of Beethoven and Nietzsche in interwar Germany. Parodying the fascist interpretation of both composer and philosopher as military heroes, Eliot’s poem instead invokes Beethoven in the idealist spirit of the Vienna Secession’s 1902 "Beethoven" art exhibition. In particular, Triumphal March reveals itself as an ekphrastic response to Max Klinger’s 1902 "Beethoven", a polychromous sculpture which portrayed the composer as a Promethean artist-hero aligned with the Übermensch of Nietzsche’s "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1883-5). Resisting a militarist interpretation of Nietzsche’s “superman” and a fascist discourse of Beethoven-Führer, Eliot follows Klinger’s utopian vision of a “Third Kingdom” as suggesting peace, reconciliation and inner transformation.