146 Philosophy and Literature Philosophy and Literature, © 2005, 29: 146–163 Symposium: Music, Politics, and Morality James Schmidt “NOT THESE SOUNDS”: BEETHOVEN AT MAUTHAUSEN I O n May 7, 2000, the British conductor Simon Rattle led the Vienna Philharmonic in a memorial performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen. 1 The concert marked the fifty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Austrian camp, which had been established shortly after the Anschluss to receive prisoners who—in the argot of the Third Reich—were classified as “unreformable” and “scarcely trainable.” 2 Those initially imprisoned included Austrian and German criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Roma. They were later joined by Poles, Spanish civil war refugees who had been interned in France and were turned over to German authorities by the Vichy government, Soviet and other prisoners of war, and Jews, many of whom were transferred from camps abandoned in the face of advanc- ing Soviet troops during the last year of the war. 3 The function of Mauthausen was to work inmates to death. It proved to be ruthlessly efficient in carrying out its mission. Estimates of the total number killed range upward from 119,000 and the mortality rate was surpassed only by the extermination camps established in occupied Poland in 1941 and 1942 (Horowitz, p. 10). The camp was built around a working quarry, and prisoners were compelled to carry loads of stones