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Isabel Hilton is a distinguished writer and broadcaster, an expert on foreign affairs and a presenter of Radio 3's Night Waves.


'In the seventies, when I was a student in China, the Chinese government launched an anti Beethoven campaign.

Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four were still in charge and the Cultural Revolution still reigned  –which meant, perversely, that most culture had been banned. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, had spent years reducing China’s cultural offer to a handful of revolutionary operas but the previous year, in a slight melting of the cultural ice, a British symphony orchestra had been allowed to visit.

The anti-Beethoven campaign was the backlash – both against Western culture and against those people in the Communist Party who wanted to relax Mao’s cultural terror. Tedious essays began to appear in the newspapers attacking “Beethoven, the bourgeois composer” and arguing the merits of revolutionary culture. I doubt that the great Chinese masses, most of whom had had regrettably little opportunity to hear any Beethoven, cared one way or the other, but they knew what they had to do. Resolutely they criticised Beethoven in meetings up and down the land.

One day, a teacher from the Shanghai Conservatoire came to lecture us on the reactionary – and therefore inferior – nature of Beethoven’s music. After half an hour of rehearsing the Party line he finally played a few bars of the 'Ode to Joy' on a tinny cassette player, to demonstrate his case. Despite the equipment, it never sounded better. The class smiled. They were not convinced. The lecturer looked embarrassed.   He didn’t believe it either. When Mao died and Jiang Qing fell from power, I thought of the man from the Shanghai Conservatoire with pleasure. Now, at least, he could listen to Beethoven without first having to pretend to hate him.'