Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No.9, Op.125 "Choral"

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Baritone Recitative

An die Freude (Ode to Joy)
Friedrich Schiller

Baritone, Solo Quartet and Choir

Tenor and Choir

Choir

Further Information

• In English
  • It's a familiar tale: an aging Beethoven, ill and deaf, conducting the orchestra and chorus in the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, conducting even after they had ceased to perform, after they had reached the end of the stunning new work, after the audience had already begun to applaud, continuing to conduct until a singer turned him around so that he could see the thunderous cheers that were resounding throughout the hall. The image is deeply moving, so much so that more cynical historians would like to discount it; it is, they feel, too perfect to be true. Yet this once, however, the cynics are apparently wrong, for several eyewitnesses tell the same tale of that fateful performance in Vienna on May 7, 1824. Their stories vary somewhat in detail. Some place the dramatic moment at the symphony's conclusion. Others maintain it occurred at the end of the scherzo. This difference of opinion might merely be credited to the passage of years between the incident itself and the day long after when those observers at last spoke to a biographer. Whenever the applause occurred, the fact that it passed unheard by Beethoven makes clear that he could never have heard a note of this most magnificent composition. Think about that bitter fact, and then wonder that a man so crossed by fate could still demand a choir to sing rapturously of joy.

    Beethoven had first encountered Schiller's poem "An die Freude" ("To Joy") over thirty years before he completed the Ninth Symphony. The poem had first appeared in print in 1785, and from that time on was quite popular in the German states. Evidence suggests that Beethoven may have set the text to music as early as 1792. Other attempts were made in 1808 and 1811, when Beethoven's notebooks include remarks to himself concerning possible settings for the familiar text. These years of toying with Schiller's ode were also years of personal and professional growth. When he first came to know the poem, he was an optimistic young artist who had not yet composed his First Symphony, yet Beethoven's third approach to the poem, in 1812, came with the completion of the Eighth Symphony. Perhaps the professional experience he had gained in those decades led him to consider that a poem of such spiritual power required an equally powerful setting, for he soon embarked on the creation of his Ninth Symphony, the work in which Schiller's words would be given glorious flight.

    Ten years would pass before this final symphony's completion, ten years in which Beethoven shed blood over every note, considering and rejecting over two-hundred different versions of the "Joy" theme alone. At the end of that time, he offered to the public a radically new creation that was part symphony and part oratorio, a hybrid that proved puzzling to his less daring observers. The conductor Louis Spohr, who knew Beethoven, asserted privately that the piece was "tasteless," and Verdi, who, it must be admitted knew a thing or two about how to blend music and words, lamented that the grand finale was "badly set." Yet others have better understood Beethoven's final symphonic work, and have defended it eloquently. Let us give Claude Debussy the last word: "It is the most triumphant example of the molding of an idea to the preconceived form; at each leap forward there is a new delight, without either effort or appearance of repetition; the magical blossoming, so to speak, of a tree whose leaves burst forth simultaneously. Nothing is superfluous in this stupendous work... Beethoven had already written eight symphonies and the figure nine seems to have had for him an almost mystic significance. he determined to surpass himself. I can scarcely see how his success can be questioned."

    © Elizabeth Schwarm Glesner

• In German
  • Rexroth, Dieter. Ludwig van Beethoven. 9. Symphonie
    Mainz: Schott, 1979.

  • Eichhorn, Andreas. Beethovens Neunte Symphonie
    Kassel: Bärebreiter, 1993.