M*A*S*H’s Dr. Winchester and the Chinese prisoners in the American camp find a common language in a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet.
The final episode of the hit TV series, M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, garnering an astounding 125 million viewers, the most in television history at the time for a single program. The show, set in an American Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH unit) during the Korean War, ran for eleven seasons and told the stories of the doctors and nurses who performed grueling, heart-wrenching work just beyond the war’s front lines. The secret of the show’s success was its brilliant blending of comedy and pathos; though billed as a “situation comedy” (or “sitcom”), it was called more accurately a “dramedy” by some observers.
During the course of its run, the show explored the psychological makeup of each of its main characters, and the balance between comedy and drama increasingly tilted toward the latter as each season passed. Indicative of this shift in tone was the replacement of three of the show’s original protagonists with characters of more depth. Colonel Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) was succeeded as camp commander by Colonel Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) after season three; Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) gave way to Captain B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) at the same time; and the bumbling, militaristic Major Frank Burns was replaced by Major Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers) after the show’s fifth season.
Winchester was a much more imposing and multifaceted figure than Burns. A snobby Boston Brahmin who usually exuded a disdain for those around him, he was a skilled surgeon and an intellectual heavyweight. Though his profession was medicine, his real passion was classical music, and several episodes of M*A*S*H involved plotlines centered on Winchester’s passion for music. (Actor Stiers is also a professional conductor who has led ensembles across the globe.)
The most moving of these stories came in the show’s famed final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen.” With the war winding down at last, a sick Winchester is taking a walk some distance outside the camp’s boundaries when five Chinese soldiers accost him. Fearing he is about to be shot, Winchester cowers in fear until the soldiers produce musical instruments hidden in the motorcycle and side car in which they had been riding. “My God, they’re musicians,” Winchester exclaims. The quintet strikes up both Chinese and American popular tunes, which grates on the snooty Winchester. They proceed to follow the American doctor back to camp, surrendering themselves.
Once back at the MASH unit, the Chinese musicians are secured in a hastily-constructed wire enclosure, and they continue to play raucously as Winchester, sitting in his tent, attempts to listen to classical music on his record player. Perturbed, the doctor storms over to the Chinese prisoners and shouts at them to desist. Speaking no English, they do not understand what the American is telling them until Winchester, who also speaks no Chinese, finally says in exasperation, “I am trying to listen to MOZART.” A look of recognition and awe comes over the faces of the musicians: “Ah, Mozart!” As Winchester turns to go back to his tent, the leader of the group plays on his flute the sublime main theme of Mozart’s famous Clarinet Quintet. Winchester stops in his tracks, a look of wonderment on his face.
Winchester then attempts to teach the Chinese musicians the Clarinet Quintet in its entirety, conducting them in his free time in the camp’s mess tent. Too soon however, the prisoners are loaded onto a truck by American military police in order to prepare them for a prisoner exchange. Winchester pleads with the MPs to let the men stay: “You can’t. Not yet. I’ve come too close to stop now!” As the truck pulls away, the Chinese musicians serenade Winchester with an excellent rendition of the first part of the Quintet. The surgeon, who maintains an emotional reserve even with his long-time American comrades, tears up and waves goodbye forlornly to these men, technically his enemy, whose only common language is a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before by a man born in Salzburg.
A short time afterward, wounded prisoners of war are brought to the MASH unit. As Winchester examines one dying Chinese soldier, he suddenly notices that the man is the leader of the quintet. “Oh God, no,” Winchester moans. “He wasn’t even a soldier. He was a musician.” A medic tells Winchester that the man’s four comrades are already dead. The stunned doctor makes his way to his tent to gather himself, putting on his record player a recording of Mozart’s Quintet as a balm. But upon hearing the opening strains of the Quintet’s main theme, Winchester pulls the needle off the record and smashes the vinyl album over the player. The horror of war has turned even this thing of absolute beauty into an ugly reminder of death—meaningless, undeserved, untimely death. Like the Devil from which its evil springs, war warps the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the episode’s conclusion, we the viewers are left to consider whether in Doctor Winchester’s soul the Gates of Hell will prevail over the memory of the beauty that the American doctor, the Chinese musicians, and the young man from Salzburg created together.
This essay was first published here in March 2014.
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The featured image (detail) is a photo of David Ogden Stiers as Major Charles Winchester, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The final episode, particularly the Winchester story, was very moving but I admire the episode when Winchester ‘saves’ a young pianist whom he convinces to play music with his remaining ‘left; hand.
I remember that episode! Though I didn’t enjoy the music as much, I love the story. He became one of my favorite characters, because of his love for music.
I searched for this episode. Thanks so much for your insightful commentary and insights.
Thanks for providing this summary of the episode and the link to the relevant Mozart piece. It brings me to tears listening again now, so many years after the series ended.
It’s just as poignant as Hawkeye’s psychotherapy episode with Sidney, recounting the Koreans on the bus, killing the chicken to prevent being discovered behind enemy lines. In this episode, Hawkeye is in therapy and breaks down, much like Charles, because of the senseless death of a baby. Hawkeye demands quiet on the bus behind enemy lines, to save the lives of all those on the bus. The mother smothers her own innocent child to save the lives of the many on the bus, including Hawkeye. That episode has haunted my psyche for years.
Fantastic MASH writers used the characters’ humour to park the horrors of war in the tent of war, but gave us the real pathos of this wartime badinage and escapist humour, dissolving with the deaths of innocents.
If only real-time media could bring us all to tears about the Zionist-expansionists murdering Palestinians, or Russian expansionists exterminating Ukranians.
Music Schindler’s List – John Williams NL orchestra Guillaume Engrand
Another good one was convincing the stuttering soldier that he was no idiot; allowing him to aspire to greater reading opportunities than comic books. He tells him a list of historical greats who were stutterers, and gives him a copy of “Moby Dick”. We later find when he listens to a taped “letter” from his sister Honoria that she is a stutterer.
Yes, another great episode! Thanks for your comment.
I watch very little television but have a room in our home converted into workout space. With a television. One channel offers three back-to-back MASH episodes. They’ve been running back-to- back from the beginning episodes forward. It’s impressive how over time they gained in complexity. If I were asked, I would argue the series is the finest television has ever offered. Well done Stephen….
That MASH, with its grim setting of War, contained accidentally compelling themes is not a surprise. Dr. Klugewicz’s undifferentiated praise (a “brilliant blend of comedy and pathos”) in the pages of the Imaginative Conservative, is. MASH’s popularity in 1970’s American Culture identifies it as a symptom and furthering force of moral decay. MASH reltentlessly propounded, undergirded, and centralized the non-principle that “Truth is relative.” As a non-principle usually gets around to doing, the show sacrifices Christian sexual mores. Whatever redeeming qualities it had should be read in the footnotes, where this article makes no pretence of placing them. As we watch our Civilization implode, let us centralize essentials; let us distinguish accidents; let us not allow ourselves to be beguiled by what was often heartless because it still had some heart.