In 2003 the journal MusikTexte polled composers on their views about the Irak war. They received more than fifty responses: some wrote letters, others wrote compositions. Zoltán Jeney sent in just one small work for one voice, one of the saddest musical jokes of all time. In this narrow-range, wavering, roaming chromatic melody, the listener slowly recognizes the theme of the Ode to Joy. While Beethoven’s exhilarating melody has over the centuries proclaimed the triumph of humanism, and is even used as the anthem of the European Union, Jeney’s version is a lost, clumsy, privately mumbled parody of the original, and as such says far more than a verbalized protest.