Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
Premiere: Vienna, May 7, 1824
Vocal soloists: Soprano, alto, tenor, bass
Chorus: S-A-T-B
Orchestra: Piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, strings
***
Allegro ma non troppo e un poco maestoso
Molto vivace
Adagio molto e cantabile
Finale: An die Freude (Ode to Joy)
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
"An illustrious, extremely large audience listened with rapt attention and did not stint with enthusiastic, thundering applause. Beethoven himself conducted, that is, he stood in front of a conductor's stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet. --The actual direction was in [the backup conductor, Michael Umlauf's] hands; we musicians followed his baton only. --Beethoven was so excited that he saw nothing that was going on about him, he paid no heed whatever to the bursts of applause, which his deafness prevented him from hearing in any case."
Thus did the violinist Joseph Böhm report on one of the most extraordinary premieres in music history. The concert in Vienna on May 7, 1824 included, along with the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, three movements of his Missa Solemnis and his overture to The Consecration of the House. It was an extremely taxing program, made even more so by the difficulty and newness of the music, and there had been only two full rehearsals. Some of the high notes in the voice parts were omitted, because the singers could not sing them and could not convince Beethoven to rewrite the passages. One of Beethoven's friends reported that "the whole symphony, especially the last movement, caused great difficulty for the orchestra, which did not understand it at first. . . The double-bass players had not the faintest idea what they were supposed to do with the recitatives. One heard nothing but a gruff rumbling in the basses. . ."
Nonetheless, the orchestra included many fine musicians, and the much anticipated new symphony made a tremendous impression. According to one of the singers in the chorus, there were moments when the audience would spontaneously burst into applause in the middle of a movement, the most striking being at the solo entrance of the timpani in the Scherzo, which, she tells us, had the effect on the audience of a bolt of lightning.
Although the unprecedented last movement, which introduces voices into the symphony, is the most popular movement today, it was less enthusiastically received and somewhat confusing at first. Beethoven had been interested in setting Friedrich Schiller's An die Freude (Ode to Joy) for more than thirty years, but his original thought, dating back to the early 1790's before he moved to Vienna, was to set it as an independent song. Years later, in 1812, while working on his Eighth Symphony, he sketched some ideas for a theme that would set Schiller's words and wrote comments for himself next to the sketch: "Make something using fragments of Schiller's Joy" and "Work out the overture" -- but there was still not yet any thought of inserting it into a symphony. More than a decade later, as he was working on the first two movements of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven still thought of the Ode to Joy as belonging to a different work. It was only in the year before he completed the symphony that he decided to use the vocal setting of Schiller's ode as its finale.
Surprisingly, Beethoven seems to have had some doubts about his decision to introduce a vocal finale into the symphony. His student Carl Czerny reported that, well after the premiere, the composer told some of his close friends that he felt he had made a mistake in doing so and that he wanted to eliminate the finale and substitute a purely instrumental movement in its place. He claimed already to have musical ideas for a new movement, but for unknown reasons, he never wrote it or replaced the original version.
The Music
Beethoven's ninth and last symphony stands apart from his other symphonies in many ways. It was written well after the period of his other symphonies, a dozen years after the eighth. Every movement of this work is more complex in structure and orchestration and grander in scale than what had normally been heard in symphonies up to that time. For much of the nineteenth century, it was considered the ne plus ultra of symphonic writing, and any composer contemplating writing a symphony -- particularly a ninth symphony -- felt himself to be in Beethoven's shadow.
From the very opening notes of the first movement, it is unprecedented: the piece hardly has a real beginning but puts us almost imperceptibly into a pianissimo stream of sound, with the orchestra sustaining an atmospheric, hollow harmony; from there, the music quickly grows into something more violent and frightening. The second movement Scherzo, famous for its solo timpani outbursts, is far more extended in form -- and more taxing on players -- than any scherzo written up to that point. In the Adagio third movement, the violins develop elaborate ornamentation of the theme each time it returns. This movement too makes unprecedented demands on the instruments of Beethoven's time: the fourth horn's solo passage in Cb major, for instance, is something that no one else would have dared ask of a valveless horn.
After Beethoven decided that his finale would be a choral setting of Schiller's ode, something never attempted in a symphony, his conversation books and sketches show him struggling with how to connect it to the earlier purely instrumental movements of the work. His associate Schindler claimed to have observed the composer's crisis in person:
When he reached the development of the fourth movement there began a struggle such as is seldom seen. The object was to find a proper manner of introducing Schiller's Ode. One day entering the room he exclaimed, "I have it! I have it!" With that he showed me the sketchbook…
Beethoven's solution, as today's listeners know, was to create a dramatic "narrative" at the beginning of the finale. Following a crashing dissonance and chaotic opening, he introduces one by one fragments of the three previous movements. Each fragment of earlier music is interrupted and essentially rejected by the cellos and basses playing in the style of a recitative. Their recitatives suggest words that we do not yet know. But then comes music that is not rejected, a theme that is allowed to expand into variations, the famous "Ode to Joy" theme played by the orchestra alone. When the voice of the baritone soloist is finally heard, he sings Beethoven's own text imploring everyone to cease fighting and join together in song. The piece then turns to Schiller's ode.
The "Ode to Joy" Theme
The "Joy" theme, one of the most famous melodies in all of music, is different in character from anything else in this symphony. It is, in a sense, more of an anthem than a normal symphonic theme. Beethoven was well aware of the relatively new interest in national anthems. He admired Britain's God Save the King, a tune on which he wrote variations, and he commented in his journal, "I must give the English some notion of the blessing they have in their God Save the King." He was also well aware of the beautiful national anthem that Haydn had been comissioned to write for the Austrian kaiser. Beethoven himself had made several forays into composing political music in his career, providing music for the Congress of Vienna following the fall of Napoleon. It was around the time of that international gathering that he made early sketches for this theme. Perhaps one of the qualities that has made it so popular is that it has the feeling of a "supra-national anthem" with words that call for the brotherhood of all mankind. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is today the anthem of the European Union.
Boston Baroque Performances
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
October 13, 2023
Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
October 14, 2023
GBH’s Calderwood Studio, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
October 15, 2023
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Heidi Stober, soprano
Daniela Mack, mezzo-soprano
William Burden, tenor
Solomon Howard, bass
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125
November 10, 2013
Strand Theatre, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
November 8 & 9, 2013
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor