“Sche ne vmerla Ukraina” (“Ukraine Is Not Yet Dead”)—composed by Mykhailo Verbytsky in 1863, with lyrics by Pavlo Chubynskyi—became the official Ukrainian national anthem in 1992. The anthem oscillates between minor and major keys, darkness and light, reflecting the direness of Ukraine’s fight against brutal oppression and unshakable optimism that freedom will prevail. Valentyn Silvestrov offers an eloquent commentary: “The Ukrainian anthem is amazing. At first it doesn’t impress you at all, but that’s only at first glance ... This chant is a Hallelujah. No other anthem has this! It’s a unique piece [that] at the same time has all the characteristic features of a liturgy’s beginning. Some memory of a liturgy, of an all-night vigil, has submerged in this anthem. It seems as if the wind blows in this simple chant, as if tree branches are singing.”
Valentyn Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most prominent living composer, has become an eloquent musical spokesman for his country. Born in Kyiv in 1937, Silvestrov survived World War II and the Soviet regime. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced him to flee, along with millions of others. He and his family made their way by bus from their home in Kyiv to Lviv across Poland to Berlin.
Silvestrov wrote a series of songs collected as Maidan 2014 for a cappella chorus in honor of the massive protests against Russian influence. Its 13th movement, “Prayer for Ukraine,” is the work performed at this concert. The current war, Silvestrov told The New York Times, is “a continuation of the Maidan. Only the Maidan Revolution was only in Kyiv, and now all Ukraine has become the Maidan.” Sadly, the current conflict has made Silvestrov’s music more relevant than ever. “It’s very obvious,” he says, “that this is not a problem of Ukraine and Russia. It is a problem of civilization.”
The performance on this program is a symphonic transcription by Andreas Gies of the original unaccompanied choir version. As is often the case with Silvestrov’s post-Soviet compositions, the music is consoling and mediative, the opposite of his early avant-garde works. A hymn-like melody based on a gentle four-note motif undergoes subtle variations and transformations, exchanged by winds, strings, and brass, sometimes fragmenting, sometimes expanding. At the end, a flute solo leads to a final reaching up toward the heavens before a serene final chord.
John Williams is the greatest living exponent of a symphonic tradition that he helped save from extinction. Were it not for Star Wars, the history of film music might have turned out very differently. In the mid-1970s, Hollywood studios were talking of eliminating symphonic music and replacing it with pop tunes and synthesizers. The death of Bernard Herrmann in 1975 seemed to signify the end of a tradition.
Then Star Wars blazed into theaters and the talk stopped. In Star Wars, Williams recalls, “We used the London Symphony playing in a grand, Romantic, sweeping style, which seemed to all of us working on the film to be the right approach.” The unexpected success “reminded people who had temporarily forgotten how much a concert symphonic orchestra can contribute to a film … The orchestra is a fabulous tool—and always has been—and still is very much with us … There is nothing yet invented that is a better instrument to deliver the emotional impact that it can.”
The harp-colored love theme “Across the Stars” from Attack of the Clones is one of the highlights of Williams’s nine scores for the Star Wars franchise. Rising and gently falling back on itself, transparently orchestrated, delicate yet densely layered, it is instantly recognizable as a Williams melody. It has the typical Williams uplift, with a suspenseful middle section and a passionate reprise.
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 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 Robert 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 continue to range from the inspiring to the unspeakable.
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