Choir of Angels from Paradise and The Kiss to All the World (detail of Beethoven Frieze, Gustav Klimt, 1902).

Julia Grella O'Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

Tonight we reach the conclusion of our Beethoven Project with his Ninth Symphony, the apotheosis not only of his own work but also arguably of the Western canon itself. 

Over the course of the Philharmonic’s multi-year Beethoven Project, we have witnessed the progression of Beethoven’s artistic development alongside his human maturation. We began with Beethoven as self-conceived son of the Enlightenment and true believer in its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity. With him, we made our way through the Heroic Period, in which the journeyman composer emerged as Romantic prototype, establishing himself prophet-like at the very center of the 19th-century artistic project. We now reach the point at which Beethoven’s belief in the heroism and power of the individual genius has given way to a new, all-encompassing vision, one that acknowledges the oneness of mankind and views art as the vehicle for its liberation.

Beethoven began writing the Ninth Symphony in 1822 immediately after completing his great Missa solemnis, and the Ninth Symphony’s premiere on May 7, 1824 also included three movements of the Missa. The pairing of these two works was strikingly apt: while the Missa is an explicitly religious work, the Ninth Symphony is imbued with Beethoven’s own heterodox spirituality, combining his abiding belief in the divinity of God with his elevation of art to the position of the Godhead. Later that same year he characteristically signed a letter to a friend, “Yours in Christ and Apollo, Beethoven,” making reference to the Greek god of music as well as to his lifelong Catholicism. The text of the Ninth Symphony’s finale, by the great German Enlightenment poet Friedrich Schiller, likewise draws analogies between the Judeo-Christian God and Elysium, the heaven of Greek myth. In the Ninth, Beethoven posits a kind of trinitarian relationship between God, man, and art, with the last serving as a bridge between the first two – the culmination of the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion, or Art-Religion.   

The earlier Beethoven believed that a great man – Napoleon – could awaken all of Europe to liberty, a belief expressed with tremendous force and vitality in his middle-period symphonies. Late-period Beethoven, having witnessed the unraveling of the revolutionary project with more than three million dead in the Napoleonic Wars, has turned both inward and upward, seeking the dissolution of the self in a mystical union with the Divine. The English writer J.W.N. Sullivan describes the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony as having “reached that state of consciousness that only the great mystics have ever reached, where there is no more discord.” 

The Ninth Symphony is kind of a musical reenactment of the history of humanity, from the creation of the universe to the fulfillment of human promise. Beethoven proposes a new mythology, which musicologist Daniel K.L. Chua has called a “poetic mirror” reflecting the human person not as he is, but as he might be. Where the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies are compendiums of dance forms, generating their rhythmic and melodic themes from popular dances of the day, Beethoven reconceives the dance in the Ninth Symphony as part of his mythical reimagining of human history. The rhythms of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies have been transmuted into a wild Dionysian dance that culminates in a frenzy of joy.

But to the dance Beethoven has added a new, unpredictable element: the human voice, reaching out to listeners in a supreme gesture of sympathy and solidarity. In the remarkable first vocal statement of the symphony’s finale, the baritone lustily addresses us, the audience, as “Freunde” – friends – and asks us to join him in the cosmic dance that promises to usher in a new society. Among the the most affecting moments in the entire piece is also one of the most fleeting, when the four soloists sing of both the hardship and the joy of finding true friendship and love: “Wem der große Wurf gelungen,/Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,/Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,/Mische seinen Jubel ein!” (Let the one who has achieved that most difficult of feats, true friendship, or attained a faithful wife, join his joy with ours). When the chorus echoes this exhortation, dropping to subito piano in the highest range of the soprano voice – a feat of extreme technical difficulty – Beethoven reveals the touching frailty of this and indeed all human endeavor. 

Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” embodies the noblest of Enlightenment ideals, the universal brotherhood of mankind. After witnessing these ideals lead some 15,000 Frenchmen and women to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, however, he died in 1805 believing his Ode a failure. But a volume of his poetry had felicitously fallen into Beethoven’s hands as a teenager in Bonn, and it was then that the young composer began to conceive of setting it to music. First distracted by the hope of a political solution to mankind’s misery and later disillusioned by that solution’s collapse, he finally wrote his magnificent setting in the style of a simple social song, known as a geselliges Lied, meant to be sung by groups of friends in 19th-century Vienna. Like the dances of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies that cut across all social classes, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” combines the qualities of liturgical chant and patriotic anthem with those of a drinking song. No longer the worshipper of individual heroism on the battlefield or in the concert hall, Beethoven merges his own spirit with those of Schiller’s millions, and with us. The Ninth Symphony is music for the masses, reflecting us back to ourselves in a transforming mirror, not as who we are but as who we are meant to be.