Beethoven's 9th:
75th Anniversary Concert
May 8, 2010

PROGRAM NOTES

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna, Austria on March 26, 1827. Though one theme from this symphony appears in a sketchbook of 1815 and some sketches for the first movement were undertaken in 1817 and early 1818, Beethoven only began concentrated work on the score in 1822. It occupied him throughout the following year, and he completed it in February 1824. The first performance took place at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna on May 7, 1824, in an all-Beethoven concert. The deaf composer stood on the stage beating time, but the real conductor was Michael Umlauf. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, strings, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass solos, and four-part mixed chorus. Duration is about 65 minutes.

Friedrich Schiller’s ode An die Freude (“To Joy”), written in 1785 and published the following year, spoke directly to the new desire for spiritual freedom and secular reform that followed the spread of Enlightenment ideals to German-speaking countries. Its vision of world and brotherhood, and its message of reconciliation, expressed in quasi-religious terms, appealed to the young and idealistic. Almost immediately, composers began setting it to music—more than forty settings are known, mostly songs for voice and piano. In 1793, Schiller received word from a friend in Bonn that a young composer there was undertaking his own setting of the poem. The friend noted, “I expect something perfect, for as far as I know him he is wholly devoted to the great and sublime.” The composer was Ludwig van Beethoven, then in his early twenties. Three decades elapsed before Beethoven was satisfied that he had found the best setting for Schiller’s text, but the resulting work—his final symphony—was indeed “great and sublime.”

After completing his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in 1812, Beethoven turned totally away from the symphony for five years, and only began thinking about a Ninth when he received an invitation to come to London in the winter of 1817‑18 and to bring two new symphonies with him. The invitation must have been attractive—it was just such a trip to England that had made Haydn a wealthy man—but in the end nothing came of it except a few sketches for two symphonies, and one of these was never finished.

Several more years passed. Beethoven returned to his sketches in the summer of 1822, still planning to compose a pair of symphonies. But by the following year he had settled on a single work in the key of D minor. For a long time he was torn between two possible endings—one purely instrumental, the other a choral setting of Schiller’s ode. The problem, as he saw it, was how to motivate the sudden appearance of a chorus after three lengthy instrumental movements. Even after he had invented the familiar hymnlike tune of the finale and drafted the instrumental variations that mark its first appearance, he could not find a solution to the vocal problem. One day he was struck by the idea of having a soloist simply sing the announcement, “Let us sing the song of the immortal Schiller,” before starting the ode itself.

In the end he settled on slightly different wording, but the point was the same: to disavow the past and turn with a conscious welcome to something new and liberating. Once he actually started setting Schiller’s words, he treated them very freely, taking the passages that particularly stimulated his muse, making cuts and repetitions as the musical development required. In the end, he actually set less than half of Schiller’s entire text and freely rearranged the rest.

The planning for the first performance was complicated by the fact that Beethoven wanted to conduct the entire concert, an embarrassment on account of his deafness. In the end he stood on stage next to Michael Umlauf, ostensibly to set the tempi, and, though he kept beating through the work, the players had been instructed to pay attention only to Umlauf’s beat. The remainder of the all‑Beethoven program included the overture Consecration of the House and three movements of the Missa solemnis. The plan to perform part of the Mass ran into legal entanglements when Church authorities refused permission for liturgical music to be heard in the unsanctified precincts of a theater. In the end, that music was billed (in a mild subterfuge) as “Three Grand Hymns with Solo and Choral Voices.”

The music was of unprecedented difficulty, a challenge to both performers and listeners. Nonetheless, the crowd in the Kärntnertor Theater on May 7, 1824, responded with enthusiasm, cheering and applauding energetically, though the deaf composer, still turning the pages of the score and hearing the music in his mind, was unaware of it until one of the soloists pulled him by the sleeve to get his attention and pointed to the audience.

