Humanism with a religious tint

No single performance of Beethoven´s music can have fired the imagination more than the performance of his Ninth Symphony did in the Viennese Kärntnerthortheater on 7 May 1824. The public, who had turned up in large numbers, saw the composer – deaf as a post – flailing his arms wildly in front the orchestra. The musicians had agreed to give Beethoven the impression he was conducting this work himself. In fact, they were not looking at him at all but at Ignaz Umlauf, who conducted them from the wings, making sure everything went well. It was a pitiful trick, a commanding pantomime, a case of well-meant collusion in which both audience and orchestra were involved. However, this performance was also a musical experience that took the audience completely by surprise.
No-one could have predicted the success of Beethoven’s Ninth. To start with, there was that curious decision to include a choir and soloists in the last movement – maybe not so very unusual (Peter von Winter had already done something similar), but certainly not fashionable. People also viewed Beethoven’s new symphony with some reserve and even with scepticism, as the composition was his first in the symphonic genre after ten years of silence; since the premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1814, Beethoven had eschewed symphonic writing. Could a deaf composer write a symphony capable of competing with his earlier symphonic works? Those who followed the music critics closely would have known that Beethoven was producing ‘hermetic’, ‘difficult’ compositions. Would his latest symphony be as complex? To top it all, there was Beethoven’s much contested decision to include a text by Friedrich Schiller in this new work.
An ode resounds in the final movement of Beethoven’s most famous symphony. An die Freude, written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785, focused on the universal, human desire for divine harmony and peaceful brotherhood, and was not entirely unknown. When it appeared in the journal Thalia in 1786, it had immediately touched the right chord. Beethoven had already made an attempt to compose a song using the text of Schiller’s ode in the late 1790s. Only two short sketches have survived, however, and neither gives any cause to believe this ode would later inspire Beethoven to compose something so earth-shattering.
The political situation in 1820 must have been the reason Beethoven reverted to a text he had put aside more than twenty years earlier. Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and the redrawing of the European map at the Vienna Settlement ushered in a period of political stagnation in Europe. Repression of all sorts of nationalist and socially committed movements characterised this reactionary period. Chancellor Clemens von Metternich, architect of the new Europe, held Austria in his steely grip: he planted spies to inform on radical free thinkers and introduced a new era of censure. It was therefore no coincidence that it was precisely in this period that Beethoven found comfort in Schiller’s hopeful and humanitarian ode. He had earlier thought of using the ode as a song text. Now he probably wondered what sort of influence a salon-performed song could have, bearing in mind the politics of the period. Beethoven therefore made a daring and ambitious decision. Instead of reducing Schiller’s universal ode to chamber-music proportions, he sculpted it to the largest possible dimension, a magisterial apotheosis to a symphony. So, by using a public and apolitical genre like the symphony to transmit Schiller’s democratic idea regarding utopian brotherhood, Beethoven destroyed once and for all the illusion that music was politically innocuous. In his hands, the concert hall became a socially committed platform on which symphonic music lost its innocence forever. This was confirmed many years later on 25 December 1989, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, when Leonard Bernstein gave an equally politicised performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Beethoven committed the first bars of his Ninth Symphony to paper in 1818, immediately after completing the large-scale Hammerklavier Sonata. He had already harnessed the power of a final driving force – a period of intensity that reaches out to the final movement – in some of his earlier compositions. This force is nowhere so obvious as in his Ninth Symphony where the first three movements function as an aesthetic but disorienting backdrop to the universal joy of the finale.
In the opening movement, Beethoven resolutely chooses to explore dramatic falling fifths. This is a strikingly one-sided choice, compared to the enormous richness of the subtheme. Halfway through comes the most startling moment of this opening movement: the mysterious entry returns with its falling fifths. It is no longer serene or embryonic as at the beginning, but really terrifying, with a threatening roll in D from the tympani and some alarming F sharp trills in the low strings. An extremely dark shadow hangs over this triumphal return, wiping out any feelings of comfort. In the scherzo that follows as well, Beethoven introduces some disrupting elements, again opening with falling notes. Strings and timpani abruptly tumble down an octave, thus initiating this feverish and precipitous movement. Here again, we cannot feel at ease as some perversely placed timpani strokes now and again interrupt the neck-breaking pace at which the orchestra must race through more than 1500 bars. Only in the third, slow movement does Beethoven appear to strike a more soothing tone. For the first time, he opens with a rising figure after which a boundlessly long and heavenly beautiful melody unfolds in the strings. This Adagio molto e cantabile is a welcome break from the tumult of the first two movements. Nevertheless, it did not prevent Beethoven from opening the concluding passage (a series of variations on the main theme) with a penetrating fanfare motif.
The final movement opens with an orchestral cacophony that reminds us of the alarming eruption in the opening movement. The cellos and double basses then launch into a powerful recitative that is interrupted by fragments we recognise from the previous movements. Only then does Beethoven present the long-awaited, and world-famous, main melody. After three orchestral variations, the fanfare-like cacophony returns. This interruption is a direct signal to start deploying the vocal ammunition at last. The bass-baritone sings “O friends, not these sounds! Let us strike up something more pleasant, full of gladness”. This is Beethoven´s way of linking the grating cacophony that signals the start of the final movement with Schiller´s ecstatic hymn.
Then two melodies play the leading role: the world-famous main theme that has already undergone a certain amount of variation in the orchestra, and the melody Beethoven created for the words “Be embraced, millions”. Here Schiller associates his ‘enlightened’ humanism with a creator living “above the starry canopy”. In limiting the vocal material to two melodies (the one, an easy sing-along; the other, relatively complex), Beethoven constructs a divide between the unencumbered songs of jubilation and the mystic declamation. While Schiller’s poem increasingly intertwines these two aspects, Beethoven’s melodies are seizing hold of each other and, wielding a double fugue, hurling the symphony towards its climax.
The magnitude and layered nature of this symphony (an opening with a harmless tumble, embellished with terrifying fanfares, and a close with ecstatic songs of jubilation) fire the imagination today too. More than that: this listening experience combining enigmatic recitatives, abrupt disruptions and life-confirming hymns leaves no-one unmoved. Although listening to this symphony is an adventure, it is difficult to recount it to others. This inability to express one’s experience is a purely romantic notion, of course. No-one can lay claim to this work, though it appeals to everyone. In this way, Beethoven’s Ninth is, literally, a “kiss to the entire world”.

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