He had not been seen in public for twelve years and, after that night, no one would see him again at any other event that, for decades, featured him as the protagonist. But he must have sensed something Ludwig van Beethoven that May 7 1824exactly two hundred years ago, so as to, against all his impulses to retreat, not miss the premiere of his Ninth Symphony.
He must have sensed something about the impact of that work that he had begun to imagine when he got it into his head to compose music at the height of the Ode to joya poem that Friedrich Schiller had published in 1785, and on which he had spent more than ten years of formal work, plus all that previous dreaming.
Beethoven did not err: that symphony made of four movements and whose performance lasts approximately seventy minutes was registered in 2003 in the UNESCO Memory of the World Registersomething like a sample of the best that humanity has produced.
More needs to be said about the German composer’s hunch: that original score, a manuscript of more than two hundred pages, was the first piece of music to achieve that recognition. If in a thousand or ten thousand years someone were to review the UNESCO archives to understand what the music that humanity is made of is like, Ninth Symphony It would be the entrance door. Nothing less than that.
Beethoven was not like Mozart. Unlike the great child prodigy of classical music, the German born in Bonn took a few more years to stand out and make his name prevail. The years of his adolescence were the ones that brought him this recognition, a little for his talent and his effort, and a little for his father’s alcoholism: the head of the household lost his job in the Bonn orchestra and that turned the young Beethoven into the largest source of income for that family.
Like a piano virtuoso, raised under the unbridled demands of that fatherLudwig’s name began to grow and by 1792, and thanks to an invitation from none other than Joseph Haydn, settled in Vienna, something like the Mecca of classical music. He was 22 years old and there were more than thirty years left until he premiered, in that consecrated city, his famous Ninth.
But almost ten had already passed since the publication of An die Freudewhich translates to joy but which became known as Ode to joy. It is a poem by the German author and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whom Beethoven deeply admired, in which brotherhood among men is the main argument. In some letters from 1793, already settled in Vienna, Ludwig tells his brothers and his friends of his desire to set the work to music.
About those words, which among other things say Seid umschlungen, Millionen! / Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt! (Be embraced millions! This kiss to the whole world!)Beethoven would build one of his several masterpieces and also a musical revolutionand the West would build a collective imagination.
Around 1824, when he finished composing the Ninth, the German musician had spent about thirty years building the musicalization of the poem, to which he added some stanzas for reasons of meter and rhythm. Based on that desire, which he placed in the fourth and last movement of his symphony, he developed everything else: he began from back to front, so that the first forty-five minutes of the work would lead the listener to that ending that, after so much Listen to it, it seems that humans are born knowing.
At the same time that he imagined his work -and composed several others-, Since 1796 Beethoven was becoming deaf, a condition that was already total several years before the premiere. That was what led him to confinement – that a musician of his caliber was seen like this embarrassed him, he told his brothers in his letters -, even thought about suicide when he learned that it was an irreversible evil – he also told his brothers that in a letter that he never sent them. But he did not stop composing.
For that he invented gadgets: he cut the legs of his piano to feel the different sound vibrations on the floor, he designed a metal tube that connected his body with that same piano so that those vibrations could be felt in his chest and, above all, he remembered until the end. final how each possible note sounded. The music that he could not hear with his ears, it is not known whether due to lupus, sarcoidosis or lead poisoning, Beethoven could hear it in his mind: he knew everything he needed to know for the miracle to happen.
In 1817, the London Philharmonic Society commissioned a symphony from Beethoven, who had several outlines of the Ninth among his drafts. That encouragement and the inspiration in Schiller’s poem, which had never stopped, made him work even more fully on his work. From 1822 to 1824 he did not dedicate himself to anything else and, in that manuscript that did not stop growing, he recorded the revolution that he was about to launch live: For the first time in the history of music, one of the great composers decided to include vocal parts in a symphony. No one had believed it possible, necessary or beautiful until that moment.
Beethoven wanted the Ninth Symphony will premiere in Berlin. A certain predominance of Italian composers in the Vienna music scene made him feel displaced, and Berlin was nothing less than the capital of his homeland. But his Viennese friends and several renowned businessmen found out and signed a petition, along with patrons and prominent musicians, for the Austrian capital to host that premiere. They convinced him.
On May 7, 1824, at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna and with the largest endowment of musicians in his entire career -to interpret the Ninth about 150 instrumentalists are needed – Beethoven premiered his work. The theater orchestra was not enough, so the Vienna Musical Society joined in and even some amateurs who passed some tests and demonstrated their ability.
Franz Schubert was in the room and the Theather-Zeitung critic wrote: “The audience received the musical hero with the greatest respect and sympathy, listened to his marvelous and gigantic creations with the most rapt attention, and burst into jubilant applause, often during the sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.”
Beethoven was on stage. Completely deaf, and under the orchestra director’s fear that he would want to intervene more than necessary, he marked the tempo to the musicians at the beginning of each of the four movements.
The audience stopped to applaud him five times.. The first thing they did was applaud, but Beethoven, with his back turned, did not notice. Caroline Unger, the Viennese contralto that the composer himself had chosen as one of the main voices for that night, was the one who turned him around to see what he had unleashed: handkerchiefs in the air, hands and hats raised, all possible forms of reverence before what they had just discovered. Beethoven bowed in thanks, saluted, left and never returned to public life. He was 53 years old, in fragile health and deafness that embarrassed him..
The German composer created more than two hundred different versions of the ode, part of the fourth movement. That fact is just a way to glimpse all the work that went into this masterpiece, in which he combined Italian opera with German opera, military fanfare with requiem, cantata with elegy, and voices with the symphonic universe.
He achieved what he had set out to do since he had begun to imagine his adaptation of Schiller’s poem: the Ode to Joy of wine Hymn to joy and is used, to this day, as soundtrack of the possibility of humanity treating each other brotherly, loved, accompanied, respected. If someone asked an average human being to set to music the phrase “love your neighbor as yourself,” the Ninth Symphony She has all the numbers to be chosen.
But precisely because of that, because of its universal status and because it condenses in that unforgettable ending the values that anyone would like to attribute to themselves to feel on the side of the best, is that it was appropriate for political uses. Sometimes even on the side of the genocidaires.
In 1933, at the Bayreuth Festival, it was performed to entertain the highest Nazi leaders and in 1937 that went further: in April of that year an orchestra presented it at the celebration of the Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Joseph Goebbelsthe Nazi propaganda minister, claimed that the Ninth illustrated “the capacity of Fuehrer to achieve a triumphant and joyful victory.”
The official musician of fascism Benito Mussolini, Pietro Mascagni, conducted the symphony in mass performances, although it was also performed by exiles who opposed those regimes. During World War II, Beethoven’s work It sounded among the Nazis but also among the Allies: It was the most performed symphonic piece on both sides. Around 1974, the then Republic of Rhodesia adopted the ode as its official anthem: it was a State that imposed apartheid.
At the same time, during the Cold War, the two Germanys once used the work as a kind of unified anthem. As soon as he fell Berlin Wallin 1989, American director Leonard Bernstein performed the Ninth together with the Philharmonic Orchestra of that city. In the vocal part, the word “joy” was replaced by “freedom.” It became one of the most massive and moving performances on record.
165 years had passed since the premiere in Vienna, and no one had invented something better to convey, with words but also through emotions, that idea that together we are better. Now two hundred have passed. And the invention remains intact.
