Symphony No. 9, Choral by Ludwig van Beethoven | Concert Library

Symphony No. 9, Choral

Library of Congress

Anecdotes, trivia, and cultural references abound attesting to the mythic status of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, arguably the greatest accomplishment of history’s most enduringly beloved composer. We have the image of Beethoven onstage at the work’s premiere, stone deaf, gaze heavenward, conducting the orchestra of his imagination (the corporeal orchestra had been instructed to follow the concertmaster); unable to hear the audience’s rapturous applause, he had to be prodded by one of the musicians to turn for his bow. Over a century and a half later, Leonard Bernstein would conduct the Ninth to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work became the origin of a macabre superstition, akin to thespians’ fear of Macbeth, that a ninth symphony was fated to be a composer’s last. (Mahler attempted to cheat death by naming what was essentially his ninth symphony “Das Lied von der Erde,” as he worked simultaneously on his proper Symphony No. 9; his Tenth was left unfinished.)

Of course, it is the sheer strength of Beethoven’s artistic statement that has catapulted the Ninth to such iconic status. Its most famous bit—the Ode to Joy, that ubiquitous melody that has been appropriated countless times in countless contexts—is so much more than a catchy tune; it is the denouement of a profoundly conceived and ingeniously wrought assertion of humanity and transcendence, by an aging composer notoriously plagued by worldly ills, and consciously writing for listeners of future generations.

The symphony’s barely audible opening measures conjure the dawn of the cosmos: horns and strings whisper an open fifth—no major (“happy”) or minor (“sad”) third, no implication yet of human subjectivity. We hear civilization (and, perhaps, its discontents) emerge with the thunderous arrival of D minor, voiced tutti, fortissimo; primordial tranquility yields to the will of man. Analysis reveals, post facto, the initial open fifth, on A, to have been the dominant to the home key of D minor: the dawn of creation pointed inevitably to the rise of humanity.

In characteristically Beethovenian fashion (cf. the Fifth Symphony), the emergence of a rich, complicated universe is made meticulously audible, one brick laid at a time. In each measure, Adam names another wonder of creation. By the end of the first movement’s development section, we are caught helplessly in the bustling swirl of modernity. And then: the mighty arrival at the recapitulation, the open fifth revisited, transfigured into resplendent D major, and in a blinding fortissimo—but the bass foundation of this chord is not the root tone of D, but the implicative third (F-sharp). To herald the recapitulation with such harmonic instability (in first inversion, for the music majors) flew in the face of good Classical manners á la Haydn and Mozart. Having so expertly constructed such a magnificent edifice, Beethoven, without warning, makes the ground to shift beneath our feet. Perhaps man’s seeming triumph is in fact man’s folly.

The second movement presents a wholly distinct worldview from the first—Tovey writes, “After tragedy comes the satiric drama.”—and here Beethoven further defies what the listener thinks she knows. Contemporary audiences would have expected the slow movement to follow; in what must have been a jarring psychological ploy, Beethoven instead proceeds to the scherzo. He moreover assigns the timpani greater authority in this movement than it likely had enjoyed in any prior music: its one-measure solo at the outset foreshadows a striking passage later in the movement, when it will single-handedly steer the entire orchestra, which has strayed to the remote key of E minor, back to D minor. (Nor is this the last time in this symphony that Beethoven will arm an instrument with human will.)

The deeply felt Adagio molto e cantabile offers another perspective still. The music critic Sir Donald FrancisTovey: “The first movement gives us the tragedy of life. The second movement gives us the reaction from tragedy to humor. … [T]he slow movement is beauty of an order too sublime for a world of action.”

The violent outburst that begins the finale stops short as abruptly as it began. The symphonic medium suddenly turns operatic, as the cellos and basses sing a brief but piercingly expressive recitative. Never before had instrumental forces been made so overtly human, been given such capacity to say something. What follows represents one of the most audacious and remarkable coups ever achieved in music, and which can be credited with revolutionizing the symphonic form as much as, if not more so than, the Eroica and Fifth symphonies. Beethoven recalls the first movement and its particular (democratic? totalitarian?) worldview; cellos and basses interject. Beethoven recalls the (playful? cynical?) Scherzo—again, interrupted by the recitative. A brief, wistful glance back to the idyllic Adagio is likewise dismissed.

What he has laboriously crafted over some forty minutes of music (already longer than any complete symphony of Haydn or Mozart), offering three prisms through which to codify the world around us, Beethoven summarily rejects in the space of about two minutes. For as the tenor soloist sings (on text written by the composer) when the recitative finally, and literally, finds its voice: “O friends, not these strains! Let us sing still more beautifully, still more joyfully!”

Not these strains, the Ninth urges us, but instead, the vision of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode an die Freude, in which “all men become brothers … All beings drink joy at the breasts of nature … Be embraced, O millions! This kiss for the whole world!” Beethoven offers us, as a musical analogue to Schiller’s ideal, his famous “Ode to Joy”—a melody as simple and singable as a children’s tune, yet so pregnant with possibility. Arguing for its utopian vision of universal brotherhood, the sprawling finale (heard by Charles Rosen as a symphony within a symphony) presents a series of variations on this theme, encompassing a broad range of styles (including the era’s emblem of foreignness, music in the “Turkish style”), and culminating in an ecstatic choral fugue.

The introduction of the human voice as the apotheosis of such an ambitious creation added a hugely consequential layer to the symphonic form, transforming the repertoire tradition of Haydn and Mozart into a vehicle for epic expression. It is Beethoven’s Ninth that would empower Mahler’s claim a century later that “A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” The Ninth aspires to nothing less.

February 13–15, 2015

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