Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, Choral

Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Bonn, December 15, 1770; d. Vienna, March 26, 1827) German composer of Dutch extraction. Principal works: one opera, Fidelio; one oratorio; two masses; nine symphonies and the "battle symphony" Die Schlacht bei Vittoria, op. 91; five piano concertos, one violin concerto, and a triple concerto for violin, cello and piano; other orchestral works, including the four "Leonore" overtures; incidental music to plays; seventeen string quartets and other chamber music; thirty-two piano sonatas and other piano works; choral music; songs.

　  

Given in Vienna on May 7, 1824, the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was a dreadful shambles and a near disaster. Despite his evident and complete deafness caused, as we know now, by progressive lead poisoning Beethoven insisted stubbornly on conducting the first performance. Only two rehearsals of the entire program were scheduled, and this program also featured Beethoven's neo-Handelian overture, The Consecration of the House, as well as the first three sections of his formidably difficult Missa Solemnis. Michael Umlauf, the Kapellmeister of the Karntnertor Theater, was the official conductor, and doubtless did what he could to keep everything more or less together. (Umlauf had watched the utter chaos of Beethoven's attempt to rehearse his only opera Fidelio some years before, and thus knew what to expect.) But Beethoven planted himself on the podium and made wild gesticulations that were often at variance with what was actually occurring in the score. The Viennese audience must have been both horrified and transfixed by the sight of the deaf composer attempting to prove that he could still direct his latest work. Beethoven would crouch down trying to indicate a quiet passage while the orchestra was playing forte, and would shake his arms to indicate loudness during a quiet moment. Umlauf must have been beside himself trying to beat time and give cues in the midst of this tragic distraction.

 

At the end, a famous, heart-rending scene occurred. As she later described it to the great British musicologist and lexicographer Sir George Grove, Caroline Unger, who sang the contralto solo in the last movement, had to tug at Beethoven's sleeve at the end of the symphony, as the composer was unaware that the orchestra had played the final chords: he was in a world of his own. Unger gently turned the composer around to see the audience, and, as she recalled, "his turning about, and the sudden understanding thereby forced on all present that he had not done so before because he could not hear what was going on, acted like an electric shock on the audience, and a volcanic explosion of compassion and admiration followed, which was repeated over and over, and seemed as if it would never end." The audience had stood and applauded Beethoven repeatedly during the concert: this approbation can be considered as an act of homage, but also as an act of defiance, for only the highest royalty were supposed to receive standing ovations in early nineteenth-century Austria. Beethoven was deeply moved, and a repeat performance was scheduled sixteen days later. Amazingly, some contemporary sources report that Beethoven is said to have remarked that he thought the choral finale was an error, and that he was considering replacing it with a completely instrumental last movement. Posterity can be grateful that he never attempted this quixotic revision.

 

A common assertion about the Ninth Symphony is that it is the first symphonic score to use a chorus. This is incorrect, however, for the now forgotten composer Peter Winter (1754-1825) had used a chorus to conclude his dreadful "Battle Symphony" that was premiered a decade or so before Beethoven composed his last symphony. Beethoven's finale is a different matter than Winter's ghastly choral effusion, however, for the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony is not just a tacked-on celebration, but, rather, contains the material from which the entire symphony has been constructed. The finale is both the origin and the culmination of Beethoven's musical argument.

 

Furthermore, the Ninth Symphony had a particular function within the overall architecture of the concert itself. Recall the order of the program: first, an overture that was meant to be a "consecration" of the "house," that is, a hallowing through music of the space in which the concert was to take place; second, excerpts from the Missa Solemnis, the composer's hymn to God and a celebration of a sacred rite whose culmination, as the predominantly Roman Catholic audience at the premiere well knew, came through the Eucharist; and then the Ninth Symphony, whose finale, a poem (1785) by the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), exhorted mankind to become brothers in order to commune with the Divine Father who dwelt beyond the "star-strewn canopy of the heavens." In other words, the concert was meant to be a religious experience for the audience, not a mere entertainment.

 

The rhetoric of the Ninth Symphony would be repeated throughout the nineteenth century by composers such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Franck, Parry, Sibelius, Saint-Saens, Elgar, and Dukas and this is just a partial list. Beethoven's rhetoric in this work traced a pilgrimage from darkness and strife to light and joy. He had already employed this expressive plan in a number of works, most notably his Fifth Symphony, but the Ninth Symphony made this journey explicit through the use of Schiller's text. With the notably exceptions such as Mahler and Vaughan Williams (in his A Sea Symphony of 1910), few composers were tempted to use a chorus in their symphonies (although Busoni uses a hidden male chorus in the finale of his massive Piano Concerto). But a number of these composers sought nevertheless to emulate the triumph over adversity found in the finale of the Ninth Symphony. In other words, the influence of the Ninth Symphony upon Western art music was extraordinary potent for approximately a hundred years after its premiere.

 

After two world wars, the Holocaust, and a succession of totalitarian regimes, however, some, such as the music historian Richard Taruskin have called into question Beethoven's optimistic symphonic rhetoric. In an essay entitled "Resiting the Ninth," Taruskin has observed that some listeners have been troubled by the Ninth Symphony's expressive trajectory, and especially by what they consider to be its relentless and naive optimism. Taruskin has further noted that even Beethoven's call for a united humanity can seem problematic in light of twentieth-century history: "We have our problems with demagogues who preach to us about the brotherhood of man. We have been too badly burned by those who have promised Elysium and given us gulags and gas chambers."

 

But, as intimated above, the Ninth Symphony is not just about the brotherhood of man, for Beethoven, adapting Schiller's poem for his own purposes, urges us to seek unity only through an embrace of a spiritual power greater than ourselves: a kiss of peace for the entire planet. Beethoven had experienced the horror of war first hand when Vienna was overrun by Napoleon’s troops; his only opera, Fidelio, contains a chorus sung by abused prisoners and deals quite directly with the barbarity of torture. Perhaps Taruskin undervalues Beethoven's real experience with the dark side of history and the evil that can lurk at times beneath the surface of humanity. In the final analysis, what is important is that this great work brings a message of hope to world that suffers now as it did in the composer’s time. Despite its disheveled premiere, despite its composer's stubbornness, despite the horrors of history, despite crass commercialization that uses this great music to sell tawdry merchandise, the Ninth Symphony continues to give us mortals a glimpse of a beauty at once benign, shrewd and transformative.

-- Byron Adams