The anthem of European Unity.
A few days before the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Vienna’s dog-walkers realized the world would never be the same again. As their dogs sniffed a concert placard, the owners learned of a “grand” new symphony with “solo and chorus voices” in the finale—a radical departure from the tradition of symphonies for orchestra alone.
The announcement that “Herr Ludwig van Beethoven will himself participate in the direction” was not reassuring, given the composer’s well-known deafness. The orchestra and chorus were to be supersized “as a favor” by music societies, and the symphony was promised to be the longest ever heard.
Yet the most shocking detail was the date: the concert was that same week, on May 7, 1824.
“On a Friday?” people wailed. “No one will come.” The ruling classes typically went to their country houses for the weekend. Why debut a new work without the counts and princes—the cultural influencers of the day? Beethoven gruffly explained that it was the only night he could get the theater and that he wanted his symphony to be heard by real people, not just the elite. He cut ticket prices and broke the dress code, wearing a green jacket because he didn’t own a black frock coat. Everything about this occasion declared his intention to subvert the established order.
The audience was enthusiastic, demanding a repeat of the second movement. Some aristocrats stayed in town; one old count was stretchered in from his deathbed. Seatless students clung to the side rails. The tension cranked up over 50 minutes. Six minutes into the finale, a bass singer declared: “Friends, not these notes—let’s try something nicer, more cheerful.” The orchestra gave him one bar to catch his breath before the bass bellowed out “freude!” or “joy.”
The chorus rose, invoking revolution with the words “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”—all people will be brothers—a slogan that could have gotten them arrested for denying the God-given rights of emperors. Beethoven had given crowd power to Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy of 1785. It now seemed practical and inevitable. The audience roared approval. A police commissioner shouted for order above the musical din. A soloist had to tug Beethoven’s sleeve to show the deaf composer his cheering, foot-stamping audience. “My triumph is attained,” he said. “From now I can speak from the heart.”
From that moment on, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became a rallying cry for social reformers of every shade, from Karl Marx, who described it as “a solemn mass of earthly joy,” to Keir Starmer, who recently told Classic FM that this symphony best summed up the Labour Party under his leadership. “It has a sense of destiny and is hugely optimistic. This is very sort of Labour. Beethoven’s getting everybody on stage … it’s that sense of moving forward to a better place.”
The symphony has served many visions of society. Joseph Stalin ordered it played in every Soviet village, and Adolf Hitler sent the Berlin Philharmonic with Wilhelm Furtwängler to play it in munitions factories beneath a giant swastika. Around Christmas each year, the Japanese put on record-breaking “Daiku” concerts of the Ninth with up to 10,000 amateur singers in the chorus. Meanwhile, China’s Gang of Four banned Beethoven altogether, and a recital of the Ninth in Iran in 2005 led to the ban of all Western music as “indecent.”
The national anthem of Ian Smith’s white-rule regime in Rhodesia was a reworked version of Ode to Joy. The European Union adopted it in 1985, interpreting Schiller’s inclusivity dream that “all people should be brothers”. When the Berlin Wall came down, Leonard Bernstein conducted a triumphalist concert, replacing the noun “freude” with “freiheit”—freedom.
Novelist Anthony Burgess used the symphony as a young thug’s drug of choice in A Clockwork Orange, its impact amplified in Ferenc Fricsay’s soundtrack performance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation. Feminist musicologist Susan McClary heard “the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release” in Beethoven’s climactic masterpiece. Her thesis prompted poet Adrienne Rich to write The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message, which contains the Freudian line “yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego,” whatever that might mean. Beethoven, at his most universalist, was open to every kind of interpretation. The fastest recording is 39 minutes, the slowest 105—both irrational. Midway is about right.
What, then, do we know of Beethoven’s intentions? He was 53 years old and in failing health. Deep in debt, he accepted a below-par commission from the Philharmonic Society of London and set aside the year 1823 to compose the symphony. By the end of August, he had only 15 minutes of music on paper. The slow movement took him two months more. Beset by aches and pains, he took a spa cure in Baden and returned to Vienna with a notebook in hand, crying: “I have it! I have it!”
The score was signed off in February 1824, but Beethoven, having doubts, talked of writing a new finale without voices. “I made a mistake,” he said. He offered the premiere to Berlin and a dedication, despite his London contract, to the Prussian king. First-night rights were won for Vienna by a cabal of local toffs, indicating that Beethoven’s commitment to egalitarianism was not altogether unequivocal.
Beethoven wanted his Ninth Symphony to erase inequality. Entering its third century, it has lost none of its irresistible appeal.
