With the exception of the Sixth, also in F major, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 is the most unreservedly joyous of the nine, yet it had a difficult time becoming established in the repertoire. The problem was that it came just after and was eclipsed by the Seventh, one of Beethoven’s most compelling and instantly popular works. The first public performance of the Eighth in 1814 (following a private one given in Archduke Rudolf’s house a year before) was received coolly, largely because the Seventh (along with Wellington’s Victory) shared the same program. When Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny pointed out that the Seventh was vastly more popular than the Eighth, Beethoven (understandably annoyed) snapped back: “That’s because [the Eighth] is so much better.”
Ironically, the Eighth began to have an impact on audiences only after programmers got in the habit of having it performed along with the crowd-pleasing slow movement of the Seventh. As in our own time, music promoters did not hesitate to use all manner of slick, “easy listening” approaches to sell their product, but in Beethoven’s era they were a bit more shameless about ripping movements out of context.
Beethoven called the Eighth his “little symphony in F,” but its concision and subtlety are a big part of its originality and greatness. A symphony without a slow movement, the Eighth has a pulsating brilliance that Wagner was one of the first to appreciate. “This incomparable bright symphony,” he pointed out in his long-form essay “On Conducting,” does not offer the usual Andante followed by a scherzo, but rather a true minuet placed “between the two main Allegro movements, as a sort of complementary antithesis to an Allegretto scherzando which precedes it … This novel and unconventional characterization of the two middle movements was almost
entirely overlooked.”
The jewel-like Allegretto scherzando was characterized by Berlioz as “one of those productions for which neither model nor pendant can be found. This sort of thing falls entire from Heaven in the composer’s brain.” This scintillating movement, with its ticking parody of a (recently invented) metronome, follows an Allegro that features a relentless development section and precedes a deliberately anachronistic minuet—a movement that is not a “throwback,” as commentators once maintained, but an early version of what we now call Neoclassicism. (Beethoven had long ago abandoned the minuet for the kind of earthier scherzo we hear in the Sixth.) The finale is a whirlwind of sound and motion, an eruption not of elemental energy, like the Seventh, but of mischievous wit and surprise—Haydn on steroids, and a happy completion of the symphony’s Neoclassical gesture.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony forever changed the character and direction of symphonic music. When it premiered in 1824, Beethoven’s admirers and detractors were either awed or appalled in far greater measure than they expected. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Was this a visionary masterpiece or the final cacophony of an eccentric deaf person? The Romantics, especially the Wagnerians, subsequently embraced the Ninth as their holy grail, but the daring structure and epic complexity of the Ninth continued to generate controversy well into the next century. George Bernard Shaw reported that in his youth, the Ninth was “regarded as too long and perversely ugly and difficult,” an attitude that changed only slowly.
After substantially enlarging the traditional conception of what constituted a symphony with the “Eroica,” Fifth, and “Pastoral,” Beethoven made a final leap with the Ninth that surpassed all the others. The integration of a chorus and vocal soloists into a symphony was the most startling innovation, but much else about the work—its structure, sensibility, emotional range, harmonic experimentation, and sheer size—were new as well. The Romantic symphonies and tone poems of Berlioz and Liszt could not have been written without the Ninth, nor could the mystical choral symphonies of Mahler, Scriabin, Ives, and Szymanowski.
The purely orchestral sections of the symphony are nearly as innovative as the finale. The first two movements convey an elemental vastness—the opening Allegro hurling the listener into a bottomless abyss, the huge Molto vivace (Beethoven’s longest) unleashing relentless rhythms that are only temporarily reined in by the earthiness of its trio.
As for the Adagio—like the finale, a monumental set of variations—it seems less a conventional slow movement song than a microscopic examination of the meaning of melody; it is one of the purest examples of the rarified spirituality in Beethoven’s late style. In the finale, which opens with an unprecedented discord of terror and chaos, Beethoven gradually works his way through fragments of the preceding movements, toward a hard-earned embrace of love and concord.
Aside from Beethoven’s Fifth, the Ninth is perhaps the most written-about of all symphonies. Beginning with Berlioz, the Romantics used it as an occasion for rhapsodic musings. For Schumann, the Ninth seemed to incorporate “all the branches of poetry. The first movement is epic, the second comic, the third lyric, and the last drama, a composite of all.” Wagner saw the Ninth shaping “all the sorrows, joys, and yearnings of [Beethoven’s] life into an unprecedented artwork,” the greatest moment being the choral finale, where “with the anguished cry of one wakening from a nightmare, [Beethoven] speaks that actual Word whose ideal sense is none other than: ‘Man, despite all, is good!’”
Indeed, the choral finale, based on a condensed version of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” has until recently been a focal point for controversy. Dissenters used Beethoven’s own ambivalence over the finale—typically, he wondered whether the whole idea had been a blunder—against him, complaining that the movement was painfully out of place as well as unsingable. (The latter objection often proves all too true.) As late as 1929, music critic Philip Hale would flee Boston’s Symphony Hall before the finale, grumbling that it was “better to leave the hall with the memory of the Adagio than to depart with the vocal hurry-scurry and shouting of the final measure assailing ears and nerves.”
Today, listeners have little problem with Beethoven’s vision of universal human solidarity expressed through a fusion of symphonic and vocal writing. The free-form variations on “Ode to Joy” come across to modern ears as a stirring culmination, a humanizing of the vast, impersonal forces set loose in the earlier movements. If, as Wagner put it, the Ninth represents music’s movement from the Beautiful to the Sublime (“beautiful” being elegant symmetry, “sublime” being awe and wonder), then the finale is what gives that sublimity its voice.
The uplift of the “Ode to Joy” is now an indelible part of our culture, so much so that Stanley Kubrick, in A Clockwork Orange, was able to evoke profound unease simply by inverting its meaning. Appropriations of this famous section range from the inspiring to the unspeakable, including Leonard Bernstein’s celebration of the bringing down of the Berlin Wall, Hitler’s celebration of his birthday, and endless allusions by pop and disco arrangers.
Indeed, the Ninth has been part of our cultural mythology since its birth. The best story is still the first: After assisting the conductor at the Vienna premiere, Beethoven had to be turned around by the soprano soloist to acknowledge applause that became suddenly subdued as the audience was confronted firsthand with his deafness—an apt and awesome final curtain for an artist who more than any other relied on his inner ear.
—Jack Sullivan
© 2020 The Carnegie Hall Corporation