Being aware of Debussy’s observations about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that “one is astonished that the Symphony has not remained buried under the mass of prose it has called forth,” I have tried to keep today’s tweets to a minimum.
I have failed.
Beethoven composed his first eight symphonies from 1800 to 1812, but not another one followed for many years afterwards. There was not much demand in Vienna for new symphonies, and without that demand, no impetus to compose them.
In 1817, Beethoven began corresponding with his old friend Ferdinand Ries, who was now in London, about a possible visit there by Beethoven the following year, with, of course, a juicy commission from the new Royal Philharmonic Society, recently founded in 1813.
In a letter of 9 July 1817, Beethoven made a commitment:
The two grand symphonies, which are entirely new, will then be ready and they will become and remain the sole property of the Society. (Beethoven Letters No. 786)
Beethoven began sketching ideas for a 9th and 10th symphony around this time, but his poor health prohibited a trip to London, and the negotiations with the Royal Philharmonic Society broke down.
Five years passed.
In a letter dated 6 July 1822, Beethoven told Ries about his recent Mass and then inquired
Have you any idea what fee the Harmony Society [Royal Philharmonic Society] would offer me for a grand symphony? (Beethoven Letters No. 1084)
A new plan developed.
In a letter to Ferdinand Ries on 22 March 1823, Beethoven wrote
The symphony is not yet finished. But it will only take me a fortnight to finish it, and then I will immediately deliver it to Herr von Kirchhoffer. (Beethoven Letters No. 1159)
Kirchhoffer handled some of Beethoven's courier tasks.
In a letter to the Archduke Rudolph on 1 July 1823, Beethoven wrote
At the moment I am composing a new symphony for England, i.e. for the Philharmonic Society, and I hope to finish it in less than a fortnight. (Beethoven Letters No. 1203)
In a letter to Franz Christian Kirchhoffer on 5 September 1823, Beethoven wrote
You will receive the score of the symphony in a fortnight at the latest.” (Beethoven Letters No. 1238)
It’s possible that Beethoven had intended to send to England a Ninth Symphony with a more conventional final movement — a finale that did not require a chorus or vocalists, and which did not include a text by one of Germany’s most renowned authors.
Beethoven had long intended to set Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”) to music, but it’s not clear exactly when Beethoven made the decision that this setting would become the finale of the new symphony.
Sometime in the fall of 1823 and early 1824, Beethoven’s new symphony took its final form. The first indication what this entailed appears in a letter to the music publisher Moritz Schlesinger on 25 February 1824:
I am offering you the score of a perfectly new grand symphony which, however, cannot be published until 1825. It has a grand Finale with choruses and vocal solo parts, in the same manner as my choral fantasia, but on a larger scale. (Beethoven Letters No. 1267)
A letter of 10 March was more explicit:
A new grand symphony, which has a Finale introducing voices, solo and choruses, with a setting of the words of Schiller’s immortal “Lied an die Freudev … (Beethoven Letters No. 1269)
The inclusion of soloists and a chorus in a symphony was unprecedented. It’s likely no one had ever even considered it. And it was definitely “on a larger scale.” The Opus 80 Choral Fantasy (Day 214) was only 20 minutes in length; the new symphony was likely 4 times longer.
The premiere of Beethoven Ninth Symphony was scheduled for 7 May 1824 at the Kärnthnerthor Theatre. Preceding the symphony on the program would be the recent Overture to the Consecration of the House (Day 328) and excerpts from the Missa Solemnis (Day 327). Beethoven had to obtain permission from the authorities for performances of the Mass’s Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei in a concert hall, but only if they were described as “hymns” and sung in German rather than Latin.
The concert would be under the general direction of Michael Umlauf, and Ignaz Schuppanzigh would conduct the orchestra. Singing the soprano and contralto solo parts were Henriette Sontag and Caroline Unger (Day 328), who had befriended Beethoven and adored him.
