Beethoven’s Ninth, Two Hundred Years On

About the Work

Ludwig van Beethoven’s last symphony had two starting points, years apart. The first was a poem. Friedrich Schiller’s ode An die Freude (To Joy), written in 1785, had been in Beethoven’s mind since his youth, and he had tried more than once to set it to music. The second was an invitation. In 1817 the Philharmonic Society of London asked him to come to England with two new symphonies. He never made the journey, but the correspondence went on, and in 1822 it turned into a firm commission for one.

He did the main work on the score between the autumn of 1822 and February 1824. The decision to end with Schiller’s poem, sung by four soloists and a chorus, was without precedent in a symphony by a major composer, and Beethoven took care over how to get there. He chose and reordered the verses he wanted and wrote the few words that introduce them himself.

The first performance was given in Vienna on 7 May 1824 at the Kärntnertor theatre. The soloists were Henriette Sontag, Caroline Unger, Anton Haitzinger and Joseph Seipelt. Michael Umlauf conducted. Beethoven, by then almost totally deaf, stood on stage beside him to give the tempos. When the music ended he could not hear the applause behind him and had to be turned round to see it; by one account it was Unger, the alto soloist, who did so.

The Ninth soon became something larger than a concert piece. The melody of the finale was adopted as an anthem by the Council of Europe in 1972 and by what is now the European Union in 1985, and the symphony has been played to mark public occasions of every kind. In 2027 it has an occasion of its own: the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death in March 1827.

The orchestra is a large one. To the usual woodwind, trumpets, timpani and strings Beethoven added a piccolo, a contrabassoon, four horns, three trombones and, for the finale, triangle, cymbals and bass drum. A performance lasts a little over an hour.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso. The symphony begins almost inaudibly, with bare fifths in the strings, like an orchestra tuning or a world not yet formed. Fragments of a theme fall through this haze until the whole orchestra hurls it out in D minor. When the opening returns later in the movement it comes back at full force and in the major, and the effect is more frightening than consoling. The coda is built over a slow, grinding chromatic bass, like a funeral march.

II. Molto vivace. Beethoven puts the scherzo second, where a slow movement was expected. The strings start a fugue on a hammering three-note rhythm, and the timpani keep bursting in on their own. The trio turns to D major for a plain, folk-like tune that grows by repetition.

III. Adagio molto e cantabile. The still centre of the work, in B-flat major. Two long-breathed melodies alternate, and each time the first returns it is more richly decorated than before.

IV. Finale. A violent discord shatters the calm. Cellos and basses answer it alone, in the manner of a singer’s recitative but without words. The orchestra offers the opening of each earlier movement in turn, and each is cut off. Then the low strings, unaccompanied and very quietly, play the Joy tune. It passes upward through the orchestra, gathering instruments, until the discord returns and a human voice takes over: ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ (Friends, not these sounds).

From here the movement is a chain of variations on the Joy theme. Listen for the ‘Turkish’ march, where the tune is turned into a jaunty quickstep with piccolo, triangle, cymbals and bass drum and the tenor sings above it; for the slow, awed section at ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’, which sounds like church chant; and for the double fugue in which the chorus sings that theme and the Joy tune at the same moment. The last pages are a headlong race.