Greg Stepanich

Anything left to say about the Ninth?

Last night the Cleveland Orchestra continued its residency in Miami with performances of the Bernstein Jeremiah Symphony and the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. I went to the concert at the Carnival Center, and I’ll have a review later today or early tomorrow.

But first I wanted to say something about Beethoven.

Putting the Beethoven Nine on the opening concerts of the Cleveland’s three programs is a sure-fire way to bring the big audiences. There’s always an especially reverent quality to a concert featuring this work; it’s a special event, the Big Game of classical concerts.

But what is there, 183 years after its premiere in Vienna, that can now be said about the Ninth? Here’s something a little flowery about the finale, from Maynard Solomon’s Late Beethoven, a series of essays he published in 2004:

By the unprecedented intensity of the finale’s rhetoric, by the multitheism of its symbolism — the Greek mythic signposts, the Christian-medieval gestures embedded in the Andante maestoso, and the orientalism of the Alla marcia’s "Turkish Music” — and by the convergence of thematic, harmonic and rhythmic patterns contending for closure, Beethoven achieved a sense of fusion so complete that it stands as the model of rapturous surrender to collectivity.

Heady stuff, but essentially on target. Solomon also points out that Beethoven was thinking after the premiere of jettisoning the finale; he thought it didn’t work, and he was going to replace it with something purely instrumental, and already had sketched some ideas for it. He changed his mind, but it’s interesting to think that Beethoven — who couldn’t hear much at this point — might have tossed the Ode to Joy in the trash. Musical history would have been very different had he done so.

The finale is merely the most well-known part of the work; the other three movements are as fascinating in their own way. One of the most important things to note about this piece is that Beethoven’s most fruitful gift as a composer was his skill at improvisation, and when he was able to unite the fever of ad libitum inspiration with a form that was expansive and yet disciplined at the same time, the result was glory.

I think the Ninth has all these things, and I think that’s one of the things that keeps it daisy-fresh from beginning to end. If the Fifth became a symbol of the fight against tyranny for the audiences of World War II, the Ninth is an ideal historic work for the current era of multitasking. That’s because it is a symphony of great variety, full of surprise, drama, passion — and in the end, joy in brotherhood.

Beethoven really did believe in that, and so what better work from the past for our present? A symphony that never bores, each movement broadly different, and the last, a movement that changes mood and setting every few minutes, culminating in a plea for human unity worldwide.
It’s nothing less than an ode to globalism, and that’s the spirit in which I heard it last night.

Anybody out there have anything to say about the Ninth? Is it overrated? Underrated? One of the great works of human culture, or a long-winded exercise in tonic-dominant dreariness? I’ll open the floor and look for your comments below.