Beethoven, despite his deafness, insists on conducting the performance. Perhaps the Ninth is making him a nicer man? Rich Viennese friends book the Theater an der Wien orchestra, the best in Vienna, for the premiere. He has broken with the past.Īt the start of January 1824, he has an attack of human kindness and sends new year’s greetings to his brother’s widow Johanna whom he has been fighting for years through the courts. Those words ‘not these tones’ are writen by Beethoven, not Schiller. It has taken leave of the tones that went before. It has the power of social confrontation and the potential to improve human life. Music has claimed the right to change the world. Once this cry has been heard, there is no turning back to the servility of Haydn and Mozart. It is the single most transformational moment in musical history. Then, uprompted, with a spurt of pace and a shout from the bass singer ‘Oh, friends, not these tones’, everything changes. It is a leisurely journey, taing all of three quarters of an hour, longer than any symphony ever written before, and when he comes to the finale Beethoven is still in no hurry.įor six minutes, the orchestra continues in much the same reflective mood as before. In three preceding movements Beethoven takes us on a tour of all the developments has made to symphonic form. The shock of the finale lies not so much in its originality as in its unexpectedness. Beethoven had involved a chorus in the quasi-concerto that is the Choral Fantasia and was still very much in the sound world of the Missa Solemnis. Finally, after taking another of his rest cures in Baden, he returns to Vienna with a sketchbook in hand, shouting, ‘I have it! I have it.’ The symphony is complete and he has written a finale which requires the additional forces of a mixed chorus and four vocal soloists: bass, tenor, soprano and alto. The serene Adagio takes him two more months. By the end of August he has about 15 minutes of music, but no clear path ahead. He struggles to get the first movement going. In so far as we can follow Beethoven’s processes, he lets flotsam and fragments float around his mind until all fall into place. Later in the notebooks there is mention of ‘the Schiller overture’.
In 1811, he transcribes Schiller’s opening line into a notebook and reminds himself to ‘work out the overture’ for it. In 1793, a friend reports that Beethoven wants to set Schiller’s ‘Freude’ to music (Friedrich Schiller’s ode to brotherhood first appeared in print in 1786). He does not warn the English that the symphony has a choral finale, sung in German, because he does not yet have any idea how the work will end.Ī thought has been nagging for years at the corner of his mind. In December 1822 he accepts a commission for the ninth symphony from the Philharmonic Society in London, a city he has never seen.
In 1819 he is distracted by family affairs and writing the last 3 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis. A year later he appears to be writing two symphonies at once. Sketches of the opening of the 9th appear in his notebook in 1817. Twelve years have elasped since his last symphony, the defiantly frivolous 8th of 1812. The 9th symphony will be Beethoven’s farewell to the public arena of the concert hall, his final retreat to the inner chamber of his hyperactive mind. His ultimate medium is the string quartet, four players in a tight circle who cannot let each other down. After the Ninth, he listens only to an inner voice and writes strictly for himself. If he can no longer hear an orchestra, he need not worry about what anyone, starting with musicians, think about his music. So this is a turning point, and an important one. It is the loudest instrument on earth and he is too deaf to hear it.
He has more to say, more to achieve, but in the years that he devotes to the ninth symphony he is forced to recognise that there is no point in him writing anything more for the symphony orchestra. Nowhere does he mention the ninth symphony as a final testament. It is not even the beginning of the end for Ludwig van Beethoven, who has another dozen scores in him before death comes calling at the age of 56. Welcome to the 108th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition