Global Beethoven Michael Wyatt Think for a moment about the most traveled piece of music. Of all the pop songs and folk tunes buzzing through the airwaves, what melody has visited the most places? Of course it would be impossible to get an accurate count or a definitive winner, but there’s one 19th-century German tune that is a serious contender. It’s a piece that has become something like humanity’s theme song all around the globe, a melody that virtually everyone has engrained into their memory—“Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s
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Cameron 10/7/12 9:36 PM Comment: I feel like a different verb choice might work better. I think that you might say something like “what melody has been most universally played” or something like that to give a feel of both travel and musical properties
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Ninth Symphony. To get a sense for the scope of this symphony, think of the Ninth Symphony as a
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fellow traveler. In getting to know this large and cheerful new comrade, you might ask about favorite travel spots. You’d find out pretty quickly that he’d made his rounds. “Well I spend a lot of time in Europe.” (The “Ode to Joy” is the anthem of the EU.) “And every holiday season, I try to see as much of Japan as I can.” (The Ninth Symphony has been a winter tradition in Japan for decades, with dozens of performances by amateur and professional orchestras each year.) But those facts are still deceptively modest. While “Ode to Joy” enjoys a lot of breadth in its exposure (think of all those ringtones and car commercials), Beethoven’s Ninth has been there at a number major world events. When the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein conducted a special concert featuring Ode to Joy amid the rubble of the Wall to symbolize the healing between East and West Germany. In 2011, for the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, performances of the symphony lit up the globe. To those without an intimate
Cameron 10/7/12 9:48 PM Comment: Deceptively modest? What does that mean? How is it deceptive
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acquaintance with the work, the “Ode to Joy” and 9/11 may seem incongruous or even grossly inappropriate. But a little more familiarity with the text shows the juxtaposition of
Cameron 10/7/12 9:58 PM Comment: It seems funny to preface Ode to Joy with the. Is this the way you’re supposed to say it?
tragedy and symphony to be a profound and ennobling statement. After an almost nasty passage from the orchestra, a baritone stands and sings, “O friends, not these sounds!” The previous dissonance is dismissed, and the baritone reintroduces the Ode to Joy theme. The text of that ode is what lends the symphony extra philosophical weight. Beethoven’s was the first symphony to add words to its palette of sound, and those words play a large part in the work’s message. The libretto comes from a poem by Schiller and speaks to the dignity and joy of humanity. A quick reading of the text dissolves the mystery behind why this piece has been put to such powerful effect at
Cameron 10/7/12 10:02 PM Comment: This entire paragraph has a LOT of big words. It sounds educated, which is good, but you begin the article with an extremely familiar voice. This vocabulary sounds stuffy and pretentious (and yes, I sound pretentious for saying pretentious), almost as if you were writing a research paper
Cameron 10/7/12 10:06 PM Comment: As I read the rest of the paper, the rest of it follows with a high vocabulary. If you want to keep this tone, you may need to change the first couple paragraphs for consistency
significant global events. Addressing the abstraction of Joy, Schiller writes, “Your magic binds again what fashion has divided. All men become brothers where your gentle wing lingers.” The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an orchestra made up of young musicians from Israel and Palestine, performs the Ninth Symphony as an almost signature piece. The orchestra’s overt purpose is to foster friendly relationships in the tumultuous climate of the Middle East, and that purpose couldn’t have been captured better than in the music of Beethoven’s last symphony. They performed it for the opening of the 2012 London Olympic games, and they just performed it again this January. It’s a well-worn cliché that music is the universal language, but Beethoven’s universality is without parallel. If music is the universal language, then this piece is the universal thought behind that language. To better understand the widespread appeal of
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the piece, I sat down with Eric Glissmeyer, the manager Classical 89, an FM radio station. Glissmeyer was introduced to the world of Beethoven by the accordion; he
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performed in a group that featured classical music arranged for accordion ensemble. They had played a few of Beethoven’s symphonies before when he decided to buy LPs of actual orchestras’ performances. “I always liked that last movement. It’s almost like he was saying with this symphony, ‘I can’t go any further with what I’ve been doing.’ The
Cameron 10/7/12 10:14 PM Comment: Which last movement? I would clarify with brackets… maybe change that to [the]
symphony is crying out for words.” But by no means should we discount the music itself. “It’s catchy. And the ‘Ode to Joy’ is why you see the symphony. If a performance stopped just before the fourth movement, you’d have a riot on your hands,” said Glissmeyer. That fourth movement is almost a half hour of monumental variations on the “Ode to Joy” theme as it’s tossed around by the orchestra, choir, and vocal soloists. In addition to it being moving and positively grand, all those variations are one of humanity’s greatest creative achievements. No matter where you’re traveling, you’ll probably have a chance to see this symphony (If it’s not sold out!). This season in the US alone, orchestras from coast to
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coast have it featured prominently in their lineup. And that’s part of the beauty of the
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music: it doesn’t matter where you are when you see the symphony. The message is universal and the music timeless.
Side Bar:
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Spring is a great time to hear this symphony of rebirth and joie de vivre. (It was
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originally premiered in the spring of 1824 in Vienna.) US Performances of Beethoven’s 9th March–May Pittsburg Symphony, April 26–28 The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, April 7 New West Symphony (Santa Monica), May 10–12 St. Louis Symphony, May 9–12 Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, April 20 Metro Chamber Orchestra (New York), April 27 Cleveland Orchestra (in Miami), March 14–16 Charlotte Symphony, May 10–12 Caramel Symphony Orchestra (Caramel, IN), April 13 Choralis Orchestra (Alexandria, VA), May 4 North State Symphony (Redding, CA), May 12 Fort Collins Symphony, May 4 Emory Symphony Orchestra (Atlanta, GA), April 19–20
Cameron 10/7/12 10:21 PM Comment: Create a standardized format of orchestra names, dates, and locations so that the list has better parallelism