Ode To The Ninth -- Back In 1824, Beethoven's Master Work Wasn't Exactly An Instant Hit

When Beethoven's titanic Ninth Symphony premiered in 1824, the composer was too deaf to conduct it himself (instead, he "set the tempo" for the performance), and its reception at early performances disappointed him: not enough enthusiasm, not enough money, not enough attendance.

The Ninth, with its surprising finale of solo and choral voices, was widely misunderstood; in England, where Beethoven's earlier symphonies had been popular, the Ninth was criticized for having "no intelligible design" and for its "noisy extravagance."

It took time, and repeated performances - probably better-rehearsed performances, too - before the Ninth achieved the status it enjoys around the world today. In Japan, Beethoven's Ninth is performed enthusiastically, usually with the choral finale in its original German, to mark all kinds of important occasions. So popular is the work in Japan that when the the compact disc was first developed, engineers stipulated a recording capacity of more than an hour, large enough for a single CD to encompass the Ninth.

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the only music deemed capable of the right magnitude of celebration was Beethoven's Ninth, which Leonard Bernstein conducted in a commemorative performance that changed the word "Freude" (joy) in the text to "Freiheit" (freedom) - an alteration that subsequent biographers claim would have pleased Beethoven, who hated tyranny.

Despite the work's current popularity, Beethoven's Ninth still appears only occasionally on the roster of major symphonies, and is usually reserved for an important spot on the calendar.

That's the case this coming week in Seattle, where two performances of the Ninth will close the Seattle Symphony's 1996-'97 concert season tomorrow and Tuesday, with music director Gerard Schwarz on the podium.

What is it about this long, challenging, complex symphony that has continued to fascinate so many listeners? There has been no shortage of commentary on the subject, from biographers and historians who have called it "an unsurpassable model of affirmative culture, a culture which by its beauty and idealism . . . anesthetizes the anguish and terror of modern life." The eminent biographer Maynard Solomon (who also has written a definitive Mozart biography) calls the Ninth a "counterpoise against the engulfing terrors of civilization . . . set against Auschwitz and Vietnam as a paradigm of humanity's potentialities."

Part of the power of the Ninth, some writers believe, is that it contains projections of human desires that have yet to be achieved, and may be unreachable. The triumphant choral finale promises a world in which "all men will become brothers and dwell in harmony."

Was Beethoven really such a passionate idealist? Certainly he believed in the work of the poet Schiller, whose "Ode to Joy" had occupied his mind for decades before he adapted the text in his choral finale to the Ninth. Though Beethoven biographer William Kinderman calls the Schiller poem "a glorified drinking song," Beethoven was more taken by the lofty sentiments it contained; he once told the composer Czerny that the only problem with setting Schiller to music is that "no musician could surpass his poetry."

Thanks to several surviving accounts of Beethoven's appearance and manners, most contemporary music lovers probably envision him as the untidy and irascible fellow who cared only for his music. Certainly the reports of Beethoven's contemporaries are a bit startling. Baron de Tremont, who visited the composer in 1809 (when Beethoven was 39), reported: "Picture to yourself the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable - blotches of moisture covered the ceiling, wan oldish grand piano, on which dust disputed the place with various pieces of engraved and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied pot de nuit; the chairs, mostly cane-seated, were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night's supper and with wearing apparel, etc."

Suspicious that his servants were cheating him, Beethoven used to examine the eggs in the kitchen, hurling any that were less than fresh at his housekeeper. He gave music lessons clad in a dressing gown, with slippers and a peaked nightcap. At night, his friends would sneak in to replace his old clothes with new ones; Beethoven would apparently dress the next day quite unaware of the exchange.

But he did take showers, emptying buckets of water over himself while he sang at the top of his voice. The water often leaked through the floor, causing Beethoven to be "unpopular with landlords," as one account puts it.

Though his manuscripts may look disorderly, and were often blotted with ink, Beethoven was a very disciplined composer, arising at dawn and going straight to work until midafternoon. Afterward, he would take a walk and mull over musical ideas, often scribbling them down in a little notebook.

By the time Beethoven set to work on the Ninth, during the years 1823-24, he had given up seeking treatment for his increasing deafness and was communicating almost entirely by means of written "conversation books." Increasingly gloomy, suffering from maladies of the eye and several internal organs, Beethoven gradually degenerated into an ill-tempered, wild-haired eccentric. It grew harder and harder for him to hear the piano, which he had earlier used during the composition process, and he broke several instruments by pounding on them to extract the greatest possible volume. He could still hear the music in his head, however, and Beethoven pulled together an astonishing array of effects - dating back 30 years, when he first thought of casting the Schiller poem as a song - in a symphony that was initially planned as a "hymn to the divine." The first three movements, full of astonishing invention (and a sublime Adagio), lead into a finale for chorus, soloists and orchestra that builds upon what is now one of the world's most instantly recognized musical themes.

Its effect on 19th-century listeners, who were not accustomed to hearing a symphony burst into song in its fourth and final movement, must have been electrifying. Certainly the effect on composers has been profoundly intimidating; Brahms waited until he was 40 to produce his first symphony, largely because he was unnerved at the thought of following the Ninth.

It is clear, however, that Beethoven believed the arts had the power to lift humankind to a different plane, far above the humdrum everyday life; many of the German philosophers of his era, such as Kant, Schiller and Goethe, believed that art could lead humanity to an inner harmony and an improved social order.

Beethoven particularly admired Schiller's views about aesthetics: "To arrive at a solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom." That is the sentiment that permeates Beethoven's Ninth. We may not be much closer to freedom and the solution of our political problems than the society Beethoven knew more than 170 years ago, when he was framing the Ninth, but his symphony gives us the hope that those goals are attainable. Maybe that is why the Ninth, like hope, springs eternal.