7 reasons why Beethoven’s Ninth is a big deal
The Milwaukee Symphony is ending its classical season June 15-17 with a big finale: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Everything about this masterpiece is big, starting with the forces guest conductor Jun Märkl will lead at the Marcus Center: 106 orchestra members, four vocal soloists and 115 Milwaukee Symphony Chorus members.
Singing the Ninth’s famous choral movement at Carnegie Hall was “one of the great musical experiences of my life,” said J. Mark Baker, publications editor for music publishing giant Hal Leonard, and author of the Milwaukee Symphony’s program notes.
With Baker’s help, and drawing on the voluminous literature about the subject, let’s consider how the Ninth embiggened the world of music:
A big innovation: Beethoven infused choral voices into an instrumental form. “It became the impetus for ... Mahler and others to incorporate symphonic and choral forces,” Baker said.
A big hit: A BBC Music Magazine Twitter poll declared the Ninth the greatest symphony of all time.
A big idea: Preoccupied for many years with Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), Beethoven adapted its words for the stirring final movement of the Ninth. In the 1820s, when Beethoven composed the symphony, monarchs were trying to roll back freedoms gained during preceding decades. That’s led some to see “freude” (“joy”) as code for “freiheit” (“freedom”), Baker noted.
When Leonard Bernstein conducted in Germany in 1989 to celebrate the destruction of the Berlin Wall, he instructed
his chorus to sing the German word for freedom.
A big mess: While enthusiastically received by the audience at its 1824 premiere in Vienna, the Ninth was performed by a ramshackle assemblage — a theater orchestra supplemented by amateur musicians.
Beethoven had to replace his original choice of bass soloist because the first man couldn’t sing the high notes for his part. “I’m sure that what you (will) hear from the Milwaukee forces will be better than what they heard in 1824,” Baker said.
As described by biographer Jan Swafford, Beethoven stood in front of conductor Michael Umlauf during the premiere, believing he was marking the tempo, though Umlauf had told the musicians to ignore Beethoven. According to legend, vocalist Karoline Unger pulled the sleeve of the largely deaf composer to turn him around so he could see the audience applause that he could not hear.
Big in church: In 1907, minister Henry Van Dyke wrote new words to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” theme, producing the popular Christian hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.”
A big superstition: Beethoven’s final symphony, and his death a few
years later, play a role in the notorious “curse of the Ninth,” which suggests composers will die before they can finish a Tenth. Mahler fueled the notion with “Das Lied Van Der Erde,” the symphonic work that followed his Eighth. It’s a nice spooky idea, but Shostakovitch (15 symphonies) and Villa-Lobos (11) are among the many whose composing careers disprove it.
A big myth: The legend persists that compact discs were designed specifically to make sure a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth would fit on a single CD. In fact checking the veracity of this claim, Snopes.com ruled “undetermined.”
In the late 1970s, manufacturers Philips and Sony wrangled over the size and bit-rate of the new CD format. Some — including, at one point, the Philips publicity department — have suggested that Sony’s president, or his wife, wanted a CD to be able to contain the full 74-plus minutes of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. Alas, Dutch engineer and inventor Kees Schouhamer Immink, who worked on the project, has written that the ultimate capacity of a CD was more a prosaic matter of balancing audio quality, coding, manufacturing and other competitive issues.