It is the most influential symphony ever composed, profoundly mirroring the philosophical ferment of its time.
Great gallons of ink have been spilled over it. Each time audiences are polled as to their favorite piece of symphonic music, it emerges the overwhelming choice. It has been performed wherever there is a new concert hall to be dedicated, whenever an orchestra is celebrating a major milestone, wherever someone wants to raise a plea for world peace.
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale based on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” occupies a special place in music history. For the Ninth possesses a timeless societal importance well beyond the musical genius that resonates in its pages.
That’s why, this week, we honor this masterpiece on the 175th anniversary of its first performance, which took place in Vienna on May 7, 1824.
What must that first Viennese audience have thought of the audacious new sounds they were hearing? Could they have anticipated the awesome shadow the Ninth would cast over much of the music of the 19th Century? Apparently not: One account reported that after the performance by a barely competent orchestra — most of the audience stayed quiet and many departed before the end.
It wasn’t the first time something radically new in the history of music mystified its first hearers.
But people did not remain mystified for long. By Beethoven’s death, in 1827, the Ninth had been embraced by musicians and audiences from one end of the Continent to the other. Suddenly musical Europe had a theme song, four bars of simple melody that sang the words “All men will be brothers.” Beethoven’s unpretentious tune came to symbolize all that is noble and great in our Western civilization, a mantra of ethical humanitarianism.
The last of Beethoven’s symphonies wages a public struggle for coherence and resolution. As the music moves from darkness to light, from tragedy to triumphant affirmation, we listeners become players in a shared drama of the spirit. Beethoven brings in solo and choral voices at the end to express what the inarticulate orchestra cannot. Through them we travel an immense emotional distance, from pandemonium to transcendence, beginning with the baritone’s calming recitative: “O friends, no more these sounds! Let us raise our voices in more agreeable and joyous songs.”
No wonder Leonard Bernstein chose the Ninth Symphony to perform on Christmas Day, 1989, to mark the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, a concert event telecast to millions. In the great choral finale, the conductor changed the German word freude (joy) to freiheit (freedom). Beethoven, an avowed opponent of tyranny, surely would not have objected.
The noble sentiments of the Ninth Symphony cannot, of course, bring down a Hitler or a Milosevic; nor can its eloquent appeals forestall a Kosovo or a Littleton-type tragedy. Simply because some people refuse to take heed of its message doesn’t make the message less necessary. In fact, the sentiments expressed by the “Ode to Joy” are all the more vital as our century struts and frets its final hours on the stage. They fill us with a thing called hope.
Recently, millions of people shared in the “Ode to Joy” given as part of the opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. Through a TV satellite hookup, Seiji Ozawa conducted choruses in all five continents represented by the Olympic rings. The gesture befit an island nation that rings in each new year with performances of the Ninth Symphony.
For German conductors of earlier generations, like Wilhelm Furtwaengler, the Symphony No. 9 was a holy ritual not so much to be conducted as celebrated, as a devout Catholic would celebrate mass. The Ninth was a work they reserved for important musical occasions. Nowadays it seems the piece is dutifully trotted out every time a symphony management wants to fill a hall. Overuse and trivializing abuse threaten to deprive the Ninth of its specialness. And that’s a pity. Would theater critics stand idly by if dinner theaters routinely put on “Hamlet”?
The Ninth Symphony has borne witness to nearly two centuries of despots and demagogues, genocide, bloodshed, atrocities and other acts of inhumanity. But it has survived them all, and, in so doing, it has served as a moral compass through the darkness. Beethoven’s transcendent music speaks to our better nature, pointing the path to a brighter world just over the rise, a world of universal love and peace and understanding.
NINTH IN SOUND/SIGHT
– There are more than 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony available on CD. Of these, my favorites are conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwaengler and Leonard Bernstein.
The 1976 Karajan, the second of three stereo Ninths he recorded, is polished and explosive, positively incandescent in the finale (DG Galleria 415832). Furtwaengler’s classic recording was made live at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1951, and if you don’t mind the dim mono sound, the spiritual intensity the great German conductor brings to this work makes his reading one for the ages (EMI 66218). The Bernstein is another live document of a historic occasion, taped on Christmas Day 1989 in Berlin at a concert to mark the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the reuniting of the two Germanys. No other version has its majesty or electric spontaneity (DG 429861).
– Bernstein’s “Berlin Wall” Beethoven and a Karajan performance filmed in Berlin in 1977 and using most of the same performers as the latter’s audio recording are available on DG 072250 and DG 072233, respectively (laserdisc and VHS).
– A CD-ROM titled “Professor Robert Winter’s Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” an interactive guide to the music and its history (The Voyager Co. of Santa Monica, Calif.), is available at computer software stores.
– No finer modern biography of Beethoven exists than Maynard Solomon’s “Beethoven” (Macmillan, 1977). “The Beethoven Compendium,” edited by Barry Cooper and written by four leading Beethoven scholars, is a useful examination of his music, life and times (Thames and Hudson, 1991).
NINTH IN POP CULTURE
The theme of the “Ode to Joy” finale to the Beethoven Ninth is so memorable, so instantly recognizable (even by those who can’t tell Beethoven from Babyface) that it’s no wonder its stirring strains turn up regularly in movies, TV shows and commercials, and popular music.
– The symphony is integral to the plot of the late Stanley Kubrick’s scathing futuristic satire “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), the best-known use of the Beethoven Ninth outside the concert hall. This is the favorite music of the film’s violent misfit (Malcolm McDowell), and it is the same music he is programmed to loathe when he is cured of his violent tendencies.
– The mighty Ninth also puts in a hilarious cameo in the Beatles’ second film, “Help!” (Richard Lester, 1965), where Ringo conducts the Beethoven to pacify a hungry lion his pursuers have turned loose on him.
– Michael Jackson “borrowed” the Cleveland Orchestra’s recording of the Ninth for his album “Dangerous” (1992). The orchestra filed suit, claiming that the singer not only stole the recording but credited himself on the album with writing at least part of the symphony. (The suit was settled out of court.)
– A currently running ad for a German car company has computer-animated androgynous characters building an automobile while singing — in German, of course — the “Ode to Joy.”
