Judge Dennis Davis
Beethoven’s 9th: Two Hundred Years Since its First Performance

Judge Dennis Davis - Beethoven’s 9th: Two Hundred Years Since its First Performance

- Good afternoon, good evening to everybody. When Trudy asked me to do this lecture, let me put it bluntly, I think I suggested to her for reasons which I’ll come to in a moment, little did I know that a lecture on Beethoven’s 9th, which of course really tries to develop themes of joy, goodwill, brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity would take place on the very day that in my country the election results are to be announced, are being announced as we speak in fact, and South Africa, which is where I come from, now is on a precipice between on the one hand the possibility, and I wouldn’t put it any higher than that, of embracing constitutional democracy to a coalition, or alternatively a form of pernicious populism, which in many instances have destroyed the constitutional experiment that we engaged upon 30 years ago. So for me, given the difficulties which South Africa faces at the moment, not of course to mention the difficulties in Israel and elsewhere, looking towards Beethoven’s 9th is a sort of a refuge of some sense of hope to which I want to come in a moment, if I may. The background to why one’s doing this now is this. In early 1824, sitting members of the Vienna Music Committee sent a letter to Beethoven requesting that he consider his plans to premier what was going to be the Ninth Symphony in Berlin, and instead hold the first performance in Vienna. Beethoven had lived in Vienna since 1792, when he’d left his hometown of Bonn to pursue his career as a composer. By the 1820s, I think it’s fair to say that to some extent he’d fallen out of favour, as hard as that is to believe, and all sorts of other styles of music, particularly Italian, were somewhat more attractive.

Beethoven, of course, was coming to the end of his career and significantly at this point, and tragically he was deaf. He had not appeared before a Vienna audience in a dozen years. But the letter finally inspired him and he agreed to debut this new work, the Ninth Symphony in D Minor, in Vienna. And the premier performance is on the May, was on May 7, 1824 at the Karntnertor Theatre. Sorry for the pronunciation. So in other words, just a little bit more than 200 years ago, the world heard for the first time the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, quite an extraordinary event. The promoters of the concert had promised the public that he would be present and that this was going to be quite some event. Reading some of the biographies of Beethoven, it turned out to be a somewhat more chaotic event than had been promised in the sense that this complex symphony, which was longer than any other symphony that had ever been written until that particular point in time, required real practise from an orchestra that didn’t have it. One is told that even the soloists at some particular point in time struggled to actually sing the various parts. And the performance as a whole was also vexed by the fact that Beethoven, deaf as he was, insisted that he should sit on the conductor stand. The actual conductor of the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians, the orchestra, the, his choir, the soloists, to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and could therefore not be relied upon to keep the requisite time. The performance was interrupted sometimes by applause. There were almost 2,000 people there, notwithstanding that they would hope for more. Beethoven, of course, could not hear any of these reactions.

In fact, the problem was that he was standing there conducting not hearing the orchestra, obviously. One of the witnesses quoted in a biography said the composer threw himself back and forth like a madman and fell several bars behind in his conducting. The tragedy of it all is in that well-known story that at the end when Beethoven, when the Ninth Symphony ended, Beethoven was still whirling his hands, conducting way behind, and he had to be turned around by the soloist to realise one, it was over, and two, that the audience was on its feet embracing this new work. It is, it’s extraordinary to me, and every time I speak about this, and I have done a lecture at Lockdown on this before, but it was worth doing another one because of the 200th anniversary. It is extraordinary to reflect that this particular symphony was written by a man who could not hear one note of that symphony in live performance. Its impact has been extraordinary. Wagner referred to it as the death knell of the symphony because you couldn’t write another symphony said Wagner after that. Well, of course that didn’t prove to be true, but it is absolutely true that the influence that the Ninth Symphony had on music going forward is just extraordinary. To put it bluntly, as you know, Brahms in his First Symphony, which he’d struggled for so long to compose, that symphony was referred to as the Beethoven 10th.

