Symphony No. 9, in D Minor, with Final Chorus on Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” Opus 125
More than ten years passed after the initial performance of the Eighth Symphony before Beethoven brought out its successor, his ninth and last, on May 7, 1824. The earlier part of this period was comparatively unproductive. Beethoven was profoundly disturbed by quarrels over his guardianship of his nephew Karl, which eventually were taken to court. His health and spirits suffered and, meantime, his deafness became complete. Nevertheless his creative impulse found expression in two works of the grandest dimensions, the Mass in D and the Ninth Symphony. Sketches for the symphony were made as early as 1815—perhaps even earlier—and he went to work on it in earnest in 1817.
The première took place at the Kaerthnerthor Theater, Vienna, on May 7, 1824. The problems of performance were complicated by the composer’s using in the final movement a chorus and a quartet of soloists. Michael Umlauf conducted and the solo singers were Henriette Sontag (one of the most famous sopranos of her day), Karolina Unger, Anton Haitzinger, and J. Seipelt. The difficulty of Beethoven’s voice parts gave trouble at rehearsals. Mmes. Sontag and Unger begged him to alter their music, but in vain. Mme. Unger declared in his presence that he was a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” Still, at the first performance it was she who led the composer from where he had been sitting in the midst of the orchestra to the edge of the stage to see the excited waving of the audience and to bow.
Beethoven in Vienna, 1820-25.
Pen and ink sketch by J. P. Lyser.
These solo parts have lost none of their difficulty for singers, and from the sopranos of the chorus Beethoven well-nigh demands the superhuman. With a view to helping matters some conductors have transposed the Finale down a whole tone, thus dimming its brilliance and upsetting Beethoven’s scheme of keys. Wagner believed that Beethoven by having words and singers in the Finale had closed the cycle of purely orchestral music. Others, however, regard the singers as a mistake and maintain that Beethoven recognized his error. So devout and searching a student of Beethoven as Professor Tovey, while dismissing as absurd the theory of Beethoven’s discontent with instrumental music, holds that every part of the Ninth Symphony becomes clearer when we assume that the choral Finale is right, and that hardly a point in the work but becomes difficult and obscure when we assume that the choral Finale is wrong. Though he admits that Beethoven, long after the production of the symphony, told some friends that the choral inclusion was a mistake and that perhaps some day he might write an instrumental Finale, he sets this down to a fit of depression. At any rate, the Finale stands as written and there is no choice but to grapple with its problems.
For three movements the symphony is of course, purely instrumental. Of the first movement (“Allegro, ma non troppo, un poco maestoso,” in D minor) Ricciotto Canudo has written: “In the beginning was space; and all possibilities were in space; and life was space.” It begins pianissimo in empty fifths. A descending figure of two notes, from the heights to the depths, is reiterated while a tremendous crescendo leads to the theme that dominates the movement, given out fortissimo in unison and octaves:
The entire movement, which is well stocked with other themes, has the majesty and impetus of a titanic tragedy, and its propulsive drama ends with a defiant proclamation of the chief theme.
Now Beethoven reverses his usual procedure by postponing the slow movement and introducing a “Molto vivace” (in F minor), which has been called at once the greatest and the longest of his scherzos. A phrase of three notes, repeated on each interval of the chord of D minor, begins it, followed immediately by this fugal subject:
The enormous vitality and rhythmic drive of the Scherzo have deafened some hearers to the bitter strain in the jest. Joy unalloyed has not yet burst upon the scene.
And meanwhile Beethoven gives us the slow movement, a combination of an “Adagio molto e cantabile” (in B-flat major) and an “Andante moderato” (in D major), which as a whole has been described conveniently and with reasonable accuracy as a set of variations on two alternating themes:
Language has been ransacked for words to express the beauty and elevation of this Adagio-Andante. Its seraphic song is dying away when the initial D minor of the Finale, presto and fortissimo, roughly smites our ears.
A series of orchestral sections, in contrast and conflict, occupy the battleground of the earlier pages before the baritone soloist, first using words by Beethoven himself, introduces the human voices and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Two of the themes brought in here the listener should keep carefully in mind: the first is employed later by the baritone in demanding sounds of gladness, and the second is the so-called theme of joy:
Now chorus and soloists join valiantly in the good fight for “mirth and rapture blended” till the symphony ends in the victorious D major paeans, vocal and at the very last instrumental, of universal rejoicing. The burden of Schiller’s praise of Joy is held in these two lines:
“All mankind are brothers plighted
Where thy gentle wings abide.”
And universal brotherhood is thus voiced by the tenors and the basses in unison.