#Beethoven250 Day 336
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Opus 125), 1824
The 25 million views of this video are well deserved. Much of the last movement is subtitled.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony emerges from a void, a quiet trembling, a tentative testing of intervals of a 5th and 4th, and then a wail with timpani already pounding. This is not an easy birth. A more pastoral second theme brings comfort but the reprise of the first is terrifying.
The second movement of the Ninth Symphony is a scherzo in all but name, a relentless and unforgettable quarter-note melody accented like a 4/4 march. The Trio section is a pastoral Presto in 2/2 time. The coda briefly reprises the Trio but quickly wraps up.
The third movement Adagio of the Ninth Symphony is lyrical and contemplative, a kind of freeform set of double variations that bounce between major and minor, duple and triple meter, concluding with a long lovely flowing section in 12/8 time.
As Elaine Sisman chronicled in her essay “Memory and Invention at the Threshold of Beethoven’s Late Style” in the book Beethoven and His World, Beethoven sometimes referenced music from a previous movement in a later movement. But nothing comes anywhere close to what he does to begin the finale of the Ninth Symphony. Here the orchestra ventures to play distinctive passages from the first, second, and third movements only to be rejected by demonstrative recitative-like cellos and bass violins.
In his sketches, Beethoven seemed to consider vocal rejections of the earlier music: for the first movement, “No, this would remind us too much of our despair,” for the second, “Nor this either, it is but sport. Something more beautiful and better,” and for the third, “Nor this, it is too tender. For something animated we must seek.” And when the “Joy” theme is finally found: “This is it. Ha, now it is found.” (Thayer-Forbes, pp. 892–3)
The defiant low-string recitatives at the beginning of the Ninth Symphony make me picture Beethoven’s pen scratching out a defunct symphony dedication, or scratching out sketches that weren’t satisfactory, sometimes with such power as to leave a hole in the page.
To anyone who has been following Beethoven’s career from the beginning, the “Joy” theme in the finale of the 9th Symphony is not entirely new. We can hear it in the song “Gegenliebe” (Day 44) and the Choral Fantasy (Day 214), and fragments appear in the first three movements.
Never has the most consummate art produced anything more artistically simple than that melody, the child-like innocence of which, fills us as with holy thrills, when we first hear it in unison in most monotonical whispers from the brass instruments of the orchestra. It then becomes the plain song (Cantus Firmus), the choral of the new congregation, around which, as in the church chorals of Sebastian Bach, the harmonic voices group themselves contrapuntally as they are successively added: nothing equals the sweet fervour to which this prototype of purest innocence is animated by each newly-added voice, until every ornament, every glory of elevated feeling, unites in and around it like the breathing world around a finally revealed dogma of purest love. — Richard Wagner
Once the “Joy” theme is discovered by the orchestra in the 4th movement of the 9th Symphony, it is built up in volume and depth through a series of variations. Although the 4th movement is fairly episodic, the primary structural element is definitely the variation.
The finale of the 9th Symphony can be described as having its own four-movement architecture: with the Turkish March beginning the “scherzo,” the “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” (“Receive this embrace, you millions!”) the “slow movement,” and the double fugue the final finale.
Some people find the Turkish March section of the 9th Symphony to be incongruous, but I’ve always loved it. I picture an unruly ragtag caravan marching across the concert stage banging pots and pans.
This op-ed by Slavoj Žižek is relevant.
In the four-movement concept of the 9th Symphony finale, the “slow movement” begins with the “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” section, perhaps a religious invasion of the movement in the same way that the Missa Solemnis confronts secular invaders. This section has just as much of a legitimate melody as the Joy theme, but it doesn’t quite stick in the head the same way. The joining of this theme and the Joy theme in a double fugue is perhaps the high point of the movement. That and the extended coda, of course.
Beethoven was on stage during the premiere of the 9th, but the musicians and singers had been advised to ignore any of Beethoven’s attempts to conduct, for he could not hear the music.
Nor could he hear the audience’s applause at the end. As Thayer tells the famous story,
while Beethoven was still gazing at his score, Fräulein Unger, whose happiness can be imagined, plucked him by the sleeve and directed his attention to the clapping hands and waving hats and handkerchiefs. Then he turned to the audience and bowed. (p. 909)
To the people who performed and heard Ninth Symphony in 1824, it was obviously a major work. But no one then could have guessed at its eventual impact on composers who came after Beethoven, including Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, and Shostakovich.
For Wagner, the Ninth Symphony revealed the importance of uniting music and words. To Wagner, the words are what allowed the Ninth Symphony to transcend the abstract sterility of purely musical compositions. Wagner knew that he must bring to opera the power of the symphony.
For Mahler, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony revealed that the symphony could encompass anything and everything. Half of Mahler’s 10 symphonies — I include “Das Lied von der Erde” — use voice, but all differently, and those that do not are just as powerful in their own ways.
Even less evident in 1824 was the eventual cultural and political impact of the Ninth Symphony. In its simplicity and tunefulness, the Joy theme of the Finale is widely recognizable. It has become a type of humanistic anthem and (without words) the official anthem of the EU.
Is Schiller’s “An de Freude” (and Beethoven’s setting of it) really an Ode to Joy? Or is the word “Freude” a euphemism for a politically riskier word nearby in the dictionary?
In the opening chapter of his book Freedom and the Arts, Charles Rosen notes that
there is a well-established theory that the “Freude” of the final ode was intended to be understood as an obvious substitute for the overly inflammatory word “Freiheit” [freedom]. Too enthusiastic or insistent a declamatory use of the word “freedom” would send a message to any government nervous about its power that someone is out to make trouble. Freedom and joy are of course not incompatible and go together remarkably well. Most of the choral finale of Beethoven’s last symphony, however, is somewhat more apt for the concept of freedom than joy. The B-flat scherzo variation with the percussive, so-called Turkish, percussion sound effects is in military style, and a combat for freedom is more reasonable than a fight for joy. In the following variation, after the fugue has completed the battle imagery, the great musical representation of the starry heavens implies more easily a spiritual view of freedom, while joy on the contrary lacks the dignity of the spacious sound imagined by Beethoven. It would be a mistake to try and pin down too specific a political meaning for the triumphal air of the last pages, but the sense of victory is everywhere evident.
Leonard Bernstein made the substitution of “Freiheit” for “Freude” when he conducted the Ninth Symphony in East Belin during Christmas 1989 following the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it's unlikely that this will become a common practice.
Just knowing is enough.
Lewis Lockwood writes (Beethoven, p. 417):
Beethoven, in this new symphony that would have Schiller’s ‘Ode’ as centerpiece, meant to leave to posterity a public monument of his liberal beliefs. His decision to fashion a great work that would convey the poet’s utopian vision of human brotherhood is a statement of support for the principles of democracy at a time when direct political action on behalf of such principles was difficult and dangerous. It enabled him to realize in his way what Shelley meant when he called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Addressing himself to those who reject the manifestations of beauty that arise from a corrupt culture, Maynard Solomon writes (in Beethoven, p. 411):
The fatal (and destructive) misconception underlying such attitudes is this: if we lose our awareness of the transcendent realms of play, beauty, and kinship that are portrayed in the great affirmative works of our culture, if we lose the reconciling dream of the Ninth Symphony, there may remain no counterpoise against the engulfing terrors of civilization, nothing to set against Auschwitz and Vietnam as a paradigm of humanity’s potentialities. Masterpieces of art are instilled with a surplus of constantly renewable energy — an energy that provides a motive force for changes in the relations between human beings — because they contain projections of human desires and goals that have not yet been achieved (which indeed may be unrealizable).
On 12 May 1824, Beethoven wrote to Henriette Sontag:
My lovely and precious Sontag!
I have always been intending to call on you sometime and thank you for your fine contribution to my concert. Well, I hope to be able in a day or two to visit you and to take you and Unger out to lunch in the Prater or the Augarten. For it is now the most beautiful season for that. I understand that the concert is to be repeated in about a week . . . you will . . . support it, and for this I shall always be grateful to you. My very best wishes to you until I have the pleasure of seeing you.
Your true friend and admirer, Beethoven