Like the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth moves from tragedy to triumph, symbolized by a move from the minor-key opening to a close firmly in the major key. But the Fifth seems to be the triumph of an individual hero, while the Ninth, with a chorus singing Schiller’s text, becomes a universal triumph for human aspiration. Though the text makes explicit the message of the symphony, Beethoven’s musical architecture reinforces that message with unusual force.

e planned the entire symphony in such a way that for the first three movements it remains locked in the realm of D minor and its closely related keys F and B‑flat (pitches that are part of the scale of D‑minor). Only near the end of the last movement does he oust F and B‑flat in favor of F‑sharp and B‑natural, notes that characterize the scale of D major. On paper this sounds like a purely theoretical change, but in performance it achieves unparalleled force. Rarely in the history of music has simple harmonic relationship between major and minor modes generated greater power, feeling, or sheer excitement.

The symphony opens with its first theme gradually appearing out of a mysterious introduction hinting at indescribable vastness. No orchestral beginning was more influential throughout the nineteenth century, though no composer ever surpassed Beethoven in the suggestive power of this particular beginning. Throughout the lengthy first movement, Beethoven never allows us to stray for long from powerful reminders that this music is in a minor key.

The demonic scherzo of the second movement, too, fiercely reiterates the minor-mode feeling of the first movement. For a moment in the middle section, Beethoven projects pure human joy in the work’s first extensive passage in D major, but it is canceled by the return of the scherzo.

The richly evocative lyricism of the third movement sings a pensive song in B‑flat, alternating with a second, slightly faster theme in D major. But on every occasion the second theme ends up slipping helplessly back to the first key, though the variations become ever more lush and sweetly consoling. In spite of their sheer beauty, they cannot reach the world of D major.

The first sound of the finale is a “fanfare of terror” introducing Beethoven’s public search for a way to turn minor‑key darkness into a firm major‑key conclusion. Cellos and double basses sing an operatic‑style recitative (for which Beethoven originally wrote words, later cut) calling up and summarily rejecting themes from each of the earlier movements. Finally a new idea appears, simple, singable, hymnlike, emphatically in D major (its melody circles around F‑sharp, the characteristic third step of the D‑major scale). The orchestra welcomes it with a set of variations. Real progress seems to be underway when this theme, too, is swept away by a renewed “fanfare of terror,” brutal and consciously ugly, containing almost every note of the D minor scale!

Here, at last, the baritone intervenes with Beethoven’s introduction to Schiller’s poem. The soloist, echoed by the chorus, sings confidently in D major, and all seems well through three stanzas of Schiller’s poem.

But one more crisis remains.

At the end of the third stanza (on the words “vor Gott”—“before God”), Beethoven undercuts his modulation to the expected dominant key and throws the following passage into B‑flat—once again threatening that the minor mode may prevail. The “Turkish” march of the tenor’s solo is actually the “Ode to joy” theme varied in rhythm and turned into a heroic aria.

An extended orchestral development follows with major and minor engaged in a last furious harmonic combat. Finally the orchestra settles on a dotted rhythm repeating the note F‑sharp through three octaves—the single note that most strikingly emphasizes the main theme and its major‑mode harmony. After two tentative beginnings in the “wrong” key, the composer changes a single note in the bass part and suddenly “realizes” that this music is, emphatically, in D major. The chorus returns in one of the most thrilling moments in all of music. From here on out, everything we hear—the prayerful invocation of a “loving Father” who “must live above the stars” and who makes all men brother, the vigorous double fugue that was one of Beethoven’s first sketches for this movement, the soloists’ last quietly sustained singing—all this is in D major or its closely related major keys, effectively wiping out memory of the conflict and struggle that had gone on before. Then, gradually pulling itself together out of a grand pause, the orchestra cues the chorus for a final outburst of ecstatic joy, asserting Beethoven’s sturdy, confident answer to the questions posed by the symphony’s opening almost an hour earlier.

TEXT & TRANSLATION

Baritone Solo:

[“Turkish” March]

Tenor Solo & Male Chorus

[Orchestral development]

Chorus

[Double Fugue]

Soloists & Chorus

© Steven Ledbetter