200 years of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9

Everyone knows it: "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A universal message of peace and harmony set to music.

What are you going to listen to?

Exactly two hundred years ago, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony experienced its first performance in Vienna. The theme of the final chorus to Schiller's Ode an die Freude, perfect in its simplicity, quickly grew to become the most famous melody of all time and has not faded away to this day.

A lifelong quest

It was in 1817 that Ludwig van Beethoven received the request from the London Philharmonic Society to compose a new symphony. From the very beginning, the composer had planned to use vocal soloists and chorus on the text of Schiller's Ode an die Freude. With that poem, the writer had achieved considerable fame. Written in 1785, it was published almost immediately and provided with a melody by a friend. Thus, it quickly gained enormous popularity and many other composers such as Carl Zelter and Franz Schubert also set it to music. Beethoven was deeply moved by the poem. As a straight republican who cherished the ideas of the Enlightenment, the vision of a brilliant new society, in which all men are brothers, appealed to him greatly. But to such a lofty text belonged an at least equally lofty melody. And that was something Beethoven had been searching for all his life. A very first germ could already be heard in the 1794 song Gegenliebe. And the basic melody of the 1808 Choral Fantasy was already very similar to that of the Ode, even though Beethoven used a different text. In the numerous sketches the composer made leading up to the finale, it is easy to see how he struggled to arrive at a perfect melody. Consequently, it took until 1824 before the work was finally finished. Initially, Beethoven composed mainly the first three instrumental movements. As impressive as it was, the finale had to far surpass all that, and the opening bars of the finale refer brilliantly to this. We hear a short excerpt from each of the three movements, whereupon the bass exclaims in words of Beethoven himself, "O friends, not these tones, but let us sound more pleasant and joyful. Then the famous melody, heard once before in the orchestra, finally bursts forth and continues to dominate the entire finale.

Last performance

Although the request for this symphony came from London, Beethoven had initially planned to have the premiere in Berlin. Even for that reason, he had dedicated the work to the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II. But his friends still managed to convince him to move the first performance to Vienna, the city where he had lived and worked most of his life. And so on May 7, 1824, the Ninth sounded for the first time at the Vienna Theater am Kärtnertor. Although conductor Michael Umlauf was in actual charge, Beethoven was swinging along drily beside him. True, he could no longer hear anything, but from the movement of the instruments and the mouths, he had some idea of the proceedings, even if he was painfully out of tune most of the time. Afterwards, the composer was completely ecstatic and the alto from the soloist ensemble had to turn him to the audience to receive the frenzied applause. The resulting enthusiasm and disorder was so great that the police had to be called in to clear the hall in some peace. For Beethoven it was his Last public appearance. He would not appear on any stage again until his death in 1827.

The symphony, and especially the famous melody of the final chorus, was elevated to an icon of Western music in subsequent years. Wagner used it as the dedication of his famous Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. A large number of new lyrics have been created to it, functioning as religious hymns or national anthems of several countries. Without lyrics, the melody is symbolic of European union as a Europe anthem. And Bernstein conducted a jubilant performance of it with a diverse international ensemble to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. Perhaps a glimpse of "Alle Menschen werder Brüder," though it has faded in the decades since.

Kees Wisse