Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra | Choir Ivan Goran Kovačić | Ivan Repušić, Conductor | Darija Auguštan, soprano | Martina Mikelić, mezzo - soprano | Matteo Ivan Rašić, tenor | Leon Košavić, baritone

The Ode to Joy, as the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or rather its vocal-instrumental part set to a text by Friedrich Schiller, is called, has long outgrown the usual boundaries of a musical work: It has become a symbol, an anthem – and a timeless message about the unity of people in joy, about their brotherhood (today, let us add sisterhood, and the freedom to choose the terms). On the musical side, we should not miss the gradation, the musical growth that precedes the famous finale, the first symphonic movement that includes the voice: the cyclic form in which chaos and peace alternate and in which Beethoven changed the usual arrangement of movements (the second movement is a scherzo, and the third is slow); in the final movement, before the voices enter, we hear again the themes from the previous movements, and then Beethoven goes on to build new peaks – which are also considered the peak of his oeuvre.

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Notes by Dina Puhovski

‘We live in the valley of the Ninth Symphony’, musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote. Wagner described this evening’s piece as ‘the redemption of music’; ‘Of all Beethoven’s works, the Ninth Symphony cast the longest shadow over the rest of the nineteenth century, and has continued to lower over the music of the twentieth century as well’, musicologist Richard Taruskin pointed out.

Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn, 1770 – Vienna, 1827) was most likely familiar with Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy from 1785 long before he wrote his Ninth Symphony. He set it to music in the fourth movement of the Symphony, shocking the world, and the Ode eventually ‘broke off’ from the whole and took on a life of its own. It is the reason why today’s audiences wait for the end of the work, although it is important to listen to the whole, as the author intended it: an important symphony among Beethoven’s already important symphonies.

Beethoven wrote Symphony No. 9, in D minor, Op. 125, about ten years after his Eighth, in the late period of his career. Beethoven’s work is usually divided into three periods: The first until about 1802, when he was experiencing a crisis due to hearing loss, which would soon prevent him from performing, and an uncertain future. In his middle period, he wrote ambitious, so-called ‘heroic’ works; his late period, starting from 1812–1813, was marked by a new dedication to music, complex string quartets and the Ninth Symphony, which he completed in 1824.

He considered a premiere in Berlin, because it seemed to him that Vienna was too infatuated with Rossini’s music and that his was no longer in fashion; but Prince Lichnowsky, publisher Diabelli, and his former student Carl Czerny wrote to him imploring that he not forsake his ‘second native city’. The premiere was his return from retirement, his first public concert in ten years, in the same theatre (Kärntnertortheater) where he had staged Leonore, later renamed Fidelio. His part in the premiere requires some clarification – he stood before the orchestra, as conductor, but the court conductor Michael Umlauf had arranged with the choir and orchestra to watch him, and not the composer, who was unable to hear. There is also a well-known story about how Beethoven did not hear the applause that broke out after the Scherzo – at that time there was often applause between movements, which is, mind you, frowned upon today – and one of the singers signalled him to turn and take a bow.

Some of Beethoven’s colleagues were sceptical of the piece, such as Louis Spohr and, later, Giuseppe Verdi, which is probably a symptom of the shock Beethoven had given his audience – not only by including a chorus in the fourth movement, but also by the contrasts, cuts and sound of the previous movements. According to Taruskin, Beethoven clearly showed that the purpose of art was not only to be beautiful, to please, in accordance with the tastes of time, and he ‘assaulted’ the ear with this work, for example, with the fanfares in the finale, which Wagner, although respectfully, called Schreckensfanfaren (horror fanfares). Additionally, by including a vocal movement in the Symphony, Beethoven ‘closed the chapter of abstract music’, as Wagner pointed out.

The chorus, the soloists and the Ode to Joy, or the fourth movement of the Symphony, indeed emphasized the presence of an extra-musical theme, a programme. This might not be unusual, but here, according to Maynard Solomon, the composer’s programmatic intentions ‘remain open’: Beethoven did not use musical codes, formulas, known to everyone at the time, while today we can say that he was the one who started the practices that we associate with symphonic music.

Listening to the tremolando at the beginning of the Symphony is, according to Nietzsche, like ‘floating above the Earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in one’s heart’. The first movement is, as expected, a sonata form, with a muted beginning, but already in its first part, the exposition, it bursts into fortissimo. Such ‘outbursts’ prompted later commentators to describe the movement as Beethoven’s depiction of the ‘creation of the world’, of the initial chaos. From the first movement onwards, the descending two-tone motif permeates the composition.

The second movement is a Scherzo, although this type of movement usually came third in multi-movement works: energetic, intense rather than humorous, with a Presto in the central Trio, which announces the Presto of the final movement. In the third, gentle Adagio, two themes alternate, also marked by descending motifs, and bring the most expressive moments of inner ecstasy.

The final movement returns to the material of the first three movements, but then it is discarded and a series of variations on one of today’s most famous musical themes develops. One of these is the ‘parade’, Turkish military variation, immediately after the choir exultantly invokes the Deity – as a return to reality, one of the many cuts that characterize this composition. Musicologist James Webster even claimed that the form of the fourth movement ‘doesn’t exist, and it cannot exist’.

The orchestra introduces the theme of the Ode to Joy, then the solo bass takes over, and the choir joins in with ‘Freude’ – ‘joy’. The vocal parts are famously demanding, a contrast to the theme that is fundamentally simple, folk-like in character. Beethoven is said to have gone through some two hundred versions of the theme before choosing the final one, for his oratorio addition to the symphony, or perhaps a symphonic cantata. The joy that is in question here will be experienced by ‘whoever has created an abiding friendship’ after ‘all that custom has divided’ reunite.

The Ode to Joy has been the anthem of the European Union since 1985, with the official explanation: ‘In the universal language of music, this anthem expresses the European ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity.’ If music is not a universal language, we can always hope that freedom, peace and solidarity are, we just need to learn them better.

Symphony No. 9 and the Ode to Joy have penetrated culture and society in other ways. When the compact audio disc, the CD, was created, which was extremely important at the time, the maximum recording time on it was set at 74 minutes, the length of the Ninth – the length of Furtwängler’s 1951 performance. Parts of the symphony were included in films such as A Clockwork Orange and Dead Poets Society. Ode to Joy was performed on Christmas Day 1989 in the newly unified Berlin, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, with ‘Freiheit’ (freedom) replacing ‘Freude’ (joy) for the occasion; it was also performed at the opening of the 1998 Olympics in Nagano.

Schiller and Beethoven spread the message that ‘all men will be brothers’; or ‘All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings’. Perhaps they did not have all people in mind back then, as we do today, or claim to do; perhaps they did not even think that all people would indeed be brothers (and the unmentioned sisters), but it was left to the new generations to reinterpret and elaborate the message.

The richness of musical contrasts and the seemingly very clear message, which nevertheless requires effort, are some of the arguments taken into account by the critic and musicologist Tom Service, who concludes: ‘Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is arguably the central artwork of Western music: it is as much of a challenge now as it was in 1824 to its listeners, to performers, and to every composer who has written a symphony since. But it’s not because this piece is a monolithic monument of certainty; instead, it’s because its gigantic, irrefutable musical power is a wellspring of endless renewal and possibility.’