[Solo quartet] Whoever has had the great success
To be a friend of a friend,
He who has won a sweet wife,
Join our jubilation!
Yes, whoever just one soul
In the round world can name his own!
And he who never could, he must
Weeping leave this fellowship!
[Chorus] All creatures imbibe joy
From the breasts of nature;
Everything good, everything bad
Follows her rosy path;
She gave us kisses and wine,
A friend proven even in death;
Ecstasy is given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.
By this point, with the first verses sung through, the finale is settled in as a train of variations on the Freude theme. But other formal models also find echoes: in one dimension it is a sort of cantata, or even a concerto (it has what amounts to a double exposition announced by the fanfares, the second exposition introducing soloists). There will be sonata-form echoes as well. At the same time, the movement resembles a miniature symphony in itself, with a scherzo and slow movement and jubilant finale. In this ad hoc form, all those elements are relevant. (What is not relevant is to try to boil down the unfolding into a single form.)
The first section or quasi-movement ends the “cherub” verse with a magical harmonic leap of a third down, from A major to F major, on vor Gott, before God. That harmonic shift was heard unforgettably in the third movement, from F to D-flat, and several times in the Missa solemnis. Always it evokes the divine. As it was in the mass, here that magical chord change will be joined by the God-texture of high harmonies. Beethoven wrote on a sketch in his matter-of-fact way, “The height of the stars [can be pictured] more by way of the instruments.”35 The implications of the shift, however, will have to wait, because something more worldly intervenes.
In a piece filled with shocks to the sensibilities and expectations of the time, what comes next is second to none. The music shifts to B-flat, the other harmonic pole of the symphony, as if to the key of a second theme in sonata form. We hear random grunts on bassoon and contrabassoon, with bass drum. They condense into a pulse that we take to be a downbeat but is an upbeat, so when the tune arrives we are jolted into the meter. It is another variation of the Freude theme, redefined into a “Turkish” march, the exotic Viennese military style. Its elements are less the melody in this case than the pounding, clanging “Turkish” percussion battery of bass drum, cymbals, and triangle. A swaggering, wine-inspired tenor takes the stage. He and the men of the choir give us the next verse, which reveals that the march illustrates a military metaphor in the text:
Happily, flying like God’s suns
Through the splendorous battlefield of the heavens,
Brothers, run your course
Joyfully, like a hero to victory.36
That this Turkish march is another character variation puts it in the train of the previous ones: military, social song. But the import of the Turkish march, the era’s definition of a “bizarre” move in this context, is hard to pin down. What can be said is that this idea for the finale was there from early on: a sketch note from 1822 ran, “End of the Sinfonie with Turkish music and vocal chorus.” In its tone the music is larky, satirical, verging on banal. Its implications in the context of the finale are symbolic, not musical. In a symphony intended to put aside the heroic ideal and replace it with an individual, spiritual, and sociable one, the military spirit here finds itself lampooned, the hero striding to his cosmic victory portrayed by a vulgar tune, a drunken tenor, tinkling triangle, and peeping piccolo. At the same time, to the contrary of satire, the Turkish march suggests an image of global brotherhood—as the Masonic song runs, “Mankind in East and West.” This will not be the last appearance of the Turkish style in the movement, and the next one is not at all satirical in tone.37
There is another dimension to the march that enfolds both parody and seriousness. In Beethoven’s mind as with most Viennese and most opera lovers, the Turkish style was wedded to a particular piece, which had been the greatest hit of Mozart’s life and remained one of his most popular: his Turkish singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). When it was written, that production played into a fad for quasi-Turkish music and fashion in Vienna. The opera virtually enveloped the style, to the point that to think of one was to think of the other. Beethoven would not have cared about the Abduction’s exoticism as such, nor about its parodistic comedy at the expense of a “pagan” culture. What appealed to Beethoven was the serious, ethical part: at the end, Pasha Selim, who has bought an English girl as a slave from pirates, reveals himself as a man of enlightened empathy. Showing a clemency he has never received from his Christian enemy, the pasha lets the lovers go free. Among its dimensions, the Turkish march of the Ninth Symphony finale is Beethoven’s echo of Die Entführung: humankind embraced in East and West.38
The deliberate triviality of the Turkish march is swept away by a dashing double fugue in triple time. This reveals the march as the beginning of the scherzo in the quasi-four-movement aspect of the finale. At the same time, in its driving minor-key lines and dazzling modulations it recalls the actual second-movement scherzo. The finale will be much involved in enfolding ideas from the whole symphony, and not only in the quoted bits at the beginning. The double fugue after the march recalls the scherzo, the terror fanfare recalls the atmosphere of the first movement. After a quiet, breath-catching moment, the choir breaks out to D major and belts out the first stanza and Freude theme straight, accompanied by the racing triplets of the fugue.
That climax reaches a sudden full stop. The next section, the quasi–slow movement, is announced by basses with trombones, the latter in their churchly mode. Here is music that was foreshadowed in the fall from A to F on vor Gott, before the march. The Missa solemnis was a sacred work troubled by a secular intrusion, the war music. The Ninth Symphony is a secular work with a sacred interlude in the middle of the finale. Here in Schiller’s visionary stanzas and Beethoven’s unforgettable setting, all humanity joins in a loving embrace:
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for all the world!
Brothers! over the starry canopy
A loving Father must dwell!
Do you prostrate yourselves, millions?
Do you know the Creator, world?
Search for Him over the starry canopy!
He must live there beyond the stars!
The music begins with its trombones and basses, the style stern and archaic, the tonality implying D Mixolydian. On the repeat of the words “be embraced,” the Beethoven God-texture breaks out in high winds, with flashing string figures. As in Fidelio (Freedom!) and the mass (Credo!), Beethoven picks out the words he most cares about: Millions! Brothers! Here is another credo from Beethoven, a credo that does not negate the liturgical Credo in the mass but amplifies it with a humanistic one, under God’s starry sky. To speak to the millions and name them brothers was the essence of what (as artist, as distinct from misanthropic man) Beethoven had been doing in all his creative life.
This is not the climax of the finale or of the entire work, but it is its spiritual and ethical core, the credo of the Ninth Symphony. Here is Beethoven’s response to the unanswered prayer for peace that ended the Missa solemnis, with the drums of war echoing in the distance. The vision of the Ninth Symphony is that as loving brothers and sisters we will find here on earth our joy and our peace. God cannot do that for us. Conquering heroes and benevolent despots cannot do that for us. We have to find Elysium for ourselves. As Beethoven wrote in slashing words on a colleague’s work that thanked God: O Man, help yourself! Kant prepared the ground for that statement: What is Enlightenment? To put away dogma and think for yourself.
The credo rises to “a loving Father must dwell.” At that point Beethoven again recalls the Missa solemnis. The harmony has the archaic, modal sound of some of the mass. The textu
re slips into the remarkable organlike sound of divided violas and cellos and low flutes and clarinets heard in the Präludium of the mass, which called forth the descent of Christ into the bread and wine. That sacred communion is echoed in this secular one. Together, in brotherhood, with kisses, we acknowledge our creator and prepare to make our paradise. As in many ways the Ninth has been a reflexive work, the first and last movements beginning as if they were creating themselves, here Beethoven tells us what the Ninth is for him: This kiss for all the world! The credo section ends in A major, pianissimo, in an uncanny texture evoking the firmament, hanging over the words “he must live there beyond the stars.”
From that point the quasi-finale of the quasi-symphony breaks out in a D-major explosion of joy, an exalted version of the Freude theme and Schiller’s first verse joined in a double fugue with the Seid umschlungen (“be embraced”) theme and its text. (In a sonata-form interpretation of the movement, this is the recapitulation.)39 This combination is full of meaning: the Freude theme and its text, the image of Joy as a divine and magical presence on earth, to be celebrated among companions, is joined to Seid umschlungen, the credo’s ecstatic embrace of all humanity under God. With this double fugue, Beethoven joins a humanistic and a spiritual vision, on the road to Elysium.40
After a climax that requires the sopranos to hold a high A for a brutal twelve bars, the double fugue sinks to more recollections of the “Do you prostrate yourselves?” stanza, proclaiming those words in new forms centering on the word Brothers!, drifting away briefly from D major. From there, a new section begins, firmly back in D major, with its own skittering introduction. (Harmonically, the finale is as stable as the first movement was unstable.) This begins a gigantic coda.
Now the variations on the Freude theme have ended, and also all the verses of the poem that Beethoven chose to set. From here on, the musical material is developments and extrapolations of the Freude theme rather than the tune itself, and the verses are the two Beethoven wants to drive home: the initial Freude, schöner Götterfunken verse and the Seid umschlungen verse. The soloists rhapsodize on the first lines of the poem, “Thy magic reunites / What fashion has broken apart.” By now that sentiment about reuniting what is broken has acquired a great deal of resonance in several kinds of uniting: East and West, sacred and secular, brother and brother, husband and wife. (This echoes the precursor of the Ninth, the Choral Fantasy, whose symbolic task was to unite love and strength through music.) In a pair of poco adagios, first the choir and then the soloists return in flowery ecstasies (straying into a brilliant B major) to the essential message, the central hope of the Ninth Symphony: “all men, all men, all men will become brothers, where thy gentle wing abides.”
Then, in this gigantic movement to climax a gigantic symphony arrives the coda of the coda, an allegro directed to speed and intensity to the end. Both for excitement and for its symbolism, he brings back the Turkish battery; the total effect, including the melody, has the exotic, driving quality of the Turkish style. This time, it is an ecstatic celebration of humankind East and West. Now the central words are Be embraced! Brothers! Above the stars must he dwell! This kiss for all the world! Joy! Joy! It is the last of Beethoven’s endings in overflowing jubilation, going back to the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony, to Egmont and Fidelio. The last words in the Ninth are “God-engendered!,” completing the circle of human and divine but firmly planted on earth. In the prestissimo last bars, the Turkish battery clangs and thunders.
Humankind, help yourself! Beethoven shaped his last epic to that end, written in a dark time to keep alive Schiller’s poem and its exaltation of freedom, without which there can be no true joy, no hope for a better world, no all-embracing brotherhood, no Elysium. In Austria, meetings of more than a few people outside one’s family were forbidden, and one could be arrested for speaking the very word freedom.
The road to Elysium begins with the enlightenment of each individual, extends to one’s brothers and lovers, and from there to the world. In addition to all the models and echoes that Beethoven infolded into the Ninth Symphony—Haydn’s Creation and Austrian anthem, the Marseillaise, Handel and Bach, his own Eroica and Fidelio and Fifth Symphony, Mozart’s Abduction—one more is significant. As I noted earlier, Beethoven’s favorite Mozart opera, Die Zauberflöte, is among other things a parable of love: the earthy love of Papageno and Papagena, the exalted love of Pamina and Tamino, the divine and disinterested love of Sarastro for all humanity. The quarter-note simplicity of the Freude theme echoes Sarastro’s sublime aria “In these hallowed halls.” At the end of the opera, Sarastro and his Bund consecrate the lovers as the highest force on this earth: “May power be victorious / And crown as a reward / Beauty and Wisdom / With an eternal crown.” Love was the vehicle of the lover’s triumph, the meaning of their crown, the source of beauty and wisdom on this earth. With another metaphor but in the same spirit, Beethoven shaped the Ninth Symphony around Joy. It is his Creation, his Marseillaise, and also his Zauberflöte.
In the end, the Ninth Symphony presents us as many questions as answers. Its utopia is envisioned, not attained. It was neglected for decades before it found its triumph.41 Yet the place in the world Beethoven intended the Ninth to inhabit is exactly where it ended up over the next two centuries: its Freude theme perhaps known to half of humanity, the symphony performed all over the globe, in East and West, often outside the concert hall as a great ceremonial work.
In an unprecedented way for a composer, far beyond the ambitions of the Eroica, Beethoven stepped into history with a communal ritual that does not simply preach a sermon about freedom and brotherhood but aspires to help bring them to pass. In the coming centuries, ideologies going by the names “democratic,” “communist,” “socialist,” and “Nazi” would claim the Ninth as their own. It would be exalted by tyrannies and it would celebrate the downfall of tyrannies. How one viewed the Ninth, it turned out, depended on what kind of Elysium one had in mind, whether that all people should be brothers or that all nonbrothers should be exterminated. The Freude theme would end up as the anthem of a Europe united after centuries of war. All of this is as Beethoven surely hoped, in some degree even foresaw. If we want to conceive something in the direction of a universal artwork, here it is.
The Ninth emerges from a whispering mist to fateful proclamations. In the finale, the Freude theme, prefigured from the beginning, is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. Which is to say, the Ninth is also music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? “Be embraced, you millions! This kiss for all the world!” run the telling lines in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of transcendent scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.
The Ninth Symphony, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, is itself Beethoven’s embrace for the millions, from East to West, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass soloist speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, Beethoven’s words are addressed to everybody, to history. There’s something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.
32
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis
AFTER THE PREMIERES of the Ninth Symphony and parts of the Missa solemnis, Beethoven’s financial and physical miseries harried him no less. But he did not take vacations from his work or from promoting his work. Somehow his energy for both remained strong. Medical science of the day could not discern that his liver was killing him, but the effects were clear enough. While he waited to see if he was dying, he turned his attention to smaller, more manageable but no less ambitious projects: the three string quartets commissioned by Russian Prince Nikolai Galitzin.
Meanwhile, after loo
sing the Ninth Symphony on the world, he did not consider that work a settled matter. At some point after the premiere, Beethoven told Carl Czerny that he had decided the choral finale was a mistake and he intended to replace it with a purely instrumental one.1 What is to be made of this astonishing statement? The whole symphony was written toward the revelation of the finale, the Schiller ode, the Freude theme.
He did not explain his second thoughts about the finale. Presumably he would have spun it off as a freestanding piece, like a more elaborate Choral Fantasy. (He was to do the same with the finale of a string quartet.) One surmise is that he was not satisfied with its rambling and episodic course, its metaphorical gestures imposed from outside rather than motivated from inside the musical dialectic. In more pedestrian terms, he may have concluded that he had finally written something truly beyond the capacities of orchestras and choirs, given that the first three movements were already unprecedentedly difficult. Or perhaps the idea of redoing the finale reveals a touch of conservatism, a lingering uncertainty about the idea of sullying the instrumental, call it abstract, integrity of a symphony by putting in voices.
For whatever reason, in his notion about replacing the finale one sees Beethoven’s integrity. He had envisioned setting “An die Freude” since his teens. The Ninth was his most ambitious symphony. It was a statement he wanted to give the world in a dark time. But if the finale did not work musically for him, he was ready to throw it out. In the end, of course, he did not write a replacement. He let the finale stand, and surely he was wise to. It has its issues, but its importance as an abiding image of freedom and fulfillment lifts it far beyond technical matters.
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph Page 98