Notes on the Program

By Maestro James Blachly

When we consider Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, we tend to focus primarily on the famous last movement, for chorus, soloists, and orchestra. The moment when the chorus and four solo singers suddenly begin to sing in this symphony is like that famous moment in the Wizard of Oz when the movie transitions from black and white to full color, because in the long history of the symphony, voices had never been included until the premiere of this “choral symphony” in 1824.

But there are three other earth-shattering movements that prepare us for this extraordinary moment.

The 9th’s first movement is enormous and intense. It begins in near-silence, with what seems like the beginning of the world. The melody gradually gathers itself together, one note and instrument at a time, before the entire orchestra plays a powerful falling figure in unison. Indeed, the movement seems to be a continual struggle to rise in the face of some dominating force that propels downwards. There are moments of repose, but the musical landscape is one of a battle being fought. At the very end of the music, we hear a funeral march, not unlike the second movement of Beethoven’s own Eroica symphony.

The symphony’s second movement is a scherzo, which suggests that it may be a musical joke of some kind (“scherzo” is the Italian word for joke). We soon realize that this is no light-hearted amusement and that it is on an unprecedented scale. The Scherzo lasts some thirteen minutes (most scherzos last no more than five or six). The repeated figure we hear at the very beginning of the movement continues throughout, with sudden, almost shocking, outbursts from the timpani. There is a contrasting middle section before the entire opening comes roaring back; the contrasting section then returns once more before being abruptly cut off.

In the world of classical music, there are some who claim that while Mozart could write melodies effortlessly, Beethoven struggled with this aspect of composition—and was never very successful. The 9th’s third movement is, to my mind, the perfect refutation of that thesis. In this movement, he succeeded gloriously in creating long, flowing musical lines. This is uninterrupted pure melody, a gorgeous unending song. It can be viewed as an expression of the all of the love that Beethoven longed for in his life and never received, a sense of comfort and warmth that all people desire.

This is all cut off with the beginning of the fourth movement, a blast of conflicting sound that Wagner dubbed a Schreckensfanfare, a “fanfare of terror.” Indeed, this opening has been compared to the gates of hell (according to Vaughan Williams, “here all hell breaks loose.”) It is followed by the cellos and basses playing a single line in unison, marked as a kind of recitative, which is a term from opera for when characters speak while singing a melodically declaimed text. Beethoven seems to be using the low instruments in an attempt to communicate directly with the audience, cajoling, demanding, and inspiring the orchestra to play various fragments, including a summary of each of the preceding movements. We first hear the orchestra play the opening of Movement I (which is rejected by the cellos and basses), then the opening of Movement II (once again rejected), then the beloved Movement III (which is, in a new reflective way, also turned down).

Finally, the orchestra plays a portion of the Ode to Joy melody. This the cellos and basses celebrate, and they soon play the entire melody, this glorious expression of humanity. Beethoven writes several captivating variations on this melody over the course of many minutes before the shriek of pain—the opening of the movement—returns, and the solo bass singer makes his dramatic entrance, a lone voice crying in the wilderness of an enormous assemblage of orchestral instruments: “O friends, not these tones. Let us, rather, strike up more pleasant and joyful ones.”

The bass is singing the same melody as the cellos and basses had played earlier, and we only realize now what they had been trying to tell us: that the world needs some kind of new music to bind us together. That is what Beethoven sets out to do for the rest of the symphony, calling on the chorus and soloists to proclaim the message of Friedrich Schiller’s famous Ode to Joy, rousing us to universal brotherhood despite our manifold differences, saying “all men should be as brothers under Joy’s soft and welcoming wing.”

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In tonight’s program, I have paired Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with Richard Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser, believing that if we are to take Beethoven and Schiller’s message fully to heart, we must first resolve the conflicts inside ourselves. The opera Tannhäuser is about a seemingly irreconcilable psychological divide in the protagonist between his love of the divine and earthly desire. We hear both of these ideas expressed magnificently in the opera’s overture, first in the love of the divine expressed by chorus of the pilgrims, then in the lure of sensuality in strings music that sounds the siren call of Venus’s mountain pleasure palace, the Venusberg.

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony created ceaseless waves of creative responses, inspiring composers for generations. The symphony was so bold and new, so creative and unexpected, that it set a new bar for subsequent composers. Brahms expressed the symphony’s challenge with characteristic modesty: “...you have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.” Wagner, on the other hand, announced himself on multiple occasions to be Beethoven’s true heir, not only able to meet the Beethoven challenge but to exceed it.

Far removed as we today are from the Vienna of 1824, we can easily lose sight of the tremendous effort that went into creating the 9th. Beethoven had first considered setting Schiller’s text to music when he was 22 years old in 1793, and by the time he added this vocal setting to his symphony, there had already been more than 20 different versions of the Ode set to song by various other composers. True to received wisdom, Beethoven struggled mightily with the melody. His notebooks indicate that he revised it more than 200 times before arriving at the version we know. But the labor was well spent: Beethoven’s melody is consummate. Once we have heard this melody, we can hardly imagine these words set to any other.

Perhaps the greatest lesson one can learn from Beethoven is to trust in the value of our own work, especially when we dare to try something new. Debussy, who as a composer did precisely that at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, wrote that “Beethoven’s real teaching...was not to preserve the old forms, still less to follow in his early steps. We must throw wide the windows to the open sky.” As listeners, we must do the same, and hear Beethoven’s mighty symphony and Wagner’s awe-inspiring music as windows to new worlds.