Beethoven’s Ode to Joy like you’ve never seen or heard it!

It’s one of the most ubiquitous, hummable and morally edifying tunes ever written, and it makes a great ringtone. The Ninth Symphony choral Ode to Joy inspired Gustav Klimt’s great Beethoven fresco; it was championed by the Nazis as the pinnacle of German culture, and it was synthesized in Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange as a tool for mind control. Now in Melbourne, via MOMA in New York, installation artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present Beethoven through the rabbit hole.

Some people would decry  putting screws and bolts on a Steinway’s strings as sacrilege; those people would certainly object to this performance art piece, Stop, Repair, Prepare, in which a manhole has been cut out of the abdomen of a Bechstein grand. A pianist emerges from the middle of the instrument – a little like Marilyn Monroe popping out of the Kennedy cake – to play Ode to Joy contorted, upside down and backwards in front of a bemused audience. “We wanted to put a hole, basically, in that familiar piece of music,” says Havana-born Calzadilla, “and question the symbolic meaning of the Schiller poem about brotherhood and...