The resemblance within the last movement of that symphony and the “Ode to Joy”, parts of the last movement of the Brahms 1, it was absolutely clear as crystal and Brahms himself said it was so difficult to write a symphony when the huge footsteps of the giant were in his ears as he wrote that symphony. In more recent times, it’s interesting that in discussions between Sony and Philips, it was decided that the length of a compact disc could only be 74 minutes, because in 74 minutes, they were then able on one CD to actually record the 1951 rendition by Wilhelm Furtwängler of the Ninth Symphony. So they tailored the CD to accommodate the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. One can go on about this just a few more points. The interesting thing about this particular symphony is the manner in which it has been interpreted. It had been widely interpreted as a plea for global brotherhood. The fourth movement, the great “Ode to Joy”, has been incorporated in ceremonial events such as UNESCO, the Olympics, the Council of Europe, European Union. And yet on the other hand, it’s also been used in all sorts of various different ways. As one of Beethoven’s biographers, Jan Swafford, said, how one views the Ninth depends on what kind of Elysium one had in mind, whether all people should be brothers or that all non-brothers should be exterminated. And of course, she’s making reference to the fact that if you think about it just within German history, in 1942, Furtwängler conducted what is really a manic version of the Ninth. And in fact, if I recall correctly, Patrick Bade spoke about that in an earlier lecture in which he incorporated reference to the Ninth and played a clip from that. I decided against that for this particular lecture.

And on the other hand, in 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at the, when the wall came down to, as it were, symbolise the free and united Germany and the fall of the Communist wall. It has been used in a variety of different ways, and obviously the question, as Swafford is trying to suggest, is how you interpret the symphony is to a considerable extent dependent upon your reading thereof. But I would like to say that to a large extent, this symphony unquestionably for me represents an expression of hope. Daniel Barenboim in a recent article in “The New York Times”, referred of course to the central text, as it were, from the Schiller “Ode to Joy” of 1785, which of course Beethoven had incorporated into the fourth movement. And he said, “This is an expression of hope. It’s an expression of hope more than a confident statement.” And to, and then quoting Gramsci, Beethoven, Barenboim says of the symphony it reminds him of the great Gramscian quote, my mind is pessimistic but my will is optimistic. And the symphony to a large degree seems to me to represent that possibility of optimism of a united world. And how do we need that now, in the divided world we are in. Talking about the symphony and the credible influence that it’s had, I don’t think you can really understand Mahler or Shostakovich without to some extent understanding just what a break the Ninth Symphony had in music as a whole. The British composer, Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the famed Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev, was conditioned by a French or commissioned by a French orchestra in 2011 to create a new work, “Beethoven9 Symphonic Remix”.

And when he was interviewed about this, he said, “A lot of the techniques and approaches Beethoven used, particularly his climatic finales and his codas and the drama and the sense of energy and drive he had, we find that everywhere, especially in dance music and electronic music.” In short, the argument is this symphony more than any other that was ever written before or after revolutionised music in quite dramatic sense. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that the Ninth Symphony’s been held up as a central work of Western classical music both for its symphonic technical and compositional imagination . It is in many ways the symphony which, as it were, represented a break from the past and into the future. Now, it’s incredibly difficult for me in a short lecture and with the inadequate sound that you get from these remote lectures to capture it absolutely perfectly. One would love to literally sit in a room and hear a perfect sound as one explains the Beethoven 9. But I, what I’ve chosen to do is to take short extracts from each movement and just say something about them in the broader context of the revolutionary nature of the symphony. So I’m going to start, if I may, with the first movement, and I’ve chosen a, sorry, a Furtwängler version thereof. I’ve done so, not the, it’s not the best one. The best one is I think a year, this is a ‘53 version, a '54 version with a philharmonic orchestra if you can get that, where Furtwängler performed at the Lucerne concerts, probably the best of the whole lots, absolutely fantastic. But just let us listen to those first three or four moments, minutes of the first symphony, of the first movement. It’s really quite remarkable. It starts almost as if the orchestra is just tuning itself up for a performance.

There are two notes you’ll hear, an E and an A on the horns, on the violin, on the cello. That then evolves into three notes. And finally, we get to some form of crescendo. They’re the most remarkable 16 measures of music in many ways. It is to a large extent representative of creation ex nihilo, from nothing, from silence, some sense of inchoate music starts until we get to that crescendo and Beethoven starts to develop that first movement. But I’ve always thought that it’s those 16 measures that define the symphony in every way. We hear it and we know something extraordinary is going to happen. So let us listen to the first three minutes of the Furtwängler 1953 recording of this. It starts, as I say, in this very inchoate way. I do apologise, it’s going to be difficult to hear it, but hopefully you’ll get the gist. All right, we can stop it there. Thank you. Just again, let me iterate. So what I’m trying to show, it starts in this way. There’s 16 measures, the E and the A, the horns, the cello, the violins, it’s, as I say, it sounds as though they’re just tuning and the, there’s nothing there. There’s no body to it at all. And then what emerges out of that is a crescendo, which then starts to drive a sort of really rhythmic drive through. And you’ll have noticed just as we ended the clip, just all of a sudden the mood changes just for a moment. There’s a softer, sort of most beautiful sound, which just sort of takes your attention away from this driving rhythm which has basically preceded it. And that’s a point that I wanted to make right through the symphony. If you listen to it as a whole, it’s full of contradictions.

They’re always, and I’m going to show you one or two, because this is a journey that Beethoven is seeking to take us on from darkness to light, from despair to some sense of joy. And one can’t help feeling that he himself, deaf as he was, struggling and with his own existential dilemmas as he is with political ones, if I were to play you the balance of this remarkable first movement at towards the end, there’s a funeral march, and in many ways what interpreters have said, if you go back to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, “Eroica”, which he initially was going to essentially dedicate to Napoleon, what that march represents to a large degree is the end of any Napoleonic dream, any sense of Beethoven’s idea that through Napoleon, some form of brotherhood could have been achieved rather than the political repressions that followed and under which he was working when he wrote the Ninth Symphony. So the symphony, the, even in the first movement, what we’ve got is Beethoven railing against the prevailing paradigm in which he’s operating and the political context. Of course, with certain light, as I’ve tried to indicate, because of the contradictions which are throughout the journey until we finally get to our long, lost destination right at the end. But you’ve got to agree with me that if you think about it, think about sitting there on the 7th of May, 1824, and hearing this piece for the very first time as imperfectly as it probably was played then, what a remarkable break from any kind of Western music that there was at the time. And then we move to the second movement. Well, the second movement is a scherzo, unusual to a large degree to have a scherzo at the second movement of a symphony.

Generally one would expected that in the third movement of the symphony. But here again we come across something quite, quite, quite interesting. It starts unlike that tentative 16 measures of the first movement in very dramatic fashion, and what it, what characterises the scherzo is a driving rhythm. It’s related to the rhythm of the first movement. And then all of a sudden, at some particular point, again showing the contradictions, this rhythm which goes on and on then converts itself into a trio. And we’re into much more rustic territory. We’re into the idea of nature, which Beethoven loved, vide the Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral. Again, remarkable contrast between Beethoven taking rhythm almost to its most furthest extent to which it can be taken, and then moving us seamlessly into this rustic trio. So we are now going to hear the version by Leonard Bernstein, the first few minutes of the scherzo of the second movement. Ah, not quite sure what happened there, but let’s leave it for the moment not to chance our arm so we can stop that clip. So I want to move, if I may, to the third movement. Now, this in many ways notwithstanding the fame of the fourth movement, the third movement probably is the greatest for me exploration and development of melody that one can hear in music. Again, it’s, it, there’s a, the main theme is a hymn, maybe a hymn that Beethoven himself felt for himself, but it’s quite incredible. It just, it’s sublime. And yet in the middle of this, there’s suddenly a change of key and we get some sort of dramatic interpose and then we’re back to this hymn-like beauty of melody.

Again, Beethoven showing us the contradictions which are inherent in the symphony. This is no, as it were, just simple walk from darkness to light. It’s an exploration by Beethoven of, in a sense, the music that he’d inherited, the music that he’d written, an attempt to get somewhere beyond. It’s not for nothing that again, to quote Daniel Barenboim in the article to which I made reference earlier, he says that as music, it creates unity out of contradictions. And by doing so, Beethoven freed music from prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. And here in this particular performance of the Ninth which took place at the Proms, and I can’t help but just mention this, that the two and a half minutes that I’m going to play you here which reveals the contradiction between this beautiful, hymn-like melody, which is just, you want to cry. And particularly you want to cry because you think how could this possibly have been written by a man who was never able to hear it in the live and had to work it all out in his head? This performance was by Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, as you know composed of young Israeli and Arab musicians. It was performed in 2006, and the performance was part of a campaign devoted for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict in 2006. Seems to me just again, just how prescient this music is at the moment. Doesn’t matter what your view is, but the idea of peace and that this represents that is particularly important.

And here played by young Israeli and Arab musicians in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, we can just hear a sort of in the middle of the third movement, the contrast between this hymn-like, melodious exposition, on the other hand, all of a sudden we’re woken up with a different key. So can we have the next clip? So what you get there is this extraordinary situation of this beautiful melody, and then all of a sudden the key changes and if you listen carefully, that short interlude we are going to hear again in the fourth movement, so he’s prefiguring it. What is also amazing if you listen to the full third movement, which I’d have loved to have played, it’s not as if this exploration of melody and hymn, the hymn in the sense just played the same way. It’s extraordinary extent as you listen to it just how it varies, almost as if Beethoven sort of develops this sort of hymn-like quality in the movement, gets bored with the way he’s doing it, and then changes it ever so slightly so that they’re evolving sort of forms of his melody as it goes through the movement. And then all of a sudden you get this sudden change of key in which he’s warning you, right? As much as this is all tranquil and beautiful, we have to negotiate something beyond before we come home. And so there’s a warning there. And then all of a sudden, the third movement goes back to this beautiful, almost bucolic sound for the rest of the movement until without warning, we come to the remarkable fourth movement. There is so much that I could talk about in the fourth movement that I was trying to work out how best to convey this all to you. And the way I suppose I, let me just make a number of points.

The movement starts of course quite dramatically, and it recaptures that little change of key that I now, that I pointed out to you in the third movement starts in the fourth. And then we’ve got this situation whereby the orchestra play fragments of each of the three movements, the first, the second and third, all interrupted, all interrupted. So Beethoven goes back, almost as if he’s going back in history, almost as if he’s going back to the body of his work and saying I need to make a break from this, none of these are good enough. And then of course we start to hear again reflective not of the inchoate beginning of the first 16 measures of the symphony, but we start to hear in slightly inchoate form, slowly, quietly, ever so quietly, the “Ode to Joy” theme, which then plays itself through the orchestra. And then comes the most dramatic moment in symphonic music to that moment, the human voice. The human voice had never, ever been heard in a symphony before. Perhaps we take it for granted now, but again, I come back to that first audience 200 years ago when they heard this for the first time. So the human voice comes in and Beethoven in the symphony of course, sorry, in this movement, is not just satisfied with giving us the “Ode to Joy”. There’s a development of the “Ode to Joy”. Then there’s a second theme, then there’s a double fugue and a whole range of development of these two themes with the orchestra, all of course employing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” of 1785, which Beethoven obviously thought was absolutely central to his overall message, that music could in fact transcend the contradictions that he’d shown us in the first three movements, the contradictions of humankind, the idea that if all human beings are brothers and sisters, we have to, as it were, move beyond our contradictions to some form of embrace of unity.

And so in a way what the fourth movement does is it resolves all of those contradictions of the first three. We have started off with sound, which doesn’t really tell us very much for 16 measures, and we’ve now reached the resolution of this all by the use of the orchestra, the soloists and the choir to give us the theme which Beethoven had in mind at the time, which makes the work so revolutionary. It’s such a decisive break. All of the commentators are right about this particular point. So I chose just to give you the last five minutes of the piece, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted again by one of my favourite conductors, Riccardo Muti. I’m not sure how brilliant the sound is. I hope it’ll be okay. But I, and then I want to make some final comments, if I may. So let us hear the last five minutes and be honest with yourselves. When you go to a concert of the Ninth and you hear this, don’t you walk out feeling the world is a better place because I’ve heard this? ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

