by Bill Scanlan Murphy
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
SYMPHONY No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, “Choral”
I Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso
II Molto vivace – presto
III Adagio molto e cantabile
IV Finale – Presto; Allegro ma non troppo
Composed: 1818–1824
Premiered: Vienna, Austria, 1824
It is one of music’s great legends: the great Beethoven conducts the first performance of his mighty last symphony—an astonishing achievement for a profoundly deaf man—then has to be gently turned around by one of the soloists to see the tumultuous applause that he cannot hear. The truth is more prosaic, and sadder: the alto soloist, Caroline Unger, turned him around because he was still beating time after the piece had ended, and she was embarrassed for him. The work was actually conducted by Michael Umlauf while Beethoven gesticulated from a desk at the corner of the platform; the performers were under strict instructions to ignore him. And, while the audience that evening were indeed rapturous—they had also enjoyed the first performance of most of the Missa Solemnis the same evening—others were less enthusiastic. The composer Louis Spohr thought the symphony was “tasteless,” and no less an authority on vocal music than Giuseppe Verdi damned it as “a disaster of word setting.” History, to put it mildly, has disagreed.
This astonishing work is (or, perhaps more accurately, has gathered around itself) a jumble of paradoxes. Widely associated with the struggle for liberty, not least since Leonard Bernstein turned the last movement into the “Ode to Freedom” when the Berlin Wall came down, the piece is nonetheless dedicated to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia (hardly a liberal saint) and was played on the radio every year on Adolf Hitler’s birthday under the Third Reich. An odd footnote to this is that the standing ovations and foot-stomping that greeted the first performance were forcibly stopped by secret policemen in the hall; the fact that someone thought it necessary to put them there in the first place certainly tells us something. Their efforts were so persuasive, in fact, that only sixteen people dared to turn up for the second performance two weeks later; one of them was Franz Schubert.
Beethoven had been determined to set Schiller’s Ode to Joy for nearly thirty years; his first effort, now lost, dated from 1792. He told his friend Anton Schindler that the Ninth Symphony would essentially be a long prelude to and setting of the poem, which first appeared in 1785; alas, he was putting Schindler on—there are sketches for a completely instrumental finale to the symphony which became the finale of the Op.132 string quartet. Beethoven was far from the first composer to set the Ode; at least three settings appeared in the year after its publication; the 18-year-old Schubert set it in 1815. Nor was Beethoven the last; by far the weirdest of Tchaikovsky’s vocal works is a setting of a Russian version of the Ode for exactly the same forces as Beethoven’s, written in 1865. Whether Schiller really intended the poem to be a universal gathering point for political visionaries is actually uncertain; it is based very firmly on a drinking song of the period, and may even have been used as one while the poet was alive. Beethoven silently deletes the boozier passages of the poem in the interests of his own grand conception of it. In one of his more ironic observations on the craft of composition, he once said that it is easier to set a fairly good poem than a great one, because it is the composer’s task to improve upon the poem. Quite so.
Beethoven’s First Symphony, completed in 1800, was the longest symphony written up to that time; the first movement alone of the Third, the Eroica, was longer than any of Mozart’s symphonies. The first three movements of the Ninth would have tipped the scales as the longest-ever (not to say strangest-constructed) symphony even if Beethoven had not decided to top the piece off with a large stretch of oratorio. He obviously considered the appearance of the Ode a crucial moment not only in this symphony, but in his music in general, and, indeed, his life. He takes a remarkable route to get there.
The symphony opens with a paradox. What can easily be taken for tremolando strings is actually a carefully written-out pattern; like approaching an pointilliste painting and seeing the dots, the careful listener can determine structure in the fog. Superimposed over this is material essentially derived from the simplest of material—the D minor arpeggio, just as the opening subject of the Eroica was derived from the E-flat major arpeggio. It is one of the paradoxes of music that some of its greatest works, from Beethoven symphonies to the Rite of Spring, are based on almost trivial musical ideas; in Beethoven’s hands, the statement of the musically obvious becomes a declaration of eternal verities. The same figure returns at the end of the movement in the major key. Its startling abruptness almost prevents it being a “theme” in the usual sense, laying the foundations for a compositional truth that would reach its epitome in Wagner and Mahler: the more gargantuan the work, the smaller the elements from which it is constructed.
The original audience would have expected the next movement to be slow, followed by a minuet and trio or Scherzo. A handful of symphonies by Beethoven’s teacher Haydn had reversed this order, and Beethoven does so now, to devastating effect. The movement is characterized by the remorseless rhythms hammered out, literally, by the timpani, who are given the first solo in the entire symphonic literature; this is contrasted in the major-key trio by the first symphonic use of trombones. And yes, that is the MSNBC news jingle at the beginning of the movement; NBC has been using those six notes since 1951.
The slow movement, in B-flat major (the symphony’s relative major— note the perfectly conventional key relationships amid the mayhem), is a theme with variations, during which the trombones are silent. The horns certainly are not, however, and the fourth (!) horn is given a solo.
And so on to the famous Finale, so long and complex that it is often described as a “symphony within a symphony” (it is easily the length of any complete Haydn or Mozart symphony). Wagner referred to the famous clangorous opening as the Schreckenfanfare (the Fear Fanfare). On closer inspection, the grinding dissonance of the first chord is the result of sounding the work’s tonic D minor triad simultaneously with its relative major B flat, a dissonance that is “solved” by the movement’s D major main theme—the Ode. Beethoven’s own words, sung by the bass soloist – nicht diese Toene (not these tones)! - introduce the Schiller setting with a very literal comment on this simple tonal scheme. Not that key, this one! This linking passage gave Beethoven a great deal of trouble; one draft begins with the less-than-stirring words “Now let’s sing Schiller’s famous Ode!”
The melody of the Ode has frequently been described as one of the great melodic inventions of all time—all the more remarkable in view of its essentially up-the-scale, down-the-scale, down-a-fifth structure. Interestingly, the Beethoven melody that is often cited as its nearest rival is that of the slow movement of the Seventh symphony, in which fourteen of the first nineteen notes are the same note. Again, in Beethoven, simplicity comes to characterize the eternal. The “Turkish” sounds that announce the tenor’s solo look back to Mozart and forward to Mahler, while the sudden plunge into a slow sub-movement at Ihr stürzt nieder shows that Beethoven did, indeed, intend a “symphony within a symphony” here.
Ironically, the sternest critic of this sprawling, vital symphony proved to be Beethoven himself. Soon after the second performance, he declared the final movement a failure and said that future performances would have an instrumental finale that he had already written. Do we—and history—dare suggest that the great composer was just plain wrong here? We certainly do.
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