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ODE TO HOPE
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.
BY LIBBY SLATE
IN THE 1980s, HISTORIAN-DOCUMENTARIAN Kerry Candaele was driving a borrowed car when he turned on the cassette player—and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “I was struck dumb by this music,” recalls Candaele, then a 20-something rock and jazz fan.
Candaele was so drawn to the work—whose “Ode to Joy” choral finale celebrates the brotherhood of mankind—that he would later produce a documentary, Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony. The 2013 film chronicles the Ninth’s cultural or political impact in countries including Japan—where the Ninth Symphony is performed every day in December, and its daiku choruses (“nine” in Japanese) can number 10,000 singers—and Germany, where the composer was born on or about Dec. 16 in 1770.
Arts companies and venues the world over had planned to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary with performances of symphonies, sonatas, concertos, quartets and masses.
Then plans changed.
Due to the pandemic, live concerts were canceled or indefinitely postponed. Yet several choruses and orchestras recorded video excerpts of the Ninth early in the pandemic for streaming online. A 360-degree digital version of the “Ode to Joy” movement by the Nuremberg Symphony and 1,000 performers is now on YouTube.
The work is among Beethoven’s more daunting. “He asks us to explore uncharted territory of emotion and sound and expression,” says L.A. Master Chorale artistic director Grant Gershon. “It’s thrilling but also terrifying. You wonder if you’re up for the challenge.”
Challenges are part of what gives the composer universal appeal.
“People relate to Beethoven’s struggles,” Gershon says, “his overcoming almost unimaginable adversity, the idea of starting in darkness and struggling somehow to find a way forward. His father was an abusive alcoholic. His mother died when he was 17—he took over raising his brothers. Just as he came into his talent, he began to go deaf and overcame that too.”
Candaele elaborates. “You don’t get to joy until you understand something about tragedy.” In the Ninth, “you have celebration despite the sorrow. He could have ended it with an ‘Ode to Despair.’”
Beethoven’s willingness to bare his emotions also appeals. “Beethoven lived long enough to cross over to a vision of the eternal, the mystery, the other side,” Gershon says.
“In his late works—the late quartets, sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth—you have a composer who’s looking beyond his own lifetime, and in a sense reporting back to us. You feel the ecstasy of the vision.”
That vision, with its jubilant embrace of worldwide unity—of “joy, brotherhood, peace and love,” says Southeast Symphony music director Anthony Parnther—serves as both a salve and a call to action.
“During times of great upheaval and tumult,” Parnther says, “the ‘Ode to Joy’ is a vessel for unification: Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, other protests against oppression and tyranny.” Its message amid today’s social-justice movement? “It’s up to us to listen, absorb and act.”
Gershon agrees: “Beethoven’s music demands action,” he says. “You cannot remain passive about the Ninth, as a listener or performer.
“It asks the same questions of us now as [late Congressman and civil rights activist] John Lewis did in the 1960s: ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’“
