Beethoven’s Ninth manuscript to go on tour
LONDON — The British music society that commissioned Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy said Wednesday it will celebrate the society’s 2013 bicentenary by showing off its manuscript of the work on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Royal Philharmonic Society, founded in London in January 1813, will also sponsor performances of Beethoven’s last symphony, splash out on commissions of new music and digitize its archive held at the British Library, the society announced in the London pub where its founders used to meet.
“Some of the most famous works in the classical repertoire were either commissioned by the Philharmonic Society or premiered in the U.K. at Philharmonic Society concerts,” said John Gilhooly, the society’s Irish chairman.
“Works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Delius, Debussy and Shostakovich, to name but a few,” Gilhooly said. The society had commissioned “over 60 composers in the last decade alone.”
The society will participate in exhibitions in New York and London featuring manuscript versions of Beethoven’s last symphony, which contains the Ode to Joy that has become a theme song for world peace and freedom.
The society’s archives record that in 1817, it paid Beethoven 50 guineas for the work. The society, which is not publicly funded and is financed by donations, got the “royal” tag in its centenary year.
Gilhooly said a much-photographed and copied bust of Beethoven the society owns would be making a return visit to concert stages after having been squirrelled away in the RPS headquarters for most of the past 30 years.
“It’s going to be a bit like the Olympic torch,” Gilhooly said. “It’s busted out in preparation for a grand tour.”
The exhibition of letters and manuscripts will be mounted in co-operation with the British Library, the Morgan Library and the Juilliard School of music in New York, which holds another copy of Beethoven’s Ninth.
The U.S. and British manuscripts of the symphony, annotated by Beethoven, will be seen together for the first time since 1824 in New York later in the year, the society said.