Beethoven more than achieved his goal when 200 years ago he premiered his great Ninth Symphony before a Viennese audience that responded euphorically and exalted. Cinema has repeatedly wanted to immortalize that moment when, standing on the podium of the Kärntnertortheater, on May 7, 1824, deafness prevented the most extraordinary composer of all time from being aware of the thunderous applause and bravery that the people dedicated to him. Their backs. Until they told him to turn around.
Disenchanted with Napoleon and embraced a radical progressive liberalism, the revolutionary Ludwig longed to awaken in the people a desire for freedom, he wanted them to rise up in brotherhood and overcome the oppression of the moment. More than that: he intended to give a hymn to all of humanity. The emperor decided to leave his box.
“The idea is crazy and utopian, but it was worth having it. Thanks to this we can think that human culture is unique: very varied but universal. “I myself have heard the Ninth on a radio in the middle of a road in the Congolese savanna,” says the Barcelona composer Hèctor Parra, author along with Milo Rau and Fiston Mwanza Mujila of the opera Justice, about the accident of a Swiss multinational in the Congo mines.
The Ninth, like poetry, has been for those who needed it. Over the course of two centuries it has been shown that, depending on the context, its fourth movement, with its notorious Ode to Joy based on Schiller’s poem, has become an anthem for ideologies of opposite signs: it served them at the same time. to Adolf Hitler to inaugurate the very old Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 and to Pau Casals to protest against the national uprising that was overwhelming the Spanish Republic.
When the Council of Europe adopted it as its official anthem in 1972, no one was unaware that for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, the Ninth fit like a glove with the party’s purposes: (Aryan) peoples, unite! Unite in favor of a long-awaited world of brotherhood among brothers! With its combativeness, the Ninth illustrated the “ability of the Führer to achieve a triumphant and joyful victory.” Maestro Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic played it for Hitler for his birthday in 1937. In 1985, it became the political anthem (without lyrics) of the EU, leaving that fateful past behind.
The message of fraternity was not the most revolutionary thing about the Ninth: musically it opened new paths, a symphony contained solo voices and choirs! His song – “…all men become brothers” – achieved enduring popularity. Is there any equivalent in the 20th or 21st century to the emblematic piece as a human and musical phenomenon?
“I don’t think there is an equivalent in the music of the last century, just as there wasn’t in the centuries before Beethoven. It is the unique vision of a genius at a unique moment in history. Today it continues to inspire intense devotion, but its nature and specific ambition are inseparable from the aftermath of the French Revolution and the period in which it was conceived,” the English composer Sir George Benjamin, the latest Frontiers of Knowledge winner, told La Vanguardia. In any case, he notes, it is not his favorite Beethoven symphony. “I like the Seventh much better! Of course, great masterpieces have been premiered throughout the last century (I think of Ravel, Stravinsky, Janacek, Berg, Messiaen, Boulez and Ligeti), but I believe that they have no direct relationship with the sound or the message of the Choral Symphony. .
The Valencian Francisco Coll, the new revelation of Spanish composition, is also not sure of finding a current equivalent to the Ninth, but he defends its rabid relevance. “It is a monument to humanity, and therefore timeless. It is as contemporary today as when it was written. What Beethoven does in his Ninth is to expose and defend universal ideals such as solidarity and peace. A very topical message. It does not belong to any specific period. It belongs to the eternal present.”
It is also difficult for Parra to find a parallel, but from the first half of the 20th century he clearly thinks of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre de Printemps. “There is no music that better expresses its time and that at the same time is more revolutionary.” From the second half of the century, perhaps Ligeti’s visionary Requiem, with its link to the more accelerated passages of Kubrick’s 2001. A Space Odyssey. Or Messiaen’s Turangalila…
Ferran Cruixent, who this September premieres his triple concerto Trinity, commissioned by the Sitkovetsky Trio, at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, agrees with Parra that the Consecration would be a candidate, as does Albert Guinovart, who points out, without forgetting others by Debussy or Ravel, highlights the transcendent character of this Stravinsky, who “breaks the rules although with a quite popular vision, unlike works by other twelve-tone artists who were not involved with the public.” Cruixent also claims the Turangalila or the Symphony of Psalms, also by Messiaen, “unique and innovative works.” But he does not see himself capable of pointing out one at the level of impact and influence of the Ninth. Perhaps Ligeti’s Atmosphères, another immense leap in the history of music.
The Beethovenian shadow had left the immediately subsequent composers out of play. It would not be until the arrival of Mahler that the creators would overcome “this atavistic fear,” as the artistic director of the Liceu, Víctor García de Gomar, defines it. The theater’s musical director, Josep Pons, sees Mahler’s Eighth precisely as the 20th century equivalent of a Beethoven Ninth.
“Many readings can be done; I’ll stick with the ethical and compositional idea. And here I find a resemblance to Mahler’s Octave, because he, who always speaks of himself, here speaks of love, of love as a path of purification. He refers to Maria, his mother, his wife… ‘Maria, Alma mater…’. He speaks of the eternal feminine and creates the mystical song in which it is assured that the world will be feminine or it will not be.
Among the works with a symbolic, political charge and with pop resonances, De Gomar would point out – in addition to the already widely agreed upon Sacre by Stravinsky and Turangalila by Messiaen – Scriabin’s Prometheus, Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s symphonies, without detracting from their forcefulness. which is born from the simplicity of Satie’s Vexations, Ligeti’s Studies, Mompou’s Quiet Music, Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks or Rainbow’s Over in the voice of Judy Garland.
The latter would be found in that musical universe that transcends the world of classical music to place itself in the imagination of everyone, because they have connected with the public. Guinovart would add here, without hesitation, Ravel’s Bolero or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue or even Bernstein’s West Side Story. “
Pop could provide its equivalents as a mass anthem and social content. The composer Joan Magrané points out The Wall, by Pink Floyd, “because of the popular and at the same time political factor, and because it is music but also a film, just as the Ninth was a symphony and at the same time a cantata. I can’t think of another work so intensely popular and ambitious,” she says.
“Possibly a Queen song like We are the champions would be another paradigmatic case because it goes beyond the scope of rock itself and designates the triumph of a sports team, each one’s own,” concludes the musicologist and essayist Oriol Pérez Treviño, who yesterday gave a conference in the Girona cinemas before the revival of Copying Beethoven (2006), by Agnieszka Holland. “Part of an English group, but it ends up being the best way to celebrate a victory all over the world, which is in fact its original content. I would say that it is more credible than the EU… ‘Embrace millions of men…’ and let’s put borders on immigrants.”