• You can hear. I think when I wanted to hear that, as I said, I mean, it’s just fantastic ending and you know, to this remarkable work, beautifully done here by Riccardo Muti. I hope you notice the size of the choir. We could only wish to have one like that here in South Africa. So just to conclude, in his work on the Ninth Symphony, Nicholas Cook written a, the British musicologist who has written an interesting text on said, “Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the Ninth Symphony seems the most like a construction of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the values, the hopes and the fears of those who seek to understand and explain it. From its first performance in Vienna in 1824 up to the present day, the Ninth Symphony has inspired diametrically opposed interpretations. They include those early listeners and commentators we saw in it’s in evidence that Beethoven had lost at composition. He’s speaking that the piece with its incomprehensive will scale nearly impossible technical demands and above all, crazily utopian humanistic idealism in the choral setting of Friedrich Schiller’s "Ode to Joy” .“ By contrast, Hector Berlioz had said it was the culmination of its author’s genius. Tom Service, writing in "The Guardian” says, “The Ninth Symphony’s arguably the single piece that inspired the methodology of musical analysis, a discipline of forensic musicological close reading of the score that tried to prove just how unified and coherent the conception of the symphony truly is underneath its chaotically diverse surface.”

And I think that’s exactly right. It is unified, but it doesn’t get to unity immediately because if you are going to set a symphony to the extraordinary idea of utopian humanist idealism that we are all brothers and sisters, you don’t just do that in some easy fashion. You have to, in a sense, expose all of the contradictions, the differences, the diversions, the diffusions of humanity before you get there. But at the end of the day, yes, I suppose you could have played this for Hitler’s birthday, as Furtwängler did in '42, although no one’s entirely certain as to what the interpretation of the manic rendition by Furtwängler was in '42. But leave that aside, but it does seem to me that Daniel Barenboim is correct, that essentially this was a massive protestation in favour of the fact that ultimately we are all brothers and sisters. It’s interesting that Leonard Bernstein, in talking about the Ninth Symphony, certainly reminded me of King David’s poem That this is an aspiration that is a brotherhood and sister that goes back a long way. And that it really, what Beethoven did was to capture that aspiration in a piece of music that when you walk out of the concert hall at the end of that performance, you just think for one moment this may all be possible. So I dedicate this session to just that belief, that one day, please God, we should all live in peace and harmony and that all of the war and all of the hatred ultimately should be diffused in the manner in which Beethoven was able to do so symphonically. Of course, much easier in music than it is in reality, but I think the fact that this piece is now 200 years old, it shows us that it’s perhaps still too modern for our modern condition. And it’s on that particular basis and it seemed to me appropriate to talk about it this evening. I’ll just see whether there are any questions, which I’m more than happy to answer. Oops, let me just get to them.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Sorry, Myrna, you asked what happened in the elections?

A: Well, the election, I think you’re going to get a lecture on that, and thank goodness I’m not with my political science hat this evening, but very briefly, of course, the ANC went down from 57.5% to 40. It’s quite astonishing in a democratic election that any particular political party could decline in that particular fashion. And of course, the real question now arises is what kind of government South Africa’s going to have.

Thank you, yes, I’m in a hoodie 'cause it’s damn cold here, I should tell you.

Yes, the BBC started in World War II with the first three nights. Interesting, Matt.

Thank you very much, Miriam. And Rita.

Diane says when I married, I wanted to come down the aisle to the fourth movement. The organist assured me that he knew the work and could play it. Unfortunately, he played, “If I Was a Rich Man” from “Fiddler on the Roof”. Well, obviously the organist did not know the difference between a musical and the great Beethoven.

That’s a lovely story. Thank you, Esther, and thank you Rod and Sheila.

Lorna says despite its emotionality, it’s never been my favourite. Well, it, you know, unfortunately or fortunately, that’s the joy, we all have our own tastes. For me, I still think it’s an extraordinary piece of music, but I’m more than happy, Lorna, for you to have a different view about it.

Thank you, Suzy and Miriam and Ruth. Yes, Herbert, that’s interesting.

Q: Wouldn’t Mahler’s Eighth be a comparable work?

A: Oh indeed, that’s a work certainly worth analysing, the Eighth Symphony by Mahler. And in some ways, yes it is, it’s less accessible, but perhaps that’s because it’s played less and it’s also possibly because it requires an even more immense set of resources, both in terms of choir and orchestra than with the Beethoven 9th. But your point is well made.

Yes, you’re quite right, Philip. There is a reference when you say the opening of Hayden’s “Creation”. And of course Hayden was hugely influential and all of these composers, including Beethoven, and to some extent it is very possible that he borrowed or adapted Hayden to his own opening.

But any event, thank you very much to everybody and have a good evening.