Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 200: A revolutionary work of art

Ted Olson, East Tennessee State University

In early 1824, 30 members of Vienna’s music community sent a letter to Ludwig van Beethoven petitioning the great composer to reconsider his plans to premiere his latest work in Berlin and instead debut the symphony in Vienna.

Beethoven had lived in Vienna since 1792, when he left his hometown of Bonn, Germany, to pursue a career as a composer. Beethoven rose to world renown, but by the 1820s he had fallen out of favor with Viennese arts patrons who, at the time, were drawn to the sounds and styles of Italian composers.

Beethoven had not appeared before a Viennese audience in a dozen years, but he was moved by the letter’s sentiment and agreed to debut his new work, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, in the city. The premiere performance was on May 7, 1824, at Kärntnertor Theater.

Concert promoters promised the public that the legendary – and legendarily antisocial – composer would be present at the performance of his latest symphony. Indeed, during the entirety of the performance, he was on stage, his back to the audience, as described by Maynard Solomon in his acclaimed biography of Beethoven.

The composer insisted upon conducting the symphony from a conductor’s stand. The official conductor at the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians – a Viennese orchestra and choir – to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and who theoretically could not be relied upon to keep time.

The performance was interrupted several times by rapturous applause from the approximately 2,000 attendees, but Beethoven could not hear the reaction. According to eyewitnesses, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman” and fell several bars behind in his “conducting.”

The enthusiastic response to the symphony’s debut performance presaged its reception in the European music community, globally and across time.

Symphony No. 9, sometimes referred to as the Choral Symphony, was the capstone to Beethoven’s extraordinary career. In the 200 years since its debut, the symphony has become an essential composition in the orchestral repertoire and is often cited as the crowning achievement of Western classical music.

A central reason for the symphony’s accessibility to a broad audience was Beethoven’s incorporation of the 1785 poem “An die Freude,” or “Ode to Joy,” by Friedrich Schiller, a leading German author, historian and philosopher. Matched to a memorable melody in the fourth movement, this text – with its uplifting, humanitarian sentiment – contributed to the symphony’s character as an anthem.

Widely interpreted as Beethoven’s plea for a global “brotherhood,” the fourth movement has been incorporated into ceremonial events sponsored by international organizations such as UNESCO, the Olympics, the Council of Europe and the European Union. Given the work’s fame the Ode to Joy section of the symphony has also been appropriated for propaganda by supporters of Nazism, Bolshevism, Maoism and other ideologies.

Symphony No. 9 is extraordinary in many ways, according to Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra and a Grammy Award-winning conductor.

The Ninth Symphony was not the first long piece of music at the time, but the others were generally built by stringing together many shorter sequences. In contrast, Beethoven crafted the Ninth Symphony – a 74-minute work – out of just four long movements. “The proportions alone are staggering,” Abrams said in an interview for this article.

Each of the Ninth’s four movements is a single cohesive, coherent musical statement. This, more than the innovation of using a chorus in a symphony, was what made Beethoven’s Ninth revolutionary, according to Abrams.

[Abridged]

Ted Olson, East Tennessee State University