MELODIA

MELODIA is the record shop in the town center where Alex buys his beloved classical music, most notably the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. It serves as a site of consumer desire and, later, of traumatic disillusionment when Alex discovers that his conditioning has poisoned the very music he once worshipped.

Location and Character

MELODIA was a record shop on Taylor Place, favored by Alex for its quick service in obtaining new recordings. The shop was run by Andy, a bald, very thin, and always helpful man who knew Alex's tastes. When Alex visited to collect his long-ordered stereo recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (the Choral Symphony, performed by the Esh Sham Sinfonia under L. Muhaiwir on the Masterstroke label), Andy greeted him with the news that it had arrived, waving the great shiny white sleeve that bore the frowning, beetled face of Ludwig van Beethoven himself. Alex paid without a trial spin, greedy to hear it alone on his own stereo.

A Changed Place

After Alex's release from prison and his conditioning under the Ludovico Technique, he returned to MELODIA, but the shop had changed. Andy was no longer there; instead, a young man barely older than a nadsat himself stood behind the counter, clicking his fingers and laughing madly while teenage boys and girls danced to a horrible pop song. When Alex asked to hear Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, the counterman and the dancing nadsats mocked him for wanting a "seemfunnah." The counterman directed Alex to a listening booth and put on a disc, but it was not the Mozart Forty—it was the Mozart "Prague." As Alex listened, he discovered the full horror of his conditioning: the doctors had so fixed things that any emotional music would make him sick, just like witnessing or wanting to commit violence, because all the violence films had been accompanied by music. The lovely Mozart became horrible, and Alex dashed out of the shop with the nadsats laughing after him and the counterman shouting. MELODIA, once a place of anticipated bliss, had become a site of traumatic betrayal, where the very thing he loved most was turned against him.