The Ninth Symphony: Beethoven's Great Gift to Humanity Part 2: The Apollo Project

DAILY DOSE of BEETHOVEN (April 22, 2020)

In 1961, President John F Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University that electrified Americans young and old. He said:

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

The speech gave birth to the Apollo Project. The nation rallied, and on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for all mankind.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was like the Apollo project, in that it required creative discoveries to accomplish something new for all mankind.

It was also composed under conditions of tremendous adversity. In 1815, after the final defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna came together to create a balance among the European powers: to prevent future wars and maintain peace and stability; and to restore Europe’s royal families to the thrones they held before the Napoleonic Wars. The conservatism of the Congress of Vienna also gradually introduced police-state measures in the name of peace.

Europe was war-weary, and people willingly sacrificed their freedoms in order to be assured peaceful lives. The 1819 German satirical cartoon (picture below), of gagged members of a "Thinkers Society", expresses the situation well.

Many poets of the time decided that it is safer to write about nature than politics, which could get one into trouble. While many poets willfully "dumbed themselves down'' in order to get along, a few brave souls went in the other direction. The great English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was one of them. His famous states that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", echoing Schiller's admonition to artists: “The future of mankind is in you hands. With you it shall sink, or with you it shall rise."

In 1819, the growing repression of civil rights in England led to the Peterloo Massacre, ordered personally by the then British Prime Minister Castlereagh. Shelley, in his poem “The Mask of Anarchy”, addresses it heads on:

I met Murder on the way-

He had a mask like Castlereagh-

Very smooth he looked, yet grim,

Seven blood-hounds followed him;

In such environment, one can either degenerate or meliorate. Beethoven decided to organize his energies and skills, in order to develop his creative powers. He wants to find a way to unite and uplift mankind in such a way that great music can do. But that music had not been written yet!

In 1823, he began working out an idea he had carried around for at least three decades: the setting of Schiller's “Ode to Joy”. He knew though, that it could only work if he did something creative, something entirely new and unprecedented!

What did that involve? It required introducing the human voice into a symphony, something that had never been done before. It also required creating an entirely new form. Modern critics throw up their hands and pronounce the fourth movement "free fantasy form". As we shall see, the form of the movement, and the entire symphony, is determined by the poem.

We leave you with another video that introduces a single step in the process: the first time in the work that those 8 lines of the poem are sung with the melody.