March 11: Beethoven's Ninth

I attended another webinar yesterday hosted by Harvard University called "Vienna in 1824: The Premiere of Beethoven's Ninth" with Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly. He was an amazing speaker, and I delighted in listening to him tell stories about Beethoven. You could tell that he really enjoyed the subject matter, and I would definitely take additional classes/lectures/webinars with him. He was engaging, easy to listen to, and had very interesting things to say. The whole premise of the talk was intriguing, discussing Beethoven's Ninth through the lens of the people who first heard it live. The Ninth is a monumental piece. Almost everyone knows the tune and it is used for everything, from Ford commercials to church hymns. It's one of the most performed symphonies in the world. It's the anthem of the European Union. It is performed to celebrate the new year in Japan. The Bavarian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, performed it when the Berlin Wall came down. The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed it in a free concert on the Boston Common to mark Seiji Ozawa's 25 years as conductor of the orchestra. (and at Symphony Hall in Boston, the cartouche above the stage has one word on it: Beethoven.)

Kelly shared a story [that my husband says is not true, but the story was used as a question on the January 17, 2001 episode of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and I checked on Snopes it says the story status is "undetermined".] It is said that the modern compact disc is 74 minutes long because Sony wanted the CD to be long enough to fit Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" on one side of it.

The piece itself broke a lot of "rules" or traditions of symphonies from the time, and listeners in Vienna would have immediately picked up on these differences. Most symphonies followed the the pattern:

1st movement: loud and fast opening (said to quiet down the audience and mark the beginning the performance)
2nd movement: slow
3rd movement: minuet/dance
4th movement: finale, lighthearted and happy

But Beethoven's Ninth did things a lot differently. The 1st movement started completely differently, he swapped the traditional 2nd and 3rd movements, and he quoted the 1st three movements in the last movement:

1st movement: started soft and mysteriously, almost with a cosmic hum and then just a few notes
2nd movement: minuet but on speed, which Beethoven calls a scherzo (which is my husband's favorite word, it is Italian for "joke")
3rd movement: slow
4th movement: finale, climactic and engaging 

The 4th movement starts as a "bass rage recitative" reminiscent of operas, like in Handel's Acis and Galatea. Kelly goes into a whole description of this opera that I had never heard of, but the comparison to the Ninth was spot on. In most operas, there are recitatives and arias. Recitatives are often just the harpsichord playing during dialogue and plot set up, to get the characters from one situation to another in order to get them to express their feelings in the arias (sometimes the orchestra plays during the recitative to indicate emotional changes). In Acis and and Galatea, the character Polythesmus is the villain, and he gets angry (he is a bass; anger is always expressed with the bass voice), and sings, "I rage, I melt, I burn." He experiences three different emotions and the music allows for the quick switching from one mood to another with the sounds of a violent orchestra behind him. At beginning of the 4th movement of Beethoven's Ninth, the cellos and the double basses are doing the dialogue, saying "I rage, I melt, I burn." Snippets of the previous movements are then quoted, which is not supposed to happen in a symphony. The cellos and basses are having a conversation with the orchestra during the whole piece (they want one kind of song, the rest of the orchestra wants another), and it is all summed up in this moment. And out of dialogue (or fight), a bass solo sings, "Oh friends, not these sounds, but let us have sounds of joy." It's like a story, and this is the climax... let's not fight or rage, let's have songs of joy... and I've never thought of the 9th in this way. It was delightful to think of it in this way, and I will probably never again listen to the Ninth without hearing this story playing out. It was a fascinating talk, and I am excited and delighted that Prof. Kelly has a whole online class on Harvard's EdX about this topic that I will be delving into. 

With delight,

♥Jamie