Beethoven: How the “Ninth Symphony”, His Most Iconic Work, Became a Political Symbol

The popularity of the piece and its ability to stimulate the audience’s most intimate emotions have meant that, over the decades, various groups and movements have appropriated it to advance their ideology or message.

BBC Mundo spoke with two music teachers specialized in the subject and authors of books on the “Ninth Symphony” to trace the legacy of this masterpiece.

Before its premiere in 1824, no one had heard a composition of such complexity and magnitude.

“Almost everything is revolutionary,” Alexander Rehding, professor of music at Harvard University, and author of Symphony No. Beethoven’s 9, who examines the transformation of that symphony in contemporary digital culture.

“It is longer than any other symphony, exceptionally demanding from an orchestral point of view – all instruments are difficult – and it is the first to include a choral segment, something that was not done in the genre of the symphony,” explained the academic.

Basically 150 interpreters are needed to assemble the “NORTHRAM“, demanded to the maximum. “It’s a lot of music that has to be played,” says Rehding. “The fourth movement in particular is very long, it can take between 25 minutes and half an hour.”

However, Beethoven was well aware of the risks he faced and planned everything for a long time.

Although the commission for the symphony had come from the Royal Society of London, the work had its premiere in Vienna, the city that adopted it, to a very loyal audience who knew about its experimentation and knew what to expect from it.

The composer had adopted an atypical style in his later works, not just the “Ninth”, notes Professor Rehding.

Although Vienna applauded it, in other cities where the symphony was later performed, it was not as successful. Some directors refused to edit it because they considered that Beethoven had already composed it deaf and that the music sounded in his head in a very different way than it did in reality.

Critics thought that the fourth movement overshadowed the rest of the symphony and the tendency in the 19th century was to skip the choral part and only play the first three movements.

It would seem curious, then, that this is the most invoked and remembered part of the “Ninth Symphony”, but there is more than one explanation why that tune has had such an extraordinary destiny

“On the one hand it looks like a popular tune, it is simple, easy to remember and to sing“Esteban Buch, professor of music history at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in France, tells BBC News Mundo.

“It has a joyous inner tension, an association with something utopian which is joy. At the same time it has a rhythmic and melodic inner tension (which adds complexity).”

But there is also the text of the “Ode to joy”. Schiller, the author, originally wrote it as a song to drink, but Beethoven rearranged the verses and changed the context.

“It alludes to the idea of ​​brotherhood, that all human beings become brothers,” says Professor Buch. “That very simple idea of the universal solidarity is what reaches the feeling of the people and they are the reasons to sing it “.

And singing it is what has been done over the decades and in a number of different contexts.

“It’s the musical fetish of the West”, Buch describes it in his book Beethoven’s ninth: a Polytic Hellohistory (“Beethoven’s Ninth: a political history”).

The work has a plasticity which makes it ideal for very different people, for various types of political orientation and for all types of institutional instruction.

“There were cases in which it was used as a national anthem and currently it is the anthem of the European Union,” Buch tells BBC Mundo.

“It also has a popular presence at very micro levels in people’s lives, it can even be sung in contexts like the current pandemic … as a kind of challenge to fate and collective suffering.”

One of the most cited events that were celebrated with the “Ninth symphony” was the fall of the Berlin wall, in 1989.

The American conductor Leonard Bernstein, performed a version with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in which the word “joy” (Fgather, in German) was replaced with “freedom” (Fpurity).

At that time, and with the same allusion to freedom, the voice of the protesters in Tiananmen Square was heard against the oppression of the Chinese authorities, as well as in Chile in protest against the abuses of the Pinochet government.

But the use of the “Novena” to project political ideas It is not a new phenomenon.

According to the EHESS professor, the “Ode to Joy” in particular, with or without lyrics, was used from 1824 to the present day in the political context, as a symbol, in the ritual sense or as the object of utopian projections.

“In Vienna in 1824, there are statements, not so much from Beethoven but from his friends, announcing the premiere of this symphony as a national cause, with the idea that Beethoven is a great artist for the Austrian nation. And that, in fact It’s a political use, “he says.

Also with a political dimension was the inauguration in 1845 in Bonn, Germany – the composer’s hometown – a statue in his honor at the initiative of a group of international musicians who tended to worship the music itself and Beethoven as titular god of the music. musicians.

“There is a very long list of political actors who liked the” Novena “and made that taste an ethical symbol”, according to Professor Buch.

“A music that represents beauty and therefore represents the goodness of my cause.”

Unfortunately, there were other types of occasions that were associated with the symphony. The most painful for many Beethoven lovers, says Buch, was the Nazis’ use not only of the “Ninth” but of the composer’s music in general.

The choral section was played at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, which is remembered as an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race.

And the entire symphony was conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the Berlin Philharmonic, for Hitler’s birthday in 1937.

According to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the symphony was the perfect choice because it illustrated with its “combativeness and struggle” the Führer’s ability to achieve a “triumphant and joyous victory.”

Esteban Buch also points out as “scandalous” the fact that in 1974, the newly independent Republic of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which imposed a regime of racial segregation, adopt the ode as its national anthem.

“It was a black moment of the use of the” Novena “, which reminds that the most beautiful and generous music can be used by an undemocratic group”, underlines the EHESS academic.

Nor does the European Union escape from the shadows of totalitarianism in its adoption of the “Ode to Joy” (without lyrics) as the anthem of the bloc.

That version is based on an arrangement by the famous Austrian director Herbert von Karajan, who is known to have been a member of the Nazi Party, Buch notes.

For some, all this places questioning humanistic aspirations of this piece of music.

Philosophers like the German Theodor Adorno, for example, considered that if music can be used to celebrate what is “without question evil”, “what exactly does music do and how can we believe in it as a forward force? moral and spiritual? “.

“I would like to think that music has some kind of resistance”, responds Professor Alexander Rehding, from Harvard University, “but that it cannot be protected from being used in any kind of context.”

You also cannot protect yourself from overuse.

“It has been incorporated into advertising and jingles. It has become the generic music that we use on any occasion, and there is a danger that it will become too commercial, “says Rehding.

“Although that does not only happen to the ‘Novena’, it is a phenomenon of our time, only that Beethoven’s piece is emblematic of the process.”

But his representation has had an interesting metamorphosis in the social networks, says the Harvard professor, particularly on YouTube.

On the platform you can listen to various flash mob, a style typical of these platforms in which a small musical incident, apparently “improvised” in a public place, grows to involve countless participants and all the observers, at levels that can really be moving.

“Up to a point, the flash mob it reflects what is happening musically with the ‘Ode to Joy,’ “explains Rehding.

“The melody played by one instrument begins and then others join in. Then a simple harmonization of the tune and then the chorus begins and then the whole orchestra. It attracts more and more people, who listen, then begin to participate. Forge their own community”.

That’s what the lyrics of the ode are talking about, says Rehding.

In a way, it’s a macrocosm of what Beethoven intended.

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