I love Beethoven. Maybe you do too.
I’m not always in the mood for Beethoven, it’s true. Sometimes I find the bombastic bits too bombastic, the lyrical bits too lyrical, the bits where he reaches in and massages the human soul not quite the thing I need that morning.
Beethoven (if you see what I mean, and yes I am aware that other opinions are available, each to their own etc and so forth) can be a bit too Beethoveny.
Schroeder, though. Schroeder really loves Beethoven.
Schroeder loves Beethoven so much that when Lucy, desperate to attract his attention, gets a baseball bat and smashes the bust of Beethoven on Schroeder’s toy piano, he merely walks to the cupboard and fetches another one from his extensive collection.
Schroeder loves Beethoven so much that when listening to the first movement of the Ninth Symphony he has to put an overcoat on because “the first movement was so beautiful it gave me the chills”.
Schroeder’s love for Beethoven is pure and honest and one of the best things about Peanuts.
Rereading the Peanuts strips of 1955 is a patchwork experience. I must have read them all numerous times in my childhood (it was the 1970s – what else was there to do?), but very few of them have stuck.
I remember Snoopy’s brief foray into impersonation – Violet, Lucy, a moose, a pelican, and (most memorably) Mickey Mouse; I remember Linus displaying the weird ability to blow up square balloons; and I remember this subversive strip on the subject of Santa Claus.
But there are swathes of them that I feel as if I’m reading for the first time. Charlie Brown being a martian; an occasional series, each strip ending with Linus asking “five hundred years from now, who’ll know the difference?”; the strip’s brief, strange obsession with Davy Crockett.
But one specific strip has stuck, and came surging back into my mind as if it had never left.
Charlie Brown and Schroeder are sitting. Charlie Brown reads from a book: “At the conclusion of the symphony the audience stood up and cheered. Beethoven, however, because of his deafness, could not hear them, and because his back was to the audience could not see them. With tears in her eyes one of the singers led Beethoven to the stage where he could see the cheering people.”
And in the last panel, Schroeder emits a stifled sob. He loves Beethoven, you see.
What I hadn’t ever noticed, in what seems like a lifetime of knowing this specific strip, was Charlie Brown’s reaction. With what was fast become his trademark ability to represent emotion with a mere squiggle, Schulz gives Charlie Brown’s eyes a sense of discomfort. He looks away, not quite towards the camera. Whether he’s discomforted more by Schroeder’s reaction, or by his own reaction to it, we’re not quite sure. But there is awkwardness afoot.
I’d always thought this strip was about Schroeder. But it’s about Charlie Brown, too. And it’s about everyone. You’re either Team Schroeder or Team Charlie Brown or an amalgam of the two. And that is part of Peanuts’ appeal.
I hadn’t thought of this aspect of Peanuts until reading the excellent ‘Charlie Brown’s America’ by Blake Scott Ball. Among many other insights, Ball talks about the universality of Peanuts. The word he uses (and I must confess this is a new one to me) is ‘polysemy’, which means that “the same character or scene could be reasonably read in multiple ways by a diverse audience”.
While the polysemy in Peanuts is much broader than expressed in this single strip (Ball explores it in some depth), it is nevertheless, I think, a small example of it. Schroeder’s empathy for Beethoven will strike a chord with many for whom the great composer’s music is in any way special. But with Charlie Brown’s reaction – uncomfortable, bemused, possibly uncomprehending – Schulz gives everyone else something to appreciate. And, crucially, he makes no judgement either way. He just shows the two reactions, and leaves us to work out which one we are.
Rereading it nearly fifty years after I first encountered it, I discover I’m a bit of both.
But mostly Schroeder.
UK readers can buy ‘Charlie Brown’s America’ here.
Catch up with my year-long Peanuts reread:
1951 – toy pianos and zigzag